The Trope of Masking in the Works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire

2004 ◽  
pp. 66-110
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

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.

Aimé Césaire: The Bearable Lightness of Becoming

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 737-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michael Dash
Keyword(s):  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Patrick Chamoiseau ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Raphael Confiant ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

Allons, la vraie poésie est ailleurs. Come on, true poetry lies elsewhere.—Suzanne CésaireThe Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.

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.

scholarly journals MARXISME ET CHRISTIANISME SELON DAMAS, CÉSAIRE ET SENGHOR / MARKSIZAM I KRŠĆANSTVO PREMA DAMASU, CÉSAIREU I SENGHORU

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-208
Author(s):  
Frano Vrančić ◽  
Helga Ptiček
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Leopold Sedar Senghor

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationships of Marxism and Christianity in the literary work of the three Baobabs of Negritude – the Guyanase Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978), the Martiniquais Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) and the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001). Starting from the first cries of black revolt against “the civilizing mission” and the disproportionate exploitation of the human and natural wealth of the formerly colonized countries, we will try to describe how the Marxist vision of the colonial world of young angry writers influences the virulence of their attitudes against the assimilationist policies of the French Third Republic and the colonial clergy. Finally, we will explain how Senghoraian Negritude differs from that expressed in Césaireʼs and Damasʼ work and how his catholicism and the experience of peaceful cohabitation between Senegalese Christians and Muslims inspire him to preach the civilization of the Universal, that is to say to the mixing of men and women of different races and cultures.

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