ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a similar study of Senghor's poetry beyond binaries while exploring the intellectual's embodiment of cosmopolitanism that France denied to tirailleurs and other blacks of its colonies during Second World War. This history, which should compel us to study the effects of cosmopolitanism on Senghor's views on colonialism and his relations with France, cannot be ignored. The chapter analyzes a selected number of Senghor's poems about Second World War as anticolonial and anti-fascist texts in spite of their cultural import without minimizing their reflections of the intellectual's views on cosmopolitanism. Leopold Sedar Senghor's poems about Second World War participate in black cosmopolitanism and anticolonialism, since they memorialize tirailleurs who defended France and Europe against Nazism. Senghor's quandary resulted from the hypocrisy of a French society that refused to recognize that the violence which fractured it in June 1940 was a long-term result of the colonial and capitalist repression that the metropole historically perpetrated against Africans.
