Aime Cesaire Research Articles

A «África» con Aimé Césaire y Wifredo Lam

El artículo analiza el concepto de negritud en la obra poética de Aimé Césaire y su relación cultural con intelectuales europeos y caribeños, especialmente con el pintor cubano Wifredo Lam, cuya convergencia artística y personal duró más de cuatro décadas. A partir de composiciones de Aimé Césaire como el poema «A África», dedicado a Lam, y su análisis a la luz de cuadros como «La jungla,» Arnold analiza la representación del continente africano en el imaginario poético de Aimé Césaire.

“Happen Is Never Once”: The Temporality of Modernism’s Black Atlantic

The works of William Faulkner and Aimé Césaire demonstrate that the Black Atlantic’s circuits join the triangle trade not only spatially, but also temporally and historically. Furthermore, they articulate the temporality of a twentieth-century subject defined along the axis of the African diaspora—one who must manage both the (presumably) linear and progressive order of global capitalist industry and the historical vertigo and disenfranchisement of the transatlantic slave trade. This essay analyzes the formal techniques of both writers, particularly their use of temporal conflation, to show that rendering the “shock” of modernity demands addressing the slave trade that linked, and in many ways produced, the modern world.

Shipwrecked: disaster and transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, and the modern world

Shipwrecked: Disaster and Transformation in Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe and the Modern World presents the first comparative study of notable literary shipwrecks from the past 4,000 years, focusing on Homer's Odyssey , Shakespeare's The Tempest , and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . The recurrent treatment of shipwrecks in epic poetry, drama, novels, science fiction, movies, and television demonstrates an enduring fascination with this archetypal scene: a shipwreck survivor confronting the elements. It is remarkable, for example, that the characters in the 2004 television show Lost share so many features with those from Homer's Odyssey and Shakespeare's The Tempest . When survivors are stuck on an island for some period of time, shipwrecks often present the survivor with the possibility of a change in political and social status--as well as romance and even paradise. In each of the major shipwreck narratives examined, the poet or novelist links the castaways' arrival on a new shore with the possibility of a new sort of life. James V. Morrison also considers the historical context as well as the triggers (such as the 1609 Bermuda shipwreck) that inspired some of these works, and modern responses such as novels (Golding's Lord of the Flies, Coetzee's Foe , and Gordon's First on Mars , a science fiction version of the Crusoe story), movies, television ( Forbidden Planet, Cast Away, and Lost ), and the poetry and plays of Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Aime Cesaire.

Rethinking Colonialism: Korean Primary School Music Education during the Japanese Colonial Rule of Korea, 1910–1945

Colonialism is the control or governing influence of nation over dependent country, territory, or people. Fundamentally, colonialism involves the economic exploitation of occupied territories in one form or another. The introduction of Western is often used as an argument for perceived positive aspects of colonialism. In many societies, formal schooling is an important institution of transmitting knowledge and culture from generation to generation, and for developing human traits that contribute to economic output, social stability and the production of new knowledge. (1) Educators also claim that schooling plays crucial role in the understanding of societal phenomena and the process of learning itself. In underdeveloped countries in particular, better schooling for the parents and pupils is seen as key to successful career, higher incomes, and better status. Colonial creates social mobility for the poor, shifting them from life in poverty to prosperity. Colonial governments, however, usually exerted little effort in opening schools, because their main aim was to extend foreign domination, enable economic exploitation, and provide settlement for their own population. (2) Although schooling was portrayed as key for achieving economic growth and improvement, in reality, schooling in colonies was established to develop and continue the influence of the imperial countries and to help them control the colonized. (3) Colonial systems were often of inferior quality and were restricted to limited part of the colonized population. According to Aime Cesaire, colonial was a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of few thousand subordinate functionaries, 'boys,' artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business. (4) One of the aims of colonial was the assimilation of the occupier's culture by the colonized. Gauri Viswanathan claims that cultural assimilation is the most effective form of political action. (5) However, this cultural assimilation usually happens by force: forceful mental control implemented through schooling. Therefore, Philip Altbach and Gail Kelly find that education in colonies seems directed at absorption into the metropole and not separate and dependent development of the colonized in their own society and culture. (6) This cultural assimilation frequently intends to brainwash colonized people through education. However, depending on the colonizers, this system of assimilation varies. For instance, the French in North Africa wanted to fulfil its colonial goals. (7) British Malaya, however, had colonial system that freely used different languages--Malay, Chinese, English, and Tamil--and was independent of the aims and curricula of the colonial government. (8) Music is common tool to promote people's emotion. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an increased form of nationalism swept the world, and nationalists used music to establish national identity but without regard for children's culture. (9) Music plays crucial role because music itself has an enduring power and a tremendous power to move people in any direction, towards peaceful and noble goals, or violent and destructive ones. (10) Hebert outlines what happens when music is used for political purposes: When music is used for patriotic or nationalistic purposes, on one hand, the role and larger meaning of music is reduced to attainment of mere utilitarian goals, neglecting aesthetic values. On the other hand, such an approach often strengthens music education's role in schools and society since it becomes more widely recognized as highly effective activity for ideological indoctrination. (11) Korea was not the only nation to become Japanese protectorate in the early twentieth century. The Japanese colonial government implemented almost identical policies and strategies in Taiwan (1898-1945) as well. …

Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aime Cesaire, and narratives of loyal opposition

Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aime Cesaire, and narratives of loyal opposition

Caribbean critique: Antillean critical theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aime Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of 'Caribbean Critique.'

Aim� C�saire and the cyclops of Theocritus Idyll 11

In her recently published book, Black Odysseys, Justine McConnell writes illuminatingly about the Homeric Odyssey as an intertext in Aime Cesaire's 'landmark poem for anticolonialism', Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal. In particular, McConnell discusses 'a pivotal episode of the poem' in which the narrator encounters an ugly poverty-stricken black man on a tram and is complicit with others in laughing at him. Given that the narrator of Cahier is cast as a kind of Odysseus returning (if only in imagination) to the land of his birth, McConnell rightly takes the black man he encounters to be a Cyclops figure, whom the narrator regards as a loathsome 'Other', just as Odysseus regarded the monstrous Polyphemus in Odyssey 9.

Cassava Westerns: Ways of Watching Abderrahmane Sissako

This essay takes Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako’s statements about the impression Spaghetti Westerns made on him as a teen as an entry point to consider new insights into Sissako’s films that emerge when they are viewed comparatively through the genre convention of the western. Rather than arguing that Sissako seeks to fulfill or depart from such conventions, the essay shows that Sissako’s experience of the genre is in fact common to a number of West African artists and that his approach to landscape, quest narratives, and seriality resonate with the Spaghetti Western genre. Yet the influence of key francophone thinkers like Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon is equally strong in Sissako’s work. The political engagement that motivated many Italian directors is transmuted in Sissako’s work to address the slow violence of globalization, using familiar generic tropes to anchor viewers confronted with cross-genre, self-reflexive, and open-ended films.

Édouard Glissant’s Excursions and Detours

Long relegated to the margins, reputed to be hermetic or tending toward unreadable, the work of Edouard Glissant is today letting its voice be heard.1 However, in spite of the remarkable growth of Glissant's audience-spurred by the emergence of Caribbean literatures, the popularity of Francophone topics, the worldwide rise of discourses such as cultural studies and postcolonial studies, and, it must be said, the persistent questioning of identity-his work remains to be read. To be read not as a form of translation mimicking or paraphrasing the poet's ideas that, in the guise of introduction or homage, would seek to fix the tremors of his thought but instead to be read at a distance, with a careful attention to the opacities and detours of an intentionally different way of speaking, or-to cite an expression of Glissant's with regard to William Faulkner-attending to that which the text says without saying everything by speaking.2 This type of reading would be a hermeneutic project that would not only respond to the call for dialogue with the Other that the work carries within itself but would also expand the text's horizon to allow for a perpetual deciphering of meanings.Poet of RuptureTo survey that nouvelle region du monde (new region of the world)3 imagined by Glissant toward the end of his life (after having explored it through his poetry), it is necessary to recall the founding impulse that a European poetry fascinated with irrational phenomena and the magic of faraway civilizations offered to an entire generation of Caribbean writers. In the same way, in the native arts of Africa and Oceania as well as in their spaces and lush tropical landscapes, Surrealism found a fertile analogy for the complexities of dreams and the real. Initially from a distance, they opened a dialogue with the poets of the Americas, one that was attractive despite Surrealism's tendency to situate the new literature in the wake of the Other.Quickly perceiving that such an influence was once again delaying the emergence of Caribbean expression, it was in echo-but also in reaction4-to Surrealism, a movement then incarnated in the Caribbean through the journals Legitime defense and Tropiques, that Glissant cofounded the political-cultural group Franc Jeu (Fair Play) in Le Lamentin, Martinique. In the name of that collective, made up of his closest classmates from the lycee, Glissant delivered his first speech,5 one whose aperture to the Caribbean6 already harbored his passion du monde (world passion). Aspiring to prolong and exceed the battles carried out by their elders, these young Martinicans, close to Aime Cesaire, were determined to open a new breach. From 1940 to 1945, I was party to that youthful militancy, to those bubbling ideas; saturated with politics, with poetry, with literature,7 Glissant would recall in 1958. Perhaps inspired by the rebellion of Rene Daumal and Roger GilbertLecomte's literary journal Grand Jeu and doubdess in response to Felix Eboue's speech in which the first black governor of a French colonial state called on the youths of the French overseas departments to Jouer le jeu (Play the game),8 the eponymous journal published Glissant's first poem in 1946. Written by the young poet around age eighteen in a context in which Caribbean poetry took the form of armes miraculeuses (miraculous weapons),9 this poem announces a project to which Glissant would continue to be loyal throughout the course of his work:Je ne laisserai rien derriere moiPas un soleil de lever d'arbrePas une etoile entre deux persiennesPas une femme engourdie d'air cuitJe ne laisserai pas un rire pas un joujouPas un souvenir.......Il faut tout happerGriller....Il ne faut rien laisserPas un bijou un oeillet portrait rougeUne sauvagePas un regretJ'en ferai un paquet d'astresEnguirlande d'explosions que je jetteraiRapide et le plomb aux voeuxA la mer immobile des inattendus10I will leave nothing behind meNot a sun to rise from the treeNot a star between two shuttersNot a woman numbed by the baking airI will leave no laughter, not a toyNot a memory. …

Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude

Research Article| December 01 2014 Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude Shane Graham Shane Graham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (4): 481–512. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Graham; Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2014; 60 (4): 481–512. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Edward Wilmot Blyden and the racial nationalist imagination

Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination is a critical study of one of the most prolific and knowledgeable black-world intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on his writings, it shows the contradictions, ambiguities, complexities, and paradoxes in Blyden's powerful black racial nationalism. Blyden was a modernist who called upon African Americans to uplift Africa; yet he was a defender of Africa's culture and customs. He was the most sophisticated critic of Eurocentrism; yet he was an avid Anglophile. He was a Protestant who admired Islam's civilizing role in Africa. Blyden was the first black intellectual to advocate for the symbiosis of Africa's triple heritage: indigenous, Islamic, and Western. His voluminous writings laid the groundwork for some of the most important ideas of African and black diasporic thinkers of the twentieth century, including Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Chiekh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney. Though Blyden is often overlooked in the history of modern black thought, in this book, Teshale Tibebu brings him out of oblivion and engages the reader in an extended, systematic evaluation of his written works. Teshale Tibebu is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896-1974, Hegel and Anti-Semitism, and Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History.

Afrique en dialogue, Afrique en auto-questionnement: universalisme ou provincialisme? "Compromis d'Atlanta" ou initiative historique?

L'article analyse la relation entre l'Europe et l'Afrique, en discutant comment la condition (post) coloniale maintient une tension entre deux différentes interprétations de cette relation. Dans un premier temps il indique comment des affirmations contemporaines dans lesquelles l'Afrique n'a pas d'histoire, a des racines profondes dans l'interprétation de savants européens que se posent des questions à propos du degré d'humanité du Noir (Kant, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Condorcet), au sujet des Africains et de l'Afrique. Dans ça démarche le texte fait une analyse critique des théories d'existence de l'âme noire. L'analyse nous amène à la discussion de comment la "question nationale" comme remplaçante de la "question sociale" a contribué à l'organisation d'une culture du servilisme qui maintient le colonisateur éloigné des conditions objectives de la citoyenneté moderne. La conclusion de l'article est que "une ancienne question n'as pas été réglée, celle de l'unité négative ou de la polarisation du monde. Les philosophes de la libération concevaient nettement la suppression de cette contradiction comme le Centre capitaliste. Cette approche implique-t-elle le retourne de l'initiative historique à la Périphérie, selon la perspective d'Aime Césaire, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcien Towa, Samir Amin. L'idée de scission, de séparation du corps de l'Empire, visait un objectif transcendant qui est l'intégration des individus et des nations de l'Afrique et du Sud dans un grand projet universel commun, dans l'indépendance, dans l'égalité et dans la réciprocité".

The Holocaust: a colonial genocide?A scholars' forum

In his book published in 1955 titled Discourse on Colonialism, one of the first and defining works of postcolonial literature, the black intellectual Aime Cesaire addressed, among other issues, the...

AESTHETICS, MULTICULTURALISM, AND DECOLONIALITY

I would like to start out with Aime Cesaire’s idea that no one group “holds a monopoly on beauty, intelligence, and strength”. While Western-European philosophy may have appropriated for itself the category of the aesthetic, sensory pleasure and appreciation of creativity are not exclusive to this paradigm. With this in mind, this paper will look at two approaches for theorizing aesthetics beyond a Western-European framework. Through Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s work on polycentric aesthetics, I will look at a multicultural model for thinking about aesthetics in a non-Eurocentric framework. And through Walter Mignolo’s decolonial aesthesis , I will consider a modernity / coloniality model for thinking about aesthetics in the framework of decoloniality. After presenting some of the main ideas from these models, I will set them into a dialogue with each other, finding the points of convergence and divergence between them. Finally, I will sketch out some potential avenues for a rehabilitation of the category of aesthetics in the field of visual studies.

Black and White and Re(a)d All Over: <em>L'Étudiant noir</em>, Communism, and the Birth of Négritude

The origins of Aime Cesaire’s famous neologism Negritude have long been shrouded in mystery; with many scholars speculating as to whether or not he coined the term before it appeared in his poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939. This article examines a previously lost early example of Cesaire’s writings that predates the Cahier, a 1935 issue of his student magazine L’Etudiant noir, in which the word Negritude appears. Through an examination of Cesaire’s allusions to the works of Marx and the Marxist thinker Paul Nizan, I argue that, contrary to accepted wisdom, Marxist thought was essential to Cesaire’s original conception of Negritude. This new discovery suggests that a reevaluation of the relationship of Negritude to both Marxist politics and to newer literary movements, such as Creolite, is in order.

Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire's and CLR James's Representations of the Haitian Revolution

The article examines the way in which Aime Cesaire's book-length poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (?Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), the founding text of the negritude movement, and C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins recuperate the Haitian Revolution, and in particular the character of Toussaint Louverture, in order to interrogate the absence of the consideration of the Haitian Revolution in human rights discourse and historiography. Particular attention is paid to the way in which Cesaire and James use the Haitian Revolution to foreground black agency and a discourse of universalism in their representations. For Cesaire, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution signified blackness as a sign of the colonised condition and its overcoming - Haiti was where “negritude stood up for the first time“. For James, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution provide an example where assumptions of black passivity and powerlessness were rejected.

Confronting the Communal: Maryse Condé's Challenge to New World Orders in Moi, Tituba

In her 1986 novel Moi, Tituba sorciere ... Noire de Salem, Guadeloupean writer and theorist Maryse Conde rewrites and recontextualizes the events of the 1692 Salem witch trials by focusing her attention on one of the incident's most central, yet most marginalized, players--the West Indian slave-woman Tituba. Inspired and permitted by Tituba's disappearance from the official historical record to freely imagine her post-Salem story, (1) Conde traces a detailed journey for her heroine-from the Caribbean islands to New England and back. In so doing, she not only paints a provocative portrait of 17th-century Puritan culture, but also interrogates multiple contemporary New communities. By her behavior and by her very being, Conde's Tituba introduces a powerful force of disorder into the literal and the discursive communities through which she circulates. In her unremitting quest for love and tendency to erotic self-objectification she steps back and forth over the line of a disordering narcissism, (2) challenging at every pass those communal expectations regarding feminine identity that conflict with or seek to repress her conception of herself as an individual. The textual resistance enacted by Tituba is paralleled by Conde's own resistance (expressed through Tituba, the novel) to those extra-textual communities with which she, as a post/colonial woman author from the French-speaking Caribbean, is meant to be aligned. Thus while the novel indisputably fulfills the desire [of U.S. feminists, multiculturalists, and francophone studies scholars] for a first-person narrative by a strong Third woman, (3) Tituba in fact expresses a narcissistic defiance of the very concept of community on which such perspectives are premised. Not only, then, does Conde push against facile and ultimately constraining recuperations of her heroine by progressive post/colonial (and) First World discourses, but she further, and perhaps even more significantly, issues a challenge to those scholars who presume to get the joke the novel plays on its sympathetic but naively politicized admirer-critics. As several theorists of Caribbean literature have noted, community is a significant concern for writer-intellectuals of the region in their struggle to determine viable socio-political identities in the face of centuries-old practices of dispossession, ahistoricization, and disenfranchisement--both by racist foreign imperial structures and by rapacious neo-colonial orders. Caribbean artists have long been compelled to articulate parameters for defensive solidarity, positing community as an objective to be achieved--to be actively constructed both in language and in law. This communal imperative is particularly evident in the French-speaking Caribbean, where multiple liberationist discourses have emerged over the past several decades. From the Indigenist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s in Haiti, to Aime Cesaire's negritude, prominent in the 1940s and beyond, to Edouard Glissant's antillanite and poetics of relation, articulated in the 1970s and 1990s, respectively, to the creolite movement outlined by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant in the late 1980s, the francophone Caribbean has produced a surfeit of models for collective identity. Jean Price Mars's call to combat Haiti's exploitation and alienation via the assertion of an Afro-nationalist collective ethics, aesthetics, and politics; Cesaire's faith in the possibility of a strong Afro-Caribbean identity tied to that of a global black community; Glissant's insistence that obstacles to political and cultural independence in the Antilles be countered by asserting le vecu commun, that is, I'affirmation collective appuyee sur l'acte des peoples; (4) and the Creolists' aggressive declaration of a heterogeneous but fundamentally cohesive Caribbean essence--these are the foundational, community-based ideologies that have framed regional literary production over the last several decades. …

Ukrainian Anticolonialist Thought in Comparative Perspective. A Preliminary Overview

Not unlike all peoples who experienced modernization through domination, Ukrainians in the Russian Empire have developed a tradition of anticolonialist thought. This article draws attention to the Ukrainian Marxist anticolonialist critique of Russian tsarist and Bolshevik rule as a body of thought that should be included in contemporary discussions of colonialism and its legacies. Stephen Velychenko contends that Ukrainian Marxist anticolonialist thinkers who combined Marxism with nationalism to justify national liberation can be placed alongside Amilcar Cabral, Tan Malaka, Frantz Fanon, and Aime Cesaire. These Ukrainians, like their Asian/African counterparts, lived in societies with a small native working class and argued that their people were experiencing industrialization, urbanization, and modernization under conditions of dependency. They created a body of anticolonialist Marxist literature that condemned not only tsarism, but Russocentric Russian Marxism as well. The article offers an analysis of this Ukrainian "national revolutionary" body of literature that was Marxist but anti-Bolshevik, and nationalist and anticolonial at the same time. Подобно прочим народам, модернизация которых осуществлялась в условиях имперского доминирования, украинцы в Российской империи создали традицию антиколониальной мысли. В статье рассматривается украинская марксистская критика российского царизма и большевистской власти как целостное направление, которое должно быть включено в современные дискуссии о колониализме и его наследии. Стэфен Велыченко считает, что украинские антиколониальные мыслителимарксисты, которые сочетали марксизм с национализмом в риторике национального освобождения, могут рассматриваться в одном ряду с Амилкаром Кабралом ( Amilcar Cabral ), Таном Малака ( Tan Malaka ), Францем Фаноном ( Fritz Fanon ) и Аимо Чезаре ( Aime Cesaire ). Подобно своим африканским и азиатским единомышленникам, эти украинцы жили в обществе, где немногочисленный "национальный" рабочий класс испытывал индустриализацию, урбанизацию и модернизацию в условиях зависимости от колониальной власти. Украинские антиколониальные теоретики создали комплекс текстов, в которых осуждался как царизм, так и русскоцентричный российский марксизм. В статье предлагается анализ этой украинской "национал-революционной" литературы – одновременно марксистской и антибольшевистской, и на­циональной.

Aimé Césaire y Tropiques: comienzos literarios en el Caribe francés

This paper deals with Aime Cesaire’s beginnings in the context of foundation of a literary system in the French Antilles, by especially focusing on his program of a Martinican literature as delineated in his review Tropiques (1941-1945). According to our reading, Cesaire’s intellectual career and the project actually carried out by the review are an example of the concrete possibilities of development of a Martinican literature as well as of the difficulties this faces (even today), resulting from asymmetrical exchanges determined by the logic of colonial circuits. In such context, the action and support offered by metropolitan institutions and intellectuals have been crucial. It was mainly due to the contacts established with the French surrealists that Tropiques started its intercommunication with Antillean and Latin American movements and writers. It was also thanks to key figures such as Sartre and Breton that Cesaire achieved prestige and acknowledgement as a poet and intellectual.

A Transatlantic Circuit: Baldwin at Mid-Century Opening Keynote Address

A Transatlantic Circuit: Baldwin at Mid-Century Opening Keynote Address Hortense Spillers (bio) On Wednesday, September 19, 1956, the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists opened at the Sorbonne and convened in the University’s Amphitheatre Descartes until the following Saturday. Among the confreres were James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and though African American, they could justifiably be identified as twixt and between and not really members of the official American delegation. Both living in Paris at the time, they were, like Senghor, Cesaire, and Alioun Diop, one of the founding editors of Presence Africaine, the denizens of an untranslatable African diasporic space. The United States delegation was chaired by John Davis and included Mercer Cook, James Ivy, and Horace Mann Bond, then president of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. From the Antilles had come Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Jacques Alexis, Jean Price-Mars, George Lamming, and Albert Mangones, as well as a sterling cast of continental artists and critics, from Leopold Sedar Senghor and Cheik Anta Diop to Paul Hazoume, Davidson Nicol, and Jacques Rabemananjara. Baldwin reports on this event for Encounter, and we know it today as “Princes and Powers” from The Price of the Ticket. The first World Congress is something of a misnomer, on the one hand, because it takes its cues from the series of Pan-African gatherings that light up the landscape of the black world in 1900, 1918, pursuant to the formal closure of WWI, 1923, 1927, and 1945, each one vested with its own complex menu of urgent desiderata. On the other hand, the first World Congress strikes an innovative chord, at least to the imaginative ear of some of its participants, because it adopts black culture as its principal focus. We must also bear in mind that the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists also takes place in the dramatic context of the 1955 Conference of non-aligned African and Asian nations, convoked only months before the Paris meetings, in the Indonesian city of Bandung. These dates, then, bearing down on the imagination as they careen our way out of the traumatized world of global warfare and its crucial aftermath of massive ruin and devastation, present us with a virtually unprecedented occasion to examine the challenges and demands of translation as it traverses the frontiers of cultures and nation-states. And in that great crossing over, getting the signifying chain right, or hearing correctly the particular and peculiar meanings of speech on the varied human tongue, is only the opening gambit. One wonders, this considerable distance of fifty-five years, how Baldwin and Wright and the other American confreres heard the discourse rattling around them in French and English and even some Yoruba and Wolof poetry, translated into French. What Baldwin renders in English in his report on this event is translated from French, and as occasional participants ourselves in mixed-language exchanges, we are quite familiar with the sudden [End Page 929] jolt and jerk out of one’s own comfort zone to which we are subjected in the switch to another linguistic and cultural code. Who and what mediates here, as simultaneous translation seems somehow intrusive in itself, both for you, who benefit from the translation, or you, who need no translation? And at any given time, we might be one or the other. But it is, perhaps, the most poignant of ironies that this World Congress, made up of black people from Europe, the New World, and Africa, despite sharing a single overwhelming historical fact, needed translation then and now. In the opening address to the Congress, Alioun Diop observes that this meeting, for non-Europeans, is only second in importance to Bandung and that the ten years separating the peace and the Paris meetings had been decisive for the destiny of those communities and notably, black communities. Though history had treated the latter in a “cavalier fashion,” Diop asserted that he would go so far as to say that history had even “dishonored” such communities, “were it not for the fact that this History, with a capital H, was the unilateral interpretation of the life of the world by the West alone” (Presence Africaine). The...