“What Is Mine”: Césairean Negritude between the Particular and the Universal

Abstract

Considering contemporary criticisms of Cesaire’s most important theoretical construct, Negritude, in light of the anti-essentialist turn in postcolonial studies, this article deploys the critical vocabulary of Frantz Fanon in order to read Cesaire as a theorist of colonial disalienation whose Negritude is not a fixed object but a process through which Cesaire comes to problematize both black essentialism and the very idea of racial particularism itself. The point, for Cesaire, is not to opt for a constructivist model that evacuates both race and subjectivity, but rather to move toward the universal “human” for which particularism is both a negation and a fundamental condition of possibility. In drawing attention to the self-reflexive aspects of the Cahier and other literary works, my reading brings forward the productive tensions between essentialism and constructivism, particularism and universalism, and independence and reciprocity, through which Cesaire articulates this critique. R ereading Aime Cesaire’s earliest and most celebrated poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, in the wake of the poet’s death some sixty years after its publication, one is immediately struck by the violence of the opening image of the French Caribbean islands, viewed through the eyes of a narrator returning from a long exile during the course of which he has adopted the cultural values of the colonizer. 1 Confronted with the apparently deserted landscape and impoverished desperation of his native Martinique, the speaker erupts with expressions of vengeful disgust, treating the island as a vile pestilence, a gangrenous excrescence or open wound on the sea’s surface, a wilting “flower of blood,” anguished, rotten, ugly, and morbid (7–9). A space of death beckoning its final destruction by the threat of a volcano and the site of the poet’s descent into his formerly “uncivilized” state, the capital city yields an anguished crowd