J. Kameron Carter (Duke University, Durham, NC)

Paratheological Passage: Aimé Césaire’s Fugitive Political Theology

     In this paper, I call attention to the lower frequencies of religion and theology in Aimé Césaire’s notion of Négritude. Indeed, working  between his two best-known works, Discourse on Colonialism and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, I surface what amounts to a double gesture in Césaire’s thought. There is, on the one hand, his interrogation of the colonial order as in fact a colonial ordo salutis, a colonial order of salvation by which the colonized are made to bear, as Césaire puts it, “the weight of an eternally renewed cross.” As a structure of racial governmentality in which identity is produced, sedimented in place, and thus contained, coloniality, Césaire in effect shows, is a structure of onto-(political)-theology. And yet, there is Césaire’s insurgent political poetics of Négritude/blackness. Being tethered neither to nor merely an expression of absolute negativity (death) and being a figure neither of identity nor anti-identity, Négritude/blackness, or the poetics that is Négritude/blackness, for Césaire is a disruptive and irruptive ghosting of the onto-theological imperative of identity within the frame of sovereignty. Indeed, it is that which escapes onto-colonial containment. As a kind of statelessness, Négritude is that which escapes ontology and thus sovereignty. In this sense (and to borrow from Nahum Chandler), Négritude/blackness is paraontological. It is precisely this escape, Négritude as escape, as fugitivity, as a kind of vortex built on rhythmic turns (the great “black hole” of which Césaire speaks in his Notebook and out of which “the malevolent tongue of the night in its motionless veerition” speaks), that Césaire offers a poetics of under the moniker “Négritude”. But more than this, in (re)imaging the slave ship as a figure of Négritude/blackness, as a passageway, indeed, as a (middle) passage of escape within the scene of modernity, and in resurrecting the slaves to stand up on the ship, Césaire offers Négritude/blackness not only as a paraontological but also as paratheological. It is this double-feature of Négritude that I want to attend to in this paper and thus by way of Cesaire begin to think about the paratheological dimensions of black critical thought. (TOP)

Crichlow, Michaeline (Duke University, Durham, NC)

&

Northover, Patricia (University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica)

The Journey Towards the Future: Negritude, Abject Blackness, and the Emancipatory Force of  Spectrality

The nature of the emancipatory project taken up by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter is epic and urgent, as it concerns the present space of “Man”–– its form, structure, and function––and the future promise of the “Human” beyond the agonistic present. At the center of this engagement is the problem of  ‘blackness’ or rather as we argue “ abject blackness” and its hauntological cognates: “black time,” “spectrality,” “nothing but an animal,”  “brutes,” and “sovereignlessness.” How does one move beyond these peculiar experiences of blackness as abjection? What sort of strategies are needed for a process of depassement , or as articulated by Césaire,  a “reactivation of the past with a view to its own surpassing”, given the operation of  a racialized philosophy of place. Indeed, what exactly constitutes the strategic and political lineaments of these historical emancipatory projects; this unfinished epic’s ongoing struggle with the present and its peculiar temporalities?

In our paper, we argue that the nature of the political process animating Césaire’s project of Negritude, as well as these other inter-locutors of hi/story is inescapably embedded with this experience of “modern blackness” as abject blackness. Abject blackness  here speaks to a non-present presence, a spectral phenomena in the space of the present. Accordingly, we believe, that it is only through a greater understanding of the complexity of these  experiences of  “blackness” as ‘abject blackness’ that one may better grasp the emancipatory work being achieved through the strategic realism of Negritude and the project of ‘depassement.’  This is a project that is critically extended by Frantz Fanon and later Sylvia Wynter, through the analytics of ‘socio-genetics, which at one level supplants the Negritude project in order to deepen the deconstructive displacement of racialized and dialecticized orders of being and becoming in modern society. Yet, in these critical emancipatory projects are there not coherent genealogical strands that thread together  these  distinctive critical  agencies  confronting the diversely lived present history of Man being inscribed through capitalism and slavery or through commodities and ghosts?  Moreover, in the project of Negritude as “ the living of history in history”, just how important is “race” and the experience of “blackness” to the quest for “depassement”?  And what exactly operates as the basis for the material importance of these tropes of experience? In other words, what kind of resources do they provide- symbolic, ontological, bio-political, poetic, social, spectral, or other- for calling forth futures and disrupting present spaces?

Like Gary Wilder, we do not believe that the political space underwritten by critics such as Césaire can be read through the dialectical historical templates of romance or tragedy, revolution or impasse. Rather, we propose that a further excavation of the entangled and haunted political at work is needed before one succumbs to such templates which ineluctably leaves our protagonists as tragic conscripts of their present, apparently bereft of resources to break the chains of present space and call forth futures- or a radical alterity which  cannot be appropriated in the present. (TOP)

Gregson Davis (Duke University, Durham, NC)

Forging a Caribbean “vulgar eloquence”: prolegomena to a new English translation of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

On the working principle that translation is best understood as interpretation in its most vivid mode, this paper begins by offering a brief account of the interplay of ideas that constitutes the vertebra of Césaire’s monumental poem, Journal of a Homecoming. The main focus of the following analysis will be on the elucidation of the linguistic dimension of his revolutionary art against the background of his ambitious program to “bend” (“infléchir”) the French language. In a famous published interview with the Haitian writer, René Depestre, Césaire spoke of this artistic goal in the following terms:”[…] I have always striven to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage. […]. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character.”  In unpacking the complex ramifications of this bold assertion (e.g. the relationship between the “diglossia” of Martinican speech and the language of Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal), I briefly compare the parallel linguistic projects of the anglophone Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, and the French Antillean novelist, Patrick Chamoiseau, both of whom succeeded in creating a new literary style in separate genres that embody a “vulgaris eloquentia” (to borrow the expression made famous by Dante’s treatise on the subject). (TOP)

John E. Drabinsky (Amherst College, Amherst, MA)

Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word

     The postcolonial moment is animated by a single, fecund question: what does it mean to begin? Whether it is a vision of cultural retrieval, syncretic memory work, or a first production of the unprecedented, this moment is oriented toward the new as a question of resistance, revolution, and, ultimately, an unshackled future. But, as with any theorizing of the future, this moment is also bound up with the question of memory-work: what is the past? And what is the past to the future? This is a particularly fraught pair of questions in the Caribbean context, where history begins with the pain of the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, and colonial domination. What does it mean to begin in this place, in the postcolonial moment, in Césaire’s critical work?

     This essay explores the relation between apocalypse and prophecy in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, as well as the implications for such thinking after Césaire and Négritude. The essay begins with that key moment in Notebook – a temporal, epistemological, and political interval – in which Césaire asks himself he wants, then replies simply “the end of the world.”

The only thing in the world

worth beginning:

The End of the word of course

What, then, is the end of the world? And why apocalypse as a condition of beginning?

     The dramatic arc of Notebook has many peaks. What begins in abjection becomes a militant and surreal affirmation of virility and possibility. The arc works because of two intertwined voices: the apocalyptic and the prophetic. The apocalyptic word, I claim, clears the space for beginning and makes clear Césaire’s conception of colonialism as a total project, both from the outside (the project of the colonizer) and from the inside (and restructuring of the colonized from the interior of life). The prophetic word lies in the interval between the apocalyptic effect and affect (an account of the abjection of Caribbean history as a history of violence) and the future of retrieval (the moment Négritude transitions from the personal – “my Négritude is not” – to the cultural and political). Césaire’s prophetic word, as with all prophecy, speaks against the king and ruler, but also toward a very little, not nothing he beholds as a better future. In that sense, I argue, the apocalyptic word clears the paradoxical time-space for a blackness-to-come, written toward a pure future, open to the Négritude-subject we do not yet know, that is also as old as Africa, rooted in a civilizational past. The intertwining of apocalypse and prophecy in Notebook’s word sustains this paradox of time and space.

     Lastly, the essay concludes with a brief consideration of how, when read as apocalyptic and prophetic, Césaire’s word can be seen as a precondition of the work of those two post-Césairean trends: existentialism (Fanon) and what I call the afro-postmodern (Glissant). (TOP)

Laurent Dubois (Duke University, Durham, NC)

Césaire and the Haitian Revolution

     In this paper I’ll explore the place of Haiti, and specifically the Haitian Revolution, in the poetry and historical writing of Césaire, focusing particularly on the Cahier and “Le Verbe Marroner,” as well as on his book on Toussaint Louverture. (TOP)

Garraway, Doris (Northwestern University, Chicago, IL)

Race, Regeneration, and Sovereignty in Christophe’s Haiti

In this presentation, I track the role of race and Africanity in the defense of Haitian sovereignty in the publications issuing from the kingdom of Henry Christophe between 1814 and 1819. Although the formal establishment of the Christophean state was less explicitly informed by race than that of Dessalines, the writings sponsored by the regime outlined a far more elaborate theory of racial equality, grounded in a conception of universal history that emphasized the central role of Africa and Africans in the development and spread of civilization. At the same time, more so than Dessalines or Pétion, Christophe imagined Haiti itself as an exemplar of black humanity, capable of redeeming the entire African race from the infamy of slavery. Focused primarily on the polemical work of Baron de Vastey, the presentation will incorporate minor texts by Juste Chanlatte, Julien Prévost, and Chevalier de Prézeau so as to assess the contribution of Christophe’s Kingdom to the conceptualization of Negritude. (TOP)

Irele, Abiola (Kwara State University, Ilorin, Nigeria)

(TOP)

Mbembe, Achille

(TOP)

Natalie Melas (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)

Poetry’s Circumstance and Racial Time (1935-1947, or thereabouts)

     What is the relation of Césaire’s poetry to its times?  The question has been addressed from the point of view of political and cultural history through an identification of the particular events or figures addressed in the poems and the cultural movements and trends that underlie them.  But it seems to me that the question also calls for reflection on Césaire’s original and complex engagement with temporality at the level of form.  Taking a cue from Abiola Irele’s inspired remark that the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal “presents itself as a poem of circumstance,”  I’d like to explore the proposition that all Césaire writing (and here the prose must be included as well) is occasional writing, where we understand the occasion to be of a paradoxical sort, namely, ultimately:  decolonization (or as Ngal frames it, ” une meme melopée: celle du procès du colonialisme”).   The raced enunciation of négritude requires an extended notion of circumstance,  because the condition of possibility in the world that it posits and requires has not, or not yet, materialized.  After briefly making the case for this approach for the writings that span the years from 1935-1947, from Césaire’s first published writings and the initial composition of the Cahier, through Tropiques and up  to the Cahier’s second definitive edition,  I will attempt to tease out some of the ramifications for a reading of the work, the most important of which would be its incompletion, hence the nature of its interrelatedness and the transgression or necessary flouting of generic boundaries, particularly between lyric and expository or oratorical modes.  Though informed and inspired by recent scholarship on the successive versions of the Cahier, my approach will focus instead on reading the contingencies across texts–the three main instances of the word ‘négritude’ for instance in the 1935 essay “Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale” and the two separate passages of the Cahier and then its near absence in Tropiques; the important resonances between selections of Césaire’s prose and poetry in Tropiques.   I will argue, tentatively, that for Césaire’s writing, the very notion of circumstance, or of the topical, must be altered on the model of race itself (a contingency converted by circumstance into necessity), such that we arrive at a timelessness that isn’t eternal and a circumstance that isn’t ephemeral.(TOP)

Mylène Priam (Harvard University, Boston, MA)

Créolité and Cesairian Negritude: from Generations to Transformations

     A close reading of Eloge de la Créolité (1989) (In Praise of Creoleness, 1993) requires that we reconstruct it within a context defined by literary and theoretical traditions whose very development owe much to the manifesto itself, and which, in turn, have allowed for in-depth exploration of the meaning of the concept contained therein. Just as Créolité extolled awareness of a burgeoning Antillean identity, the discourse that sought to describe it must also be perceived as a diversified reading process, starting theoretically with Praise, but neither limited by nor ending with the text itself.

     Much like the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, who had integrated his poetic vision into the “traditional mold of a manifesto or speech, in which the speaker cites established authorities and pertinent examples of poetry in order to refute them, following with his own statement of authority and poetic examples” (Willis, 29-30), the Creolists sought to locate Créolité and its discourse within an ideological and intellectual continuum that they in turn would claim, challenge and assess. Praise was indeed an opportunity for the three Martinican thinkers to popularize a “definition” of Antillanité that would authorize the construction of unlimited relational patterns while rejecting basic syntheses. The Creolists believed that this cultural and ontological construction could not ignore the importance of identifying and clarifying its theoretical grounds.

     First among these was Negritude, which, as described in Praise, paved the way for the introduction and reception of Créolité. The manifesto’s authors believed strongly that Césaire’s Negritude, while representing a crucial step, failed to meet a basic need: that of a distinctive Antillean aesthetic. To their future detractors, however, the Creolists had implicitly identified Créolité as essentially the daughter of Negritude, since the authors had declared themselves to be “forever Aimé Césaire’s sons” (80) (I). But as Praise further asserts, two other catalysts, Antillanité and Creolization, crucially informed the conception of Créolité. In constructing and presenting Créolité as a legacy inherited from their Martinican compatriots the Creolists sought both to acknowledge the permutations of contemporary intellectual thought in the French Antilles and to legitimize their own role in its evolution. This approach may also explain their insistence on notions partially opposed to their own theories instead of on content that linked them to their forbears, particularly in their treatment of Césaire’s Negritude. A close reading of Praise reveals that the Creolists’ generational and transformational exegesis was neither exhaustive nor impartial, nor restrained.(TOP)

Wilder, Gary (CUNY University, New York, NY)

Political Pragmatism, Radical Literalism, Situated Humanism

This paper will discuss Aimé Césaire’s distinctive critical orientation to politics, culture, and knowledge which linked a rejection of a priori or dogmatic thinking to immanent critique in order to recuperate, inflect, and refunction existing categories or formations in the service of a projects that were at once specific and world-historical, pragmatic and utopian, political and poetic. I will focus on Césaire’s thinking in the postwar period and reflect on the implications of his legacy for critical political thought today.(TOP)