Aimé Césaire

By Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aim C saire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with L on-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and L opold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakening of African heritage, a rejection of Western ideology that inherently saw blacks as inferior to whites, and a reclamation of what it meant to be black. C saire's first major and most famous poetic work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Throughout his long political career, which lasted for most of his life, C saire fought not only for his own people but for those who had been wronged by vestiges of colonial regimes. This book is an exploration of C saire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9766408297
• ISBN13: 9789766408299
• Release Date: June 2021
• Publisher: University of the West Indies Press
• Length: 92 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.7" x 8.3"