Aimé Césaire and Francophone Postcolonial Thought

Abstract

Abstract Born in 1913 in Martinique, Aimé Césaire was drawn to Europe as a young man. He enrolled at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris in 1932 and at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) three years later. During these years in the capital of France, Césaire co-founded, along with the Senegalese poet-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guyanese poet, Léon Gontran Damas, the négritude movement. He first used the term négritude in the review L'Étudiant noir, also founded by him, Damas, and Senghor in 1935. Towards 1938, Césaire finished writing his epic poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and completed his studies at the ENS. In Cahier, he displayed a highly developed political consciousness as well as acute linguistic, poetic, and ethical sensibility that blossomed into a variegated life of writing and politics. This chapter examines Césaire's literary oeuvre including his poetry, along with his political thought and his contribution to Francophone postcolonial thought.

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