Summary
Martinican poet whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal supplies the epigraph to Chapter Three of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and the climactic instance, in Chapter Three, III, of the way beyond Nativism (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.218 / printed p.191; PDF p.257-259 / printed p.230-232).
Details
- The core of Césaire’s Caribbean Une Tempête is not ressentiment but an affectionate contention with Shakespeare for the right to represent the Caribbean, part of a grander effort to discover the bases of an integral identity different from the formerly dependent, derivative one (PDF p.239-240 / printed p.212-213).
- Césaire’s Toussaint Louverture passage in the Cahier, quoted in French, figures the colonized subject as a man alone imprisoned in white, defying the white cries of white death; Said comments that most often the concept of race itself gives the prison its raison d’être (PDF p.241-242 / printed p.214-215).
- The great turn at the climax of the Cahier — after the poet accepts his race entirely, without reservation — is figured as the way beyond nativism: no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence or force, and there is room for everyone at the rendez-vous of conquest (PDF p.257-258 / printed p.230-231; Said’s translation).
- Césaire and then Fanon represent to Girardet a somewhat suspicious revolutionary messianism, but they spurred Sartre and other Europeans openly to oppose French colonial policy in Algeria and Indochina during the 1950s (PDF p.269 / printed p.242).
- A French political theorist reading Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme when it appeared in 1955, just after Dien Bien Phu, is addressed by natives in the language of Bossuet and Chateaubriand, using concepts of Hegel, Marx and Freud to incriminate the very civilization producing all of them (PDF p.224 / printed p.197).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, W. B. Yeats, Nativism, Frantz Fanon, Imperialism