Writing Back to the Imperial Canon : Hybridity and Resistance in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest

Abstract

Négritude, as the social movement initiated by Francophone colonial writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, sought to debunk the longstanding myth of ‘blackness’ that had been invented and propagated in order to justify the histories of slave trade and colonial rule. Though Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, the co-founders of Négritude, shared the agenda of decolonizing the mind and rebuilding black consciousness, their means to achieve it were not identical. While one had nostalgia for a ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ African culture of the pre-colonial past, the other accepted the given condition of colonial hybridity as a point of departure for anticolonial resistance. This essay examines how Césaire put his political theory of Négritude into literary practice in A Tempest, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s colonial romance The Tempest. For Césaire, Shakespeare was not simply the Bard of English literature but also an icon of Western cultural hegemony that served to rationalize the unequal power relations between colonizer and colonized. Césaire’s writing back to the representative Western canon from an Afro-Caribbean perspective had both aesthetic and ideological purpose. By making ‘the imperial canon’ a site of intercultural dialogue, by using the English text and the French language in the non-European context, Césaire suggested that appropriation as well as rejection can be a means of cultural resistance. Further, Césaire’s challenging experiment in A Tempest provided a viable model of cultural hybridity for his succeeding postcolonial critics like Frants Fanon, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha.