Ideas in movement: political and intellectual imagination in Présence Africaine (1950-1960)

Abstract

This paper is an investigation of the political ideas movement that was central to the intellectual and political debate in Africa and in other regions of the planet in the post-World War II context. Taking as starting point Présence Africaine late 1950s and early 1960s articles, dossiers, and editorials, this study aims to address the configuration of an intricate network and heteronomic political space within then called Third World. As a vehicle for the imagination of future African States and also for their insertion in collective political projects, pan-African certainly, but also in a Third World dimension, Présence Africaine is here considered a privileged source for understanding international solidarity agendas and movements that aimed the breaking of imperial and asymmetrical logics of power. Following some directions of this intertwined network, which are distributed over space and time, the objective is twofold: to understand the projection of possible, connected futures; and to acknowledge these projects as political concepts that organized the action and worked as the substrate to foster new axes of political and epistemological protagonism.