Bøger af Aime Cesaire

Originally published in 1939, Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Negritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Cesaire's surrealist masterpiece.

French-English bilingual edition. Andre Breton called Cesaire's Cahier 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. It is a seminal text in Surrealist, French and Black literatures - published in full in English for the first time in Bloodaxe's bilingual Contemporary French Poets series. Aime Cesaire (1913-2008) was born in in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas departement of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Negritude appeared for the first time. Negritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Leon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aime Cesaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France. As a poet, Cesaire believed in the revolutionary power of language, and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms, and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refuses assimilation to a dominant cultural norm, a language that teaches resistance and liberation.

Césaire's essay stands as an important document in the development ofthird world consciousness--a process in which [he] played a prominentrole. --Library Journal This classic work, firstpublished in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation ofscholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles inAfrica, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialisminspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, andanti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism andcolonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing thecontradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of progressand civilization upon encountering the savage, uncultured, orprimitive. Here, Césaire reaffirms African values, identity, andculture, and their relevance, reminding us that the relationshipbetween consciousness and reality are extremely complex. . . . It isequally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the sametime that we decolonize society. An interview with Césaire by the poetRené Depestre is also included.

The first bilingual edition of this radically original workAimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric--material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself.'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent

"Aimae Caesaire's work is foundational for colonial and postcolonial thought. In this unique volume, his responses to Frandcoise Vergaes' questions range over the origins of his political activism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the question of reparation for slavery and the problems of marrying literature to politics"--

A collection of poems by the Martinician poet Aime Cesaire, who was read as a poet of revolutionary zeal during the Black Power movement of the 1960s. This collection is the first English edition to include "And the Dogs Were Silent" and "i, laminaria". There is a critical introduction.

A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas's new translations of Aime Cesaire's Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po-et's course, encapsulating in one volume Cesaire's entire literary career and creative evolution.

Cesaire's masterpiece that reaches the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

The only bilingual edition of this radically original collection

Contains an introduction, notes, the French original, and a translation of Cesaire's poetry - the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook.

A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a "break into the forbidden," at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity.More praise:"The greatest living poet in the French language."--American Book Review"Martinique poet Aime Cesaire is one of the few pure surrealists alive today. By this I mean that his work has never compromised its wild universe of double meanings, stretched syntax, and unexpected imagery. This long poem was written at the end of World War II and became an anthem for many blacks around the world. Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translations and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." --Bloomsbury Review "Through his universal call for the respect of human dignity, consciousness and responsibility, he will remain a symbol of hope for all oppressed peoples." --Nicolas Sarkozy"Evocative and thoughtful, touching on human aspiration far beyond the scale of its specific concerns with Cesaire's native land - Martinique." --The Times

A Tempest is Aime Cesaire's anti-colonialist retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest.