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Author: Césaire, Aimé Nationality: Martiniquais Sex: m Birth/Death 1913-2008 Biography: Celebrated poet, politician, and progenitor of the Negritude movement, Aimé Césaire is remembered as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. As a student at the Lycée Louis le Grand, Cesaire and Leopold Senghor founded L’Etudiant Noir, a one-shot journal at the origins of the Négritude movement that brought together Caribbean and African students around questions of racial consciousness. In 1941, in response to the aggression of the Vichy regime and prevailing assimilationist attitudes among the Martinican people, Césaire, Suzanne Roussi Césaire, and René Ménil co-founded Tropiques, an international journal of decolonial art and criticism created to disalienate the Martinican people and cultivate a global anticolonial consciousness. In the 1960s, Cesaire joined Alioune Diop as one of the leading figures of Presence Africaine, a quarterly anticolonial literary magazine and publishing house. Over the course of his life, Césaire worked as a poet, a playwright, and an essayist. He is best known for his seminal work, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, a poem considered to be at the origin of the Négritude movement. Cesaire is also remembered for his collections of poetry, including Soleil Cou Coupé, Corps Perdu, his collection of essays including Discours sur le Colonialisme, and his plays, Une Tempête, Une Saison au Congo, Et les Chiens se Taisent and La Tragédie du Roi Christophe. Cesaire shared a close friendship with Andre Breton and remained in proximity to surrealism throughout his artistic career, collaborating on the surrealist review VVV, and contributing a poem to Breton’s 1947 international surrealist exhibition. In 1945, Cesaire was elected mayor of Fort de France and deputy to the National Assembly, where he led the charge for departmentalization, a measure which passed in 1946. Breaking with the communist party, Cesaire founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1957. BibReferences: “Aimé Fernand Césaire.” The Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/aimae-fernand-caesaire. Accessed 4 Apr. 2026. |
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| Journal | Volume | Issue | Type of Committee | Title on Committee | ||
| Présence Africaine | (none) | 1 | Comité de Patronage | other | ||