Philosophy as translation: A conversation with Souleymane Bachir Diagne
WHERE: White Hall 208, Emory University – 301 Dowman Dr, Atlanta, GA 30322
WHEN: September 11, 2025, 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a leading philosopher and public intellectual from Senegal. Professor Emeritus of French and Philosophy at Columbia University, he directed the Institute of African Studies for a decade. His work bridges African, Islamic, and European intellectual traditions, offering a vision of philosophy as a truly global, plural, and dialogical practice.
Author of numerous landmark books, Diagne has illuminated fields ranging from Islamic thought to African philosophy, postcolonial studies, and the history of ideas. His major works include Bergson Postcolonial: The Elan Vital in the Thought of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Muhammad Iqbal (2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (2018), and Postcolonial Bergson (2019). More recently, he has reexamined universalism in In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (2022), explored aesthetics and identity in African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (2023), and developed a compelling theory of translation in From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation (2024).
For Diagne, translation is not merely a linguistic exercise but a philosophical act of hospitality—a way of making ideas travel across languages, cultures, and histories while preserving their multiplicity. In this spirit, he has consistently advocated for philosophy as a practice of openness, dialogue, and mutual transformation across traditions.
His contributions have been widely recognized: he received the Edouard Glissant Award in 2011, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, and in 2024 was named Chaire du Louvre in Paris.
This Atlanta conversation will be an opportunity to engage with one of today’s most inspiring thinkers, and to reflect on how philosophy, like translation, can serve as a bridge across cultures and worlds.
The story began in May 2023, when French saxophonist and composer Raphaël Imbert embarked on a Villa Albertine residency in the United States. His project, Music is My Field, set out to explore the rich musical traditions of the Southeast and Appalachia. It was in Atlanta that Imbert first connected with saxophonist Kebbi Williams and his collective, Reverence, during the city’s Music in the Park festival.That encounter sparked a transatlantic artistic exchange. Imbert invited Williams to perform at the J.E.S.T. Festival in Marseille in November 2023, and later at the Marseille Jazz des Cinq Continents festival in July 2024. The collaboration deepened in November 2024, when Imbert came back to Atlanta. Alongside Marseille-based musicians T.I.E. (electronics) and Blanche Lafuente (drums), he traveled to Atlanta to co-create a new piece with Williams, Zacchaeus Paul, and Daniel Wytanis. The result was a powerful performance at Music in the Park on November 17, 2024.Nydia Blas and Joshua Dudley Greer’s residencies aim to narrate the city of Marseille and its complexities, offering, in resonance with French photographers Geoffroy Mathieu and Yohanne Lamoulère’s explorations of Atlanta, a perspective on two cities through the lens of communities and urban landscapes.
In conversation with Professor Subha Xavier
Subha Xavier is Associate Professor of French and African Studies at Emory University. She writes, teaches, and translates the cultural politics of migration, African literature and film. She is author of The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature, and two forthcoming works on The History of Sino-French Literary Exchange and the biography of Franco-Ivoirian writer Véronique Tadjo: Becoming Griotte. She is currently at work on a new project on international narratives of boat migration.
This event is co-sponsored by Villa Albertine, the Departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Emory University, the Center for Ethics, and the Program in African Studies, with generous funding from the Hightower Fund.