Cold War Negritude

Cold War Negritude PDF Author: CHRISTOPHER T. BONNER
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781837644711
Category : Caribbean literature (French)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers--René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis--whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three "worlds" of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

Cold War Negritude

Cold War Negritude PDF Author: CHRISTOPHER T. BONNER
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781837644711
Category : Caribbean literature (French)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers--René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis--whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three "worlds" of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

Cold War Negritude

Cold War Negritude PDF Author: Christopher T. Bonner
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837644985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

NEGRITUDE AND ITS REVOLUTION

NEGRITUDE AND ITS REVOLUTION PDF Author: CHRISTIAN FILOSTRAT
Publisher: Pierre Kroft Legacy Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
How and why négritude came to be defined by Aimé Césaire the way it did, including the author’s personal notes from interactions with Léon G. Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Leopold S. Senghor (Author’s note: I was carrying Léon G. Damas’s ashes to (French Guyana) Guyane (Damas had been one of the my advisors re Négritude doctoral dissertation.) and was making a stop in Fort de France for Cesaire’s eulogy. Césaire was at the airport to meet me, and while waiting for my bags, we exchanged our experiences with the cremation procedures of dear friends. In my case, it was that Marietta Damas had had it with people moving her husband and had given me specific directions. One of them was that Damas should not be moved anymore and should be cremated in the massive oak casket that Houphouet Boigny had bought for her. In Southeast Washington, DC, the cremation technician, to show me he was following instructions to the letter, opened the door of the oven, then lifted the lid of the casket for me to see that he had moved nothing; even the roses that Marietta had placed on the body were still there. The procedure of cremation had already started, and I could see blue flames as though from welding torches shooting everywhere, attacking the body. After a moment of reflection, Césaire, in turn, told me of his experience with Richard Wright and hearing his friend’s bones explode during the procedure. To a reflection regarding what négritude had become at the time of Damas’s death, Césaire gave me a long soliloquy, starting with Paris’s effervescence around the Paris Colonial Exposition back in the 30s and concluding with Sartre’s Black Orpheus. Black Orpheus broke the mold, turning négritude into an aesthetic of literature stripped of socio-political value. The crux of which was that négritude had become another academic subject of post - colonial studies. That was not what Senghor intended. After Black Orpheus, no one could write about négritude without mentioning ontology, epistemology, esthetics, Hegel, integrism, and so on. “You heard what I said in Dakar in 66, I don’t like the word négritude. It’s disruptive.” Then too, it bothered him that négritude had gotten disconnected from people’s reality. He then compared that disconnect with what he had witnessed in Haiti in 1944. The disconnect between the people and the intelligentsia. (Césaire’s interest in Haiti was immense. It was like a duty to visit him whenever I had been to Haiti.) (Author’s note: In 1980 I was the Cultural Attaché at the US Embassy in Dakar. Randall Robinson of Trans-Africa was visiting, and I arranged an interview with him for the Dakar daily, Le Soleil. Among the subjects discussed was the Western Sahara issue. Robinson explained his support for the Saharawis and the Polisario Front. The interview never ran. Instead, President Senghor asked me to his office. When he said, “I have a great weakness for France,” he meant it. It made no difference if I saw him every day. I could never meet him without being taken aback by how much Francité he exuded. But not this time. This time it was a furious Senghor I was meeting. He could not let views inimical to Morocco’s interests in the Senegalese media. He then gave me a long lecture about Arab racism, Morocco excepted. It didn’t help that the slave state of Mauritania, right across the Senegal River, insisted on an Arab designation. He grew bitter. I was astounded, for no one was more guarded than Senghor. But here he let it rip, perhaps because he was a few months from announcing his retirement. ) Thanks for taking the time to read this. If you liked this book, it would mean a lot if you could take a moment to leave an honest review on your favorite online store. Thanks so much! Pierre Kroft Legacy Publishers

The Aesthetic Cold War

The Aesthetic Cold War PDF Author: Peter J. Kalliney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069123065X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney's extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

Satchmo Blows Up the World

Satchmo Blows Up the World PDF Author: Penny VON ESCHEN
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through political statements and romantic liaisons, these musicians broke through the government's official narrative and gave their audiences an unprecedented vision of the black American experience. In the process, new collaborations developed between Americans and the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East--collaborations that fostered greater racial pride and solidarity. Though intended as a color-blind promotion of democracy, this unique Cold War strategy unintentionally demonstrated the essential role of African Americans in U.S. national culture. Through the tales of these tours, Von Eschen captures the fascinating interplay between the efforts of the State Department and the progressive agendas of the artists themselves, as all struggled to redefine a more inclusive and integrated American nation on the world stage.

The Negritude Movement

The Negritude Movement PDF Author: Reiland Rabaka
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498511368
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an “insurgent idea” (to invoke this book’s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a “traveling theory” (à la Edward Said’s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois’s discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

The Sorcery of Color

The Sorcery of Color PDF Author: Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592133525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
An examination of how racial and gender hierarchies are intertwined in Brazil.

La Négritude

La Négritude PDF Author: Dr Wacyf H Ghali
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1663264260
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
La Négritude: An African Social Humanism seeks to tackle accounts of African society—particularly sub-Saharan Africa—from its roots through modern times. La Négritude—meaning Blackness in French—was coined as a term in the 1930s, initially as a strategy for political resistance against French colonialism. As the resistance matured, its namesake developed to refer to being proud to be Black, proud of being a Negro—the true and correct word for defining an African Black man’s ethnicity. Instead of being disrespectful, the word became meaningful and beautiful in terms of what it portrayed. Because of the effects of slavery and colonialism, the traditional Negro-African society transformed into a modern society so different from the old one that many expressed a loss of identity culturally, politically, and economically. This study attempts to redefine and reidentify sub-Saharan Negro-African society using the traditional values that existed before or during the era of colonialism. Its goal is to instill a sense of security and unity among the people—with the understanding that adding changes from outside Negro-Africa could allow positive growth and development without fear of destroying the African character and personality.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966 PDF Author: David Murphy
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1781383510
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide an overview of the First World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar in 1966, and of its multiple legacies.

A Soviet Journey

A Soviet Journey PDF Author: Alex La Guma
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498536034
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.