Une Tempête
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
2. Primary
Texts: Drama
Aimé
Césaire. Une
Tempête.
Key Terms (tags): caribbean, theatre,
francophone, colonialism,
Supporting References:
- Aimé Césaire's Reworking of Shakespeare: Anticolonialist Discourse in "Une Tempête"
Laurence M. Porter
Comparative
Literature Studies , Vol. 32, No. 3 (1995), pp. 360-381
Published by: Penn
State University Press
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247009
- Buchanan, Ian. "Césaire, Aimé." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 21 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of the author and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Césaire, Aimé (1913–2008)
Francophonepoet and activist, Césaire was one of the key thinkers
behind the négritude
movement. Born in Martinique, he went to Paris in 1931 on a
scholarship, where with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas he
founded L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student). He returned to
Martinique to teach in 1939—one of his students was Frantz
*Fanon, who would go on to write a series of
powerful anti-colonial books. He also became close to the
self-appointed pope of SurrealismAndré
*Breton, who spent part of World War II in
Martinique. In 1945, as a member of the Communist Party, Césaire was
elected mayor of Fort-de-France. In the following year he helped
draft the departmentalizing laws France put in place for its various
colonies, for which he was later criticized by pro-independence
thinkers and activists. Similarly, he was heavily criticized by the
Creoleness
writers for the fact that he always wrote in French, and never
Creole, which is the first language for most Martinicans. Following
Stalin's death in 1953, Césaire became disenchanted with communism,
particularly its Stalinist variant, writing a stirring denunciation
of it in a text that has also become a cornerstone of Postcolonial
Studies—Discours sur le colonialisme
(1955), translated as Discourse on Colonialism (2001). After
the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Césaire resigned from the
Communist Party, but he remained active in politics until 2001. He
wrote powerful biographies of black revolutionary leaders Toussaint
Louverture (who led a slave uprising in Haiti in 1791) and Patrice
Lumumba (who became the first Prime Minister of the newly decolonized
Congo 1960), the latter in the form of a play. He also wrote an
adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest, highlighting the role
of Caliban. But he will probably always be best remembered for his
magnificent surrealist poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
(1939), translated as Notebook of a Return to My Native Land
(2001), which functioned as négritude's poetic manifesto. In honour
of his memory, and as a measure of his contribution to his country as
both politician and poet, Martinique named its principal airport
after him.”
- a
- a
- a
Comments