Placing Césaire

Abstract

Introductionpicture the bibliographical prelude: in 1973, Frederick Ivor Case publishes the first enumerative bibliography of Cesaire with the simple title Cesaire: Bibliographie. Around the same time, we imagine Thomas Hale already hard at work on his thesis, Aime Cesaire: His Literary and Political Writings with a BioBibliography, which he submits in 1974. A few years later, in 1978, a revised version of the latter is published in a special issue of Etudes francaises, Ecrits d'Aime Cesaire: Bibliographie commentee. Such bibliographic activity in the 1970s announces - perhaps more than any other event - the end of Cesaire's main writing activity, and the arrival of monumental Cesaire.By the end of the 1960s, soon after the publication of Une Tempete, a total of 135 scholarly works had been published on his work. By the end of the 1970s, the number more than doubled to 273. At this point, the total production on Cesaire included at least thirty-six monographs, 162 articles and five theses.1 Cesaire was well on his way to being required reading for the aggregation at the Ecole Normale Superieure - the same aggregation that he himself failed because he was too busy writing. Today, only three years after Kora Veron refined and expanded the work of Thomas Hale in Les Ecrits d'Aime Cesaire: Bibliographie commentee (1913-2008) in 2013, we count 1,201 secondary works written directly on Cesaire.2 As Hale and Veron's bibliography attests, we also know much more today about Cesaire's own writings in print; and with the work of several researchers and archivists in recent years - Jean Jonnaissant, Lilian Pestre de Almeida, Katerina Gonzalez Seligman, Kora Veron, Nadine Albert Ronsin and myself, to name but a few - a genetic dossier is beginning to take shape with the surfacing of rich and important manuscripts.I find it difficult to believe that the bibliographic work started with Cesaire's critics in the back pages of their essays and monographs as early as the 1950s, and continued apace in the publication of these major bibliographies, has not had an impact in the growing research activity around Cesaire. What a shame, then, that institutional support for bibliographic work of the enumerative, authorial kind has dwindled in recent decades,3 and more so at the moment when we need to deploy these modalities for the sake of decolonial, queer, feminist and ecological memory. The internal struggles within bibliographic circles have a role to play in this state of affairs. After all, enumerative bibliography has too often been seen as the poor cousin of analytic and descriptive bibliography by those who should know better.4 I would argue, though, that the bulk of the blame lies elsewhere.The more the work of enumerative bibliography is seen as merely 'practical' or 'technical' - the kiss of death of the hermeneutic class - the further the labour required to compile them shifts into the black boxes of the academy and the private sector. We should leave the deep history of these processes for future work, and content ourselves with a brief outline of the major forces that shape enumerative bibliography today. The most important, by far, is the rise of electronic cataloguing and its back-end indexing, which has come to meet the 'information needs' of scholars. These catalogues, both open and private, are accessible today through open and closed networks. Their very material construction traces the history of changing labour relations within and without the academy in recent decades, without losing its connection to a history of indexing that dates to the dawn of human inscription.With the rise of databases and discoverability we see a series of new private industries forming alliances with research and public libraries.5 In recent years a handful of North Atlantic monopolies - EBSCO, ProQuest, Springer, WileyBlackwell and Elsevier, to name a few - have come to dominate the production, flow and 'discovery' of the scholarly and pedagogical record in European languages at massive scales. …