HUMANISM AND THE ENDS OF EMPIRE, 1945–1960

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 773-800 ◽  
Author(s):  
GILI KLIGER
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Federalist ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

This article situates francophone anticolonial thinkers—including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon—within the “humanism debate” in postwar French thought. Drawing on their poetry, prose, speeches, and interviews, this article reconstructs their critique of the humanist tradition that had identified the capacity for reason as the essence of “man.” It then traces their dialogue with approaches to this critique, including existentialism, phenomenology, and surrealism, that circulated in the metropole. The particular ways in which anticolonial thinkers built upon such approaches merit our attention because they force us to revise our understanding of the politics motivating the turn to so-called “antihumanism” in the 1960s. Drawing on recent studies that have highlighted proposals for federalist alternatives to empire entertained prior to national independence, this article suggests that the “federalist imagination” helped to inspire the distinctive mode of criticism developed by certain anticolonial thinkers and taken up by later scholars.

Sartre’s imaginary and the problem of whiteness

2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372110175
Author(s):  
Betty Jean Stoneman
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
White People ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Political Act ◽  
White Gaze

Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation.

Spirit of Bandung beyond Colonial Mobility

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-209
Author(s):  
Jeong Eun Annabel We
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Current Paradigm

This article argues that the spirit of Bandung’s relevance in a time of resurgent fascist mobilization is in the new logic of movement that the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia espoused. The critiques of liberal humanism and its relation to fascism by Ernst Bloch, Takeuchi Yoshimi, and Aimé Césaire reveal that an underlying problem of coloniality and movement remain in current paradigm of liberalism. The article situates conceptual reworkings of colonial-fascist movement by the thinkers Takeuchi Yoshimi, Frantz Fanon, and Ch’oe In-Hun within the trajectory of the spirit of Bandung. Through this engagement, the article argues that the spirit of Bandung has called for revolutionary movement beyond the grids of colonial mobility in the transpacific.

The Last Muslim Intellectual

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamid Dabashi
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Urgent Task

The first comprehensive social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, this book explores the life and legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923-69), arguably the most prominent Iranian public intellectual of his time and contends that he was the last Muslim intellectual to have articulated a vision of Muslim worldly cosmopolitanism, before the militant Islamism of the last half a century degenerated into sectarian politics and intellectual alienation from the world at large. This unprecedented engagement with Al-e Ahmad’s life and legacy is a prelude to what Dabashi calls a post-Islamist Liberation Theology. The Last Muslim Intellectual is about expanding the wide spectrum of anticolonial thinking beyond its established canonicity and adding a critical Muslim thinker to it is an urgent task, if the future of Muslim critical thinking is to be considered in liberated terms beyond the dead-end of its current sectarian predicament. A full social and intellectual biography of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a seminal Muslim public intellectual of the mid-20th century, this book places Al-e Ahmad’s writing and activities alongside other influential anticolonial thinkers of his time, including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Edward Said. Chapters cover Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s intellectual and political life; his relationship with his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar; his essays; his fiction; his travel writing; his translations; and his legacy.

Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-144
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Silva
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
European American ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Enrique Dussel

This chapter seeks to flesh out Sylvan’s stance against Empire by interfacing his essayistic production with his poetry. For instance, in his O Racismo da Europa e a Paz no Mundo, written during the heightened period of anti-colonial struggle in Africa and Asia, Sylvan offers a theorization and cursory genealogy of European and European-American global hegemony, ranging from the European historicization of itself as ‘the standard civilization,’ the fantasy of European superiority, and its resignification of difference in order to retain the balance of global power. This chapter thus contextualizes Sylvan’s anti-imperial thought with that of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Enrique Dussel; in addition to elaborating the points where Sylvan’s thought further problematizes and contributes to the theorization of contemporary global power.

Acogny, Germaine (1944--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Baker-Tarpaga
Keyword(s):  
West African ◽  
Research Center ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Rwandan Genocide ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

In a career that has spanned over forty years, Germaine Acogny has contributed to modernism in dance by merging culturally situated West African dances from Senegal and Benin with Western dance forms such as the Graham technique and classical ballet to create a new African dance aesthetic. Her work emerged from an African postcolonial framework, and her pedagogy codified a modernist Africanist technique. In the 1960s when African dance was viewed by some Western audiences as primitive and timeless, Acogny advocated the necessity of viewing African dance as evolving and changing. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and French choreographer Maurice Béjart appointed Acogny director of the Senegal-based Mudra Afrique that trained African-based choreographers and teachers. Acogny has taught and performed globally and is the founder of École de Sables (School of Sands), a training, residency, and research center in Senegal. She also founded the Jant-Bi (The Sun) Company in 1996. She is known as "Mama Acogny" because she has mentored numerous young dancers and choreographers in Africa and globally. She has also been referred to as one of the founders of contemporary African dance. Fagaala (2003) is a notable touring work, which addressed the Rwandan genocide. It was a choreographic collaboration between Jant-Bi and Japan’s Kota Yamasaki in 2004.

Negritude’s Problem with History

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-71
Author(s):  
Robert Decker
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Postcolonial History ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor ◽  
Diasporic Communities

This essay argues for the recuperation of the writings of Léonard Sainville, a founding member of Negritude, and the incorporation of his work into the movement’s canon. Sainville was a historian and novelist whose work mitigates Negritude’s undertheorization of the concept of history and critiques European historiographical methods. Whereas writers such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor present Negritude, paradoxically, as both establishing continuity between the modernist present and the African past and marking a historical break from their poetic predecessors, Sainville argues that Pan-Africanism cannot form a sufficient basis for Negritude without sustained analysis of the cultural and historical evolution of both continental African and diasporic communities. Sainville’s historiographic intervention blurs the distinction between anti- and postcolonial thought, suggesting that the latter’s critiques of history do not follow necessarily from the failure of postcolonial history to follow the trajectory laid out for it by narratives of anticolonial overcoming.

Two Plays by Ina Césaire: Mémoires d'Isles and L'enfant des Passages

1990 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Jones
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
International Audience ◽  
The 1960S

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document