Over the course of the twentieth century, anti-colonial political struggle was a crucible for inspiring experiments in poetics, fueling the creation of and reflection upon works of art and literature that sought to do justice to the uprising of “darker nations.” Aimé Césaire—the French Martiniquan poet, dramaturg, essayist, and politician—was a towering and complex figure in the world of anti-colonial theory and praxis. From his writings on Négritude (a political and aesthetic movement for the affirmation of Blackness against Eurocentric and White supremacist frames) to his critical appropriation of Surrealism, his cultural interventions in Vichy-occupied Martinique alongside his wife Suzanne, and his communist militancy, Césaire embodied many of the political and aesthetic contradictions and complexities of decolonization in a world still structured by European empires and racial capitalism. At the heart of his work are questions that remain very much alive: What is the role of culture in the process of decolonization? Why is tragedy such a significant genre in the imagination and staging of anti-colonial politics? And how, as Césaire himself asked, can “Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism”?
In this course, we will examine how Césaire gave voice to anti-colonial critique and illuminated the political and intellectual tensions of decolonization in the twentieth century and beyond. We will begin with the account of Négritude developed in Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, before turning to his totalizing critique of Western racial domination and exploration of settler-colonialism’s entanglement with fascism in Discourse on Colonialism. Along the way, we will study his lifelong engagement with interpretations of the Haitian Revolution and his efforts to anatomize the dramatic contradictions of decolonization in his plays, including …And the Dogs Lay Silent, The Tragedy of King Christophe, A Season in the Congo, and A Tempest. What can we learn from the politics and poetics of anti-colonial insurgencies of the past as we continue the still-unfinished work of decolonization?
