Césaire after Fanon. Returning to the “master-slave” revolt in Une tempête

Abstract

In his work, Fanon generously cites Césaire’s poetry. His citation from Césaire’s tragedy Et les chiens se taisaient in Peau noir masques blancs, and later in Les Damnés de la terre, in support of his argument that anti-colonial violence was essential to a new, post-revolutionary beginning, is of particular interest. I want to make the case that Une tempête presents us with a complexity of temporal and intertextual folds that pursues the question of freedom and what comes after. Fanon came after Césaire but Une tempête comes after Fanon. Césaire’s text, I argue, alludes to Fanon’s work in different ways and in doing so appears to assert the case for non-violence, refuses the figure a decolonial tableau rasa and returns us to the predicament of colonial racism that both he and Fanon sought to overcome. In all of this, is the figure of the hyphen—a ligature binding Prospero to his imagined self, that is constituted through Caliban, but also loosely binding Césaire to Fanon.