This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of postcoloniality. Through readings of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, Jeannie Suk illuminates how debates about negritude, antillanite, and creolite contribute to paradoxes at the heart of postcolonial modes.
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This edition, containing an extensive introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Cesaire's poetry--the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook--will remain the definitive Cesaire in English.

Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to "figure alongside the Eliot-Pound-Yeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years." He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.

Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew...

-Cesaire's Tempest, in translation by Richard Miller, is a sprightly and song-filled enchantment. The luminous intelligence of Mr. Cesaire's meditation on the absurdities of colonialism shines through the antics of the bewildered characters.- -New York Times
-The weapon of poetry may be Cesaire's greatest gift to a modern world still searching for freedom. As one of the last truly great 'universalists' of the twentieth century, he has had a hand in shaping or critiquing many of the major ideologies and movements of the modern world. In his own words: 'Poetic knowledge is...

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas s new translations of Aime Cesaire s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a poet s course, encapsulating in one volume Cesaire s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements.
This volume s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically...

The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, revised 1970) is recognized as the Martiniquan writer and activist Aime Cesaire s greatest play. Set in the period of upheaval in Haiti after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, it follows the historical figure of Henri Christophe, a slave who rose to become a general in Toussaint Louverture s army. Christophe declared himself king in 1811 and ruled the northern part of Haiti until 1820. Cesaire employs Shakespearean plotting and revels in the inexhaustible possibilities of language to convey the tragedy of Christophe s transformation...

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.