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The essays collected in this volume study the poetry and thought of four major Francophone Caribbean writers: Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. In a context where identity was a question, an original conception of subjectivity appeared, as the end point rather than the origin of a process which was inseparably poetic and political. It entailed an aesthetics of dispersion or errance, rather than belonging. This volume thus questions the traditional teleological narrative of negritude as 'renaissance' or 'awakening'. A careful look at the birth of different negritude movements shows the complexity of this history and explains Fanon's philosophical and political critique of the notion. These writers' astonishingly rich production rests on original aesthetic ideas and philosophical reflections which the vagaries of history and displacement, and their comparison with major metropolitan literary movements, had masked. Fanon's thought is at the heart of the book, but this volume also traces the important debates these authors had with the major French thinkers of their time, notably Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
List of contents
CONTENTS: Introduction: Poetry, History, Philosophy of the Antilles - Part I: Poetry and Subjectivity - The Plane and the Discrete: Virtual Communities in French Caribbean Poetry. From Mallarmé and Perse to Césaire and Glissant - Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes: Images and Moods in Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - Ontology and Subjectivity: On Césaire's Late Poetry - Appendices: A: A Commentary on Négritude in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/B: Deux néologismes de Césaire/C: Obituary: Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) - Part II: History: Negritude, Alienation and Freedom - The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s - Corps Perdu: A Note on Fanon's Cogito - Alienation and Freedom: Fanon on Psychiatry and Revolution - L'Afrique de Fanon - Part III: Philosophy: Chance, Event and Consciousness - The Idea of an Impersonal Consciousness: Deleuze and Sartre - Poétique de l'identité vécue comme hasard (Perse, Michaux, Deleuze, Glissant)
About the author
Jean Khalfa is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College Cambridge. He specialises in the history of philosophy, modern literature (in particular contemporary poetry and writing in French from North Africa and the Caribbean), aesthetics and anthropology. His research on Fanon contained in this book was facilitated by the award of a Senior Research Fellowship from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust.
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"This is a rich and compelling volume that makes an important contribution to francophone postcolonial studies." (Nick Nesbitt, French Studies, 2019)
