Cheikh Anta Diop and Raymond Mauny

Intellectual Frontiers and Epistemic Dispute in The Genesis of African Studies (1940-1960)

Abstract

In the constitution of the disciplinary field of  Francophone African studies in Europe and Africa, the names Cheikh Anta Diop (1923-1986) and Raymond Mauny (1912-1994) stand as references for two distinct interpretative trends, despite their trajectories unfolding within the same intellectual landscape. In the first case, we encounter an academic with specialized training and field experience in West Africa, whose work was widely recognized by his peers, exercising authority and influence in the creation of research lines both in Senegal and in France. In the second case, we find a researcher with a solid theoretical background, who adopted a contestatory perspective towards academic canons and founded Afrocentric alternatives for scientific interpretation. This article seeks to demonstrate, from a perspective comparative, the development of the respective academic careers of these two intellectual references who, although occupying diverse social, intellectual, and political positions, circulated within the same urban, cultural, and intellectual settings in Dakar and Paris during the 1940s to the 1960s, and navigated the same research spaces and institutions, such as the I.F.A.N. and the University of Sorbonne. However, these trajectories occurred under unequal and divergent conditions and positions: one as a white european intellectual in Africa, and the other as a black african intellectual in Europe. The guiding hypothesis of this study is that both, in their own ways, carried within themselves the marks of colonialism and racism.