Engagements with Aimé Césaire

Engagements with Aimé Césaire
Author: Jason Allen-Paisant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192867229

In this inventive and thoughtful study, renowned poet Jason Allen-Paisant provides a timely critical reappraisal of Aimé Césaire's works. The book showcases Césaire as a major Black thinker, whose writings remain deeply relevant to today's crises and debates.

Freedom Time

Freedom Time
Author: Gary Wilder
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2015-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822375796

Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Césaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

The Collected Poetry

The Collected Poetry
Author: Aim C Saire
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1983-10-03
Genre: Non-Classifiable
ISBN: 9780520907614

This edition, containing an extensive introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Césaire's poetry--the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook--will remain the definitive Césaire in English.

Negritude Women

Negritude Women
Author: T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2002
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816636808

The Negritude movement, which signaled the awakening of a pan-African consciousness among black French intellectuals, has been understood almost exclusively in terms of the contributions of its male founders: Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon G. Damas. This masculine genealogy has completely overshadowed the central role played by French-speaking black women in its creation and evolution. In Negritude Women, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting offers a long-overdue corrective, revealing the contributions made by four women -- Suzanne Lacascade, Jane and Paulette Nardal, and Suzanne Roussy-Cesaire -- who were not merely integral to the success of the movement, but often in its vanguard. Through such disparate tactics as Lacascade's use of Creole expressions in her French prose writings, the literary salon and journal founded by the Martinique-born Nardal sisters, and Roussy-Cesaire's revolutionary blend of surrealism and Negritude in the pages of Tropiques, the journal she founded with her husband, these four remarkable women made vital contributions. In exploring their influence on the development of themes central to Negritude -- black humanism, the affirmation of black peoples and their cultures, and the rehabilitation of Africa -- Sharpley-Whiting provides the movement's first genuinely inclusive history.

Discourse on Colonialism

Discourse on Colonialism
Author: Aimé Césaire
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 104
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1583674101

"Césaire's essay stands as an important document in the development of third world consciousness--a process in which [he] played a prominent role." --Library Journal This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of "progress" and "civilization" upon encountering the "savage," "uncultured," or "primitive." Here, Césaire reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that "the relationship between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." An interview with Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.

Grounds of Engagement

Grounds of Engagement
Author: Stéphane Robolin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-08-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252097580

Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.

Not at Home in One's Home

Not at Home in One's Home
Author: Víctor Figueroa
Publisher: Associated University Presse
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838641774

This study examines the work of three important 20th century Caribbean poets, focusing on one major work by each of them: Pales Matos' 'Tuntun de pasa y griferia' (Puerto Rico); Cesaire's 'Cahier d'un retour au pays natal' (Martinique), and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' (St. Lucia).

Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire
Author: Gregson Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 1997-10-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0521390729

A study of Antiguan writer Aimé Césaire, which links his political career to recurrent themes in his writing.

The Negritude Movement

The Negritude Movement
Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2015-05-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498511368

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an “insurgent idea” (to invoke this book’s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a “traveling theory” (à la Edward Said’s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois’s discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

Discrepant Engagement

Discrepant Engagement
Author: Nathaniel Mackey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1993-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521444538

Discrepant Engagement addresses work by black writers from the United States and the Caribbean and the so-called Black Mountain poets.