In his review of Janet Vaillant's magisterial biography of the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor, Christopher Miller characterises the great man as a wearer of masks. Noting how Vaillant's title Black, French, and African alludes to Senghor's many guises, Miller goes on to argue that Senghor's multiple modes of self-identification were his answer to the binary thinking propagated by French colonialism. According to Miller, ‘masks, personas, and role-playing are all strategies consistent with a refusal to submit to the most Manichean dichotomy of colonialism: are you French or African?’ Senghor's role-playing took a variety of forms, and reflects the eclecticism of both his cultural and his political thinking. First, he is now perhaps best known for having devoted himself to establishing the specific qualities of the black soul, while insisting on the black man's continuing interaction with Europe in the service of a new civilisation de l'universel. He championed both the essential characteristics of black identity and a universal sharing across all human communities. Secondly, Senghor set himself up as an intellectual whose cultural knowledge and political endeavours would, in tandem, enable him to mediate between France and Africa. He dreamed of an ongoing and enriching cultural dialogue between peoples, and believed that he could help create a Senegalese community harmoniously benefiting from the successes of two civilisations. Thirdly, his vision of a fusion between France and Africa was the source of both his literary vocation, and latterly, the trigger for his political activity, and these two aspects of his work were for him inextricably linked. He endeavoured to achieve his vision of cultural symbiosis first in his work to improve the education system in Senegal and later in his fashioning of the independent nation, and, at the same time, in his ongoing theorisation of negritude and in his prolific poetic writing.

There is no doubt that Senghor's many ambitions brought him great literary and political success, yet he remains a controversial figure whose work on both fronts provoked criticism. His dream of a symbiosis between Africans and Frenchmen has been seen as a weak and tacit form of complicity with colonial thinking, and his understanding of negritude culture has been labelled both racist and neo-colonial.