Notice Board

Dr. Esther de Bruijn presents 'Augmenting Affect Theory with Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Aesthetic Theory: Vitalism in Ghanaian Market Fiction'

The sensational style of contemporary chapbook fiction of Ghana, West Africa, demands attention to its distinctive aesthetic. Recent affect theory, in its intersection with aesthetic theory, offers a valuable set of questions for this analysis. Because Ghana’s market fiction is produced within a lively popular cultural matrix of vibrant oral narrative and performative genres, Daniel N. Stern’s notion of how “vitality dynamics” may be transmitted from one aesthetic experience to another is particularly valuable. What is intriguing is that several of Stern’s ideas were preconceived in the much earlier Negritudinist aesthetic theory of Léopold Sédar Senghor (now largely dismissed, especially by Anglophone Africanists). My study returns to Senghor’s concept of “la force vitale” in African artistic expression and argues that Senghorian vitalism, with its emphasis on the arts’ force for binding community, draws important attention to how, in the market fiction, social vitalism inheres through affective transmission.