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This book approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture. Engaging primarily the works of Aime Cesaire and Leon Gontran Damas, Carrie Noland shows how the demands of modernist print culture alter the personal voice of each author, transforming an empirical subjectivity into a hybrid, textual entity that she names, after Theodor Adorno, an "aesthetic subjectivity." This aesthetic subjectivity, transmitted by the words on the page, must be actualized -- performed, reiterated, and created anew -- by each reader, at each occasion of reading. Lyric writing and lyric reading therefore attenuate the link between author and phenomenalized voice. Yet the Negritude poem insists upon its connection to lived experience even as it emphasizes its inscriptive support. Ironically, a purely formalist reading would have to ignore the ways in which formal -- and not merely thematic -- elements point toward the poem's own conditions of emergence.
Blending archival research on the historical context of Negritude with theories of the lyric "voice," Noland argues that Negritude poems present a challenge to both form-based (deconstructive) theories and identity-based theories of poetic representation. Through close readings, she reveals that the racialization of the author places pressure on a lyric regime of interpretation, obliging us to reconceptualize the relation of author to text in poetries of the first person.
List of contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. "Seeing with the Eyes of the Work" (Adorno): Cesaire's Cahier and Modernist Print Culture2. The Empirical Subject in Question: A Drama of Voices in Aime Cesaire's Et les chiens se taisaient3. Poetry and the Typosphere in Leon-Gontran Damas4. Leon-Gontran Damas: Writing Rhythm in the Interwar Period5. Red Front / Black Front: Aime Cesaire and the Affaire Aragon6. To Inhabit a Wound: A Turn to Language in MartiniqueConclusionAppendix 1 English Translation of Leon-Gontran Damas's "Hoquet"Appendix 2 English Translation of Aime Cesaire's "Calendrier lagunaire"NotesIndex
About the author
Carrie Noland is professor of French and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology and Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Along with coediting two collections of essays, Migrations of Gesture (with Sally Ann Ness) and Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (with Barrett Watten), she has published numerous essays on avant-garde literature and art.
Summary
Approaches Negritude as an experimental, text-based poetic movement developed by diasporic authors of African descent through the means of modernist print culture
