Search

Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1909-1982) returned to the Caribbean in 1941 after spending eighteen years in Spain and France. In the following four years his painting practice transformed, generating the iconic imagery that he would become known for inventing. His return from Europe figures prominently in essays that Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire wrote about him soon after his 1943 completion of La jungla, his most famous painting. These Caribbean writers had close relationships of friendship and collaboration with Lam, and while their essays have become important sources for Lam criticism, they rarely receive critical analysis. In my analysis, I am interested in how they illuminate the role of return in shaping the dichotomy that Alejo Carpentier went on to establish between surrealism and the Americas-located aesthetic he dubbed “lo real maravilloso.” For Carpentier, the aesthetic of the marvelous that the surrealists sought to render emanated readily from social reality in the Americas. I understand this idea to be predicated upon his own return from Europe, and I argue that his earlier work on Lam, alongside Cabrera’s and Césaire’s, offers coordinates for a theory of return, from Europe and surrealism, through which to understand the real-marvelous aesthetic in Lam.

It is tempting to attribute state violence to the imposition of a normative order, and it is tempting to construct an opposition between sanctifying that order and messianic interruptions of that order. This framework supposes that God, and the surrounding language of the sacred, follows the logic of rule, imposing a set of expectations on what is to be done enforced by threat of punishment. But what if we centre the story of Job in our account of the divine and with it an image of God as abuser rather than ruler, that is, God as only imposing the phantom of norms, norms that shift or evaporate as soon as they are imposed, never fulfilling a promise of reward or threat of punishment as expected? I explore this possibility through brief encounters with two texts on the racial violence of the state, one by Aimé Césaire and the other by the contemporary Black American writer Kiese Laymon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his work, Fanon generously cites Césaire's poetry. His citation from Césaire's tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient in Peau noir masques blancs, and later in Les Damnés de la terre, in support of his argument that anti-colonial violence was essential to a new, post-revolutionary beginning, is of particular interest. I want to make the case that Une tempête presents us with a complexity of temporal and intertextual folds that pursues the question of freedom and what comes after. Fanon came after Césaire but Une tempête comes after Fanon. Césaire's text, I argue, alludes to Fanon's work in different ways and in doing so appears to assert the case for non-violence, refuses the figure a decolonial tableau rasa and returns us to the predicament of colonial racism that both he and Fanon sought to overcome. In all of this, is the figure of the hyphen—a ligature binding Prospero to his imagined self, that is constituted through Caliban, but also loosely binding Césaire to Fanon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negritude movement emerged from the Black intellectual milieu of Paris in the 1930s and became one of the defining anticolonial modes of the postwar years. It stands as an exemplary case of primitivism beyond its canonical European forms, performing a striking détournement of primitivism in the unlikely direction of anticolonial liberation. This article places the work of leading writers of negritude, including Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, into dialogue with their friend and critic René Ménil to unfold the political stakes of anticolonial primitivism. Ménil, a Martinican Communist who moved in the same Parisian milieu as the negritude writers, developed a sustained critique of negritude in the postwar years. This critique allows us to see that, in making primitivism a basis for liberation, negritude reconfigures many of the common assumptions of leftist thought at the time, including the rejection of a stagist account of history and the development of a revolutionary subject defined not by its oppressed position within the structures of modernity but by its location outside of them. By imagining the divide between modern and nonmodern as a fault line along which the anticolonial struggle will be fought, these thinkers develop an alternate vision of liberation whose legacy resonates in contemporary political debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1935, while visiting his friend Petar Guberina in Dalmatia, Aimé Césaire saw an island by the name of Martinska (the equivalent of Martinique). Shocked by this discovery, he began writing his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. While acknowledged, this Yugoslav connection tends to be mentioned as merely anecdotal. This essay argues that Yugoslavia represented an important detour for Césaire. Césaire's friendship with Guberina and his discovery of Martinska allowed him to see how the particularity of his historical experience as a member of the African diaspora could also serve as the basis for solidarity with other oppressed people. Whereas the accusation of racial essentialism has long followed the founders of the Negritude movement, the Yugoslav connection invites a more layered and nuanced reading of the Notebook, whose unusual origins resonate throughout its verses, positioning it as a text always already in Relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his renowned Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Aime Cesaire points out that the kind of contact which was typically established when the European colonizers encountered other civilisations was not wholesome or mutually beneficial, as the Europeans rarely made any genuine effort to acknowledge the values and achievements of other cultures; instead, their focus was primarily on exploitation and material gain. Such dynamic is also evident in Peter Shaffer's play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), where most of the members of the sixteenth-century Spanish expedition to Peru treat the Inca culture with hostility and disdain, or even regard some of its aspects as a threat which needs to be eliminated. The exceptions to this attitude may be found at the individual level, where some attempts at recognizing the cultural values of the Other are made by the protagonist, Pizarro, and the narrator, Martin. The paper examines these attempts, but aims to demonstrate that, in the final analysis, they also fail, so that Shaffer's play as a whole conveys a message that imperialist ambitions inevitably undermine any opportunity for a beneficial cross-cultural encounter. In addition to Cesaire, other authors in the field of postcolonial and ideological criticism, such as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and Roland Barthes will also be referred to.

This article examines Aimé Césaire's literary and political engagements with socialist-era Poland between 1948 and 1956. Reading Césaire's poem "Varsovie" alongside "Letter to Maurice Thorez" and his speech Discours à la Maison du Sport, it argues that the rebuilding of Warsaw in the post-war period and Eastern European movements for national autonomy during the 1956 Socialist Bloc Thaw are important contexts, not only for Césaire's resignation from the Communist Party, but also for his efforts to develop a more thoroughly anti-colonial Marxist politics and poetics. In the decade following World War Two Césaire was deeply invested in current events in Eastern Europe; understanding this investment is key to a complete understanding of both his work and the politics of Cold War Internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alternative Francophone is the property of Alternative Francophone and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Na primeira tragédia de Aimé Césaire, Et les chiens se taisaient (publicada pela primeira vez em 1946), um herói anticolonial, o Rebelde, luta em um mundo ficcional, anterior à abolição, onde o passado detém uma apreensão profética do futuro. Césaire articula a transformação social por meio de estruturas temporais intempestivas associadas a ciclos orgânicos de vida, mudanças sazonais e imprevisibilidade meteorológica. Esses modelos ecológicos proveem os registros figurais através dos quais Césaire descreve a revolução como uma erupção violenta do novo em todos os níveis da existência. Esses poéticos atos de criação violenta, impossíveis de serem previstos ou contidos, envolvem a intensidade específica e a temporalidade peculiar do nascimento. Este ensaio sugere que a revolta escrava em Les chiens apresenta a intempestividade da descolonização como uma poética que rejeita fundamentalmente noções mecânicas da mudança determinadas por modelos lineares do tempo e da história. Lendo Les chiens através de alusões ao material de suas fontes filosóficas, mostro como muito do que Césaire constela pode ser vinculado, tanto genealogicamente quanto esteticamente, a dois esquemas temporais distintos, associados à Antiguidade grega: a renovação cíclica dionisíaca e o “tempo certo” kairológico. Embora opostos com frequência em um nível filosófico, esses dois esquemas intempestivos, como justapostos por Césaire, expressam a temporalidade plural e poética das erupções trágicas da revolução decolonial. Seu encontro com o dionisíaco de Nietzsche e com o kairós de teólogos políticos envolveu conceitos que, em sua qualidade de expressões de primitividade, revelam ao mesmo tempo a herança civilizacional da África e as forças destrutivas capazes de levar o imperialismo europeu à queda.

En 1966, à l’occasion du Festival mondial des arts nègres de Dakar, la revue Présence Africaine publie son 57e numéro qui rassemble 144 poètes et 393 poèmes. Ouvrage collectif, la Nouvelle somme de poésie du monde noir est une anthologie plurilingue, rassemblant des poèmes écrits dans cinq langues différentes (français, anglais, portugais, espagnol et néerlandais). L’auteur ressaisit les intentions des anthologistes (Léon-Gontran Damas, Lamine Diakhaté, Abiola Irele et Virgílio de Lemos) et leurs conceptions de la « poésie du monde noir » à partir de l’appareil d’accompagnement et de l’organisation de la Nouvelle somme. Se manifeste une volonté de donner corps tant à une littérature (« la poésie du monde noir »), qu’à une communauté imaginée (« le monde noir »). Il indique ensuite les enjeux sous-jacents au projet de rassembler la poésie d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains à l’occasion du Festival mondial des arts nègres et la tentative menée par Damas d’affilier la nouvelle génération de poètes à la Négritude.

L'ajout des «Tableaux parisiens» dans l'édition de 1861 des Fleurs du Mal peut être compris comme une réponse de Baudelaire à ses accusateurs lors du procès dont il a été victime à l'occasion de la première publication des Fleurs du Mal. La notion de «fleurs du mal» s'en trouve changée et concerne désormais aussi le monde bourgeois, capitaliste et colonialiste qui a mis en scène ce procès, tandis que la Ville Lumière, Paris, apparaît pleine de boue. Ce mouvement de retournement contre ses accusateurs sera plus tard repris par Aimé Césaire dans le Cahier du retour au pays natal, qui, en abordant lui aussi la boue qui a envahi les Antilles colonisées, remet en question l'hypocrise que dénonçait Baudelaire dans le premier poème des Fleurs du Mal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes using Pauline Alexis Gumbs' re-definition of "Echolocation" in Undrowned (2020) as a means of re-thinking music intertextuality in the French Rap songs analyzed here. This process aims to identify discourses across transnational music by focusing on issues pertaining to race and environmental racism in the context of the French refusal to use the socially constructed term "race" to address racial discrimination in the country. This enables French rappers to inscribe their work within a discourse that embraces this vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends scholarly analysis of race in imperial capitalism by examining the naming and baptism of formerly enslaved Black people in Aimé Césaire's 1963 La tragédie du roi Christophe. King Christophe, the protagonist, attempts to give his people a foothold in a world system based on their exploitation by giving names – or griffes (meaning both "claws" and "signatures") – to his aristocracy in order to bind them and their land to him. The article argues that Christophe resorts to tropes of naming and baptism as sacralizing gestures to establish power structures that will anchor his state against the flow of European-dominated capitalism. The term griffe, however, also refers to a person of mixed race; in a context where both whiteness and racial admixture are suspicious, the pun on griffe problematizes Christophe's reliance on the power of naming. Christophe's tragic fallacy is to trust language at the expense of other considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay was originally published online at Mute magazine in 2014, as part of Aesthetic Education Expanded, a series of 12 articles commissioned by Mute and published in collaboration with Kuda.org, Kontrapunkt, Multimedia Institute, and Berliner Gazette.

This article reads ‘pandemic, plague, pestilence and the tropics’ through Covid-19, climate change and the discourse of tropicality. It asks: What happens, as seems to be the case today, when the temperate/tropical oppositions around which tropicality revolves start to unravel because the aberrations and excesses (here of epidemic disease and extreme weather) hitherto deemed to belong to tropical areas, and as constitutive of their otherness, are found in temperate ones? This question is broached with a focus on the United Kingdom as one such ‘temperate’ place that currently finds itself in this situation (although the argument has broader resonance), and with Aimé Césaire’s ideas about the choc en retour (boomerang effect) of Western colonisation and la quotidienneté des barbaries (the daily barbarisms) by which this effect works. Evidence and feelers from science, theory, politics, and the media are used to consider how sensibilities of tropicality, and especially (as Césaire enquired) distinctions between the ‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ and ‘immunity’ and ‘susceptibility,’ permeate the way Covid-19 and climate change are perceived and felt in the temperate world.

This essay focuses on the specific location and history of The Great House in Port-of Spain, Trinidad, to open out a Black Atlantic exposé of networks of imperial global domination, Indigenous genocide, and plantation slavery. The essay works through Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism to model how Black and Caribbean thinkers enable an antiracist critique of eighteenth-century studies that persists in disavowing its violent colonial histories and legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Maracanan is the property of Revista Maracanan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal for Languages & Literatures of the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad / Zbornik za Jezike i Knjizevnosti Filozofskog Fakulteta u Novom Sadu is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

By the mid-1930s, migration from the French colonies had brought Afro-intellectuals into the heart of political and artistic conversations in the metropoles of Europe and had created imbricated spaces of heated debate. Coming from various nations in Africa and the Americas, the interlocutors in these debates grappled with their fraught relationship to imperial centres while addressing questions specific to their diverse national contexts and racialized realities. The declarations they made and conclusions they drew were scrutinized by multiple, and at times antagonistic publics. This article chronicles a fascinating instance of such networked literary polemics: the 1955–1956 Présence Africaine 'Debate on National Poetry'. It offers a close look at the intellectual and political underpinnings of this fraught exchange between celebrated Martinican poet-statesman Aimé Césaire and then-militant socialist Haitian poet René Depestre as a means of understanding how twentieth-century intellectual and artistic movements in Europe presented real challenges to prominent figures in the (imminently post-)colonial francophone world. Depestre's uncomfortable positioning reflects the larger quandary facing Afro-diasporic intellectuals and artists called on to navigate identities that reflected their political commitments and the expectations of their white allies, on the one hand, and their racial identifications, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to compare and contrast the traditional Western versus the postmodern colonization of the mind. How is the current technological age barbaric? I investigate Aimé Césaire's writings, refer to Lea Ypi's definition of colonialism, and discuss society's use of psychopolitics to find the answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Les multiples références à l’œuvre d’Aimé Césaire dans Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967) d’André et Simone Schwarz-Bart suggèrent un dialogue, parfois implicite, entre la narratrice/protagoniste Mariotte et son compatriote martiniquais. Cet intertexte dialogique se reflète dans la composition des sept cahiers de Mariotte qui tente d’expliquer aux lecteurs sa lutte pour reconstituer la mémoire de son pays natal dans des conditions dictées, au milieu du XXe siècle, par un système social raciste, oppressif et déshumanisant. Deux figures en particulier de l’œuvre de Césaire se détachent des cahiers de Mariotte, à savoir le Rebelle qu’elle associe à un homme qu’elle a connu quand elle était enfant, et le « vieux nègre dans le tramway », personnage du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939). Mais avant d’assumer elle-même ces deux rôles, Mariotte adresse une prière à « Saint-Césaire », lui demandant de la rejoindre dans son chant mémorial. Dans des notes placées à la fin du texte, les auteurs semblent dire que Mariotte a cité Césaire de façon plutôt cavalière, ce qui crée une certaine ambiguïté au sujet de ce rapport intertextuel.

Coined at Paris during the 1930s, la Negritude has progressively broke away from the contingency of both its origin and pioneers becoming the leitmotiv of several generations of writers native of Africa and Caribbee who borrowed it although they reappraised it. La Negritude has then travelled within time and space outlining a transnational trajectory that this research aims at restoring. Through that circulatory prism drawing its inspiration from social history of political ideas and travelling theory, this paper presents the original understanding of la Negritude and its diasporic nature due to its both dispersion within the francophone space and problematical transfer into Anglophone area. The paper reports next institutional initiatives that were central to the transnational making of la Negritude.

Is 'decolonisation' relevant at all to the university situated in Britain and other former colonial centres? Answering broadly in the affirmative, this essay situates the project of 'decolonising' the metropolitan university within a wider historical and intellectual context while delineating some of the key questions such an endeavour might grapple with. It argues that 'Western' universities can lead the increasingly vital task of historical self-understanding in the constituent polities and societies of the geopolitical 'West'. Decolonisation is reparative of the 'European' itself, seeking to understand and to extend knowledge about how cultures and communities outside it have shaped 'Europe'. Reframing discussions of decolonisation in the light of anticolonial thought – as the theory and practice of anticolonialism – gives grounding, heft and direction to them, enabling rich questions to be posed and answered towards the wider horizon of making another world possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energised by his concern with the place of poetry in and as philosophy, Césaire's work is engaged in thinking knowledge, a praxis which becomes fundamental to his critique of the ideology of imperialism. The concern with poetry as magical thinking and the question of what it contributes to philosophy, and more particularly, to epistemology, takes on pressing importance in the light of colonialism, whose domination is predicated on the hegemonic disruption and erasure of indigenous knowledges. Through his radical re-evaluation of Western epistemology, Césaire shows that what is at stake in African/diasporic, and indeed planetary, futures, is a radical reframing of the category of philosophy and the possibility of an alternative relation to objects. The issue of coloniality's imbrication in a Western ontology of objects takes on amplified importance in the light of current capitalist crises, including ecological collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As today's catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump's criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell's published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can't Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O'Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of História Unisinos is the property of Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Our reasons for avoiding death are manifold, encompassing among others, motives that are personal, political, and historical. Still, are there ways that we might use words to overcome these common everyday aversions to death and the dead through another modality of language, that of poetry for example? Can the poetic word get us to acknowledge the particulars of death despite the various reasons we have to disavow it? Might we use language not simply grasp death abstractly (or more accurately, fail to grasp it) but instead to realize what death means in its awful particularity? These questions are prompted by Aimé Césaire’s poerty and his prose, and by his elegy for Emmett Till in particular. Through his writings and his political work, one of Césaire’s key aims was to get people to acknowledge what they would prefer to avoid. Césaire’s work, both his poetry and prose, urges readers to see the things they would prefer not to see and to show us how language stakes us to the world in all its terrifying awfulness and wondrous splendor, despite our desperate attempts to avoid this realization. This essay is divided into two parts. The first part looks at how this problem of alienation and the need to acknowle this alienation motivates Césaire’s writing more generally, focusing on the ten years between 1945 (when his essay “Poetry and Knowledge” is published) and 1955 (when the second edition of his Discourse on Colonialism is published). In order to consider how alienation and acknowledgement work in this celebrated text, I consider related works and their contexts from the period from 1950-1956, including his famous letter of resignation from the French Communist Party. This sets the stage for the reading of Césaire’s Ferraments provided in the second section. The second part examines how and why Césaire sought acknowledgement for Emmett Till’s brutal murder through his poetry, focusing specifically on his poem “…On the State of the Union” from his 1960 collection Ferraments.

After the expeditions in the late 19th century to Africa, Africa became a new destination for the colonists. In this period, the King of Belgium Léopold II started to colonize Congo which is situated in the heart of Africa. Later, in the beginning of the 20th century, Congo was fully conquered by Belgium. Patrice Lumumba, who was the president of Congo for a while, fought with his colleagues for the independence of their country. After such a long struggle, Congo gained its independence on June 30th, 1960. This idea of independence did not satisfy the new colonialists (neo-colonialists) who made major economic investments in Congo, and they wanted to end this independence. In this study, we will refer to the recent history of Congo, to Lumumba's fight for independence and his plan for the unification of African people against the colonialists in the play entitled Une saison au Congo by the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire.

Frantz Fanon's writing represents a productive embrace of the political and the poetic. His ideas have had such a long afterlife, they live on in us, I submit, precisely because the language of their articulation, image-filled and rhythmic, is compelling. This article examines three elements of Fanonian poetics in Black Skin, White Masks: the use of metaphor and, in "By Way of Conclusion," an ambiguous/multiple "I" as persona, and, finally, what Brent Edwards has called "anaphoric poetics," the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, Aimé Césaire travelled to Cuba to participate in the Havana Cultural Congress, a mass international meeting where delegates discussed the place of culture in the struggle against imperialism, neo-colonialism, and underdevelopment. Among the likes of C.L.R. James, Nicolás Guillén, René Depestre, Michel Leiris, and Daniel Guérin, it was in Havana that the Martinican politician undertook the until-now untranslated interview with Sonia Aratán for the Casa de las Américas revue and delivered his Cultural Congress conference paper – previously believed by Césaire scholars to be lost. Both texts shed light on Césaire's little-known views on Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and Marxism in the context of late-1960s tricontinentalism. By reconstructing Césaire's exchanges with Cuban writers before and during the Congress, we propose a consideration of the role of Cuba in Césaire's political thought as a tragic possibility, combining the catastrophe of Caribbean history with the uncertain potential of new social forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the interactions, connections and parallels in literary texts addressing Haiti by Anglophone Caribbean writers C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott, and Francophone writers Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Primary materials considered include: C.L.R. James' 1934 playscript, Toussaint Louverture, which had been lost for many years until recently; two plays by Derek Walcott, Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours; Aimé Césaire's book-length poem, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and his theatrical work, The Tragedy of King Christophe; and Édouard Glissant's single published play, Monsieur Toussaint. Collectively, this corpus of primary materials demonstrates parallels and connections within literary efforts at decolonization across the Caribbean and reveals Haiti as a principle of coherence, and of hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a contemporary reading from Latin America of Discourse on Colonialism, one of Martinican writer and political leader Aimé Césaire's most important works, which is not well known in the Latin American context, despite the great relevance that his politics have in that region. It is one of the strongest interpellations of colonialism and racism as inherent vectors of capitalism and Western modernity and even could be considered as a precursor to critiques of international development thinking and practices. The article includes a short biography of Césaire, and goes on to address how Discourse offers a non-Eurocentric reading of European history, arguing that Nazism is not an outgrowth of or an exception in European history but the ultimate effect of a civilization that justifies colonization. It then describes Césaire's post-war aspirations for decolonization as a possible third way forward for Europe, breaking with the binarism of capitalism/communism, and outlines questions involving the tensions in the demands for equality and recognition of differences, which stemmed from his involvement in the departmentalization of Martinique in 1946, and the problems that French universalism caused for this process. Rereading Discourse today, there is a distinct blind spot in its androcentrism, and in Césaire's ignoring of Black women thinkers who were his contemporaries. However, the text still offers original and creative proposals that subaltern groups in Latin America (racialized groups, women, LGBTQ+) can use to observe elements of reality that colonizers and dominant groups are reluctant to acknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contexto Revista Anual de Estudios Literarios is the property of Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How can an untranslatable text be read as world literature? Gaston Miron's only published collection of poetry, L'homme rapaillé, is of course a national, and even nationalist, work. While limited translations exist, their failure is inevitable to the extent that Miron's language, beyond its fragmented syntax and play with prosody, abounds with neologisms and elements drawn from deep within the Québécois lexicon. In fact, the text is, in a sense, against translation as much in its form as in its content. Furthermore, one might expect that the collection's overt political engagement and rootedness in the specific experiences and events of the Quiet Revolution would circumscribe the possibility of an extended readership. However, within the francophone world at least, L'homme rapaillé's circulation and influence has far exceeded the borders of Quebec, in large part because its militancy and aesthetics eschew both provincialism and any facile conception of the universal. This article examines how the poetic construction of the "Québécanthrope," precisely because of its concern for the local and the intimate, and its simultaneous lyrical dialogue with key figures of decolonization (Césaire, Depestre, Memmi, and Fanon, among others), becomes a gesture of worlding. The article argues for reading Miron as a theorist and practitioner of world literature, viewing Quebec through the lens of relation. I draw on the work of Emily Apter, Vilashini Cooppan, and Jacques Derrida to unpack the implications of Miron's articulation of the local word and the world, focusing on his signed hapax, "amironner." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article teases out elective affinities between Julia Kristeva's theorization of the abject and certain (Afro-)Caribbean writers' figurations of racialized alterity and violence in the (post)colony. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on the tropes of refuse and the corpse to classify the volatile experience she calls abjection, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and others invoke tropes of bareness and monstrosity (i.e. zombies, cannibals) to characterize and denounce racialized violence. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on an understanding of the abject as intimately tethered to the pre-Oedipal, writers such as Michelle Cliff and Edwidge Danticat offer us exemplary works that tend to the abject and semiotic praxis by imaginatively drawing on the pre-colonial, not least its valuations of matrilineal power and wisdom. The article registers these affinities and speculates on what the differences bespeak about violence vis-à-vis the (M)other and blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]