This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aime Cesaire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with Leon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and Leopold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakening of African heritage, a rejection of Western ideology that inherently saw blacks as inferior to whites, and a reclamation of what it meant to be black. Cesaire's first major and most famous poetic work, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), explored the contours of this African heritage and his complex identity as a black man born under French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Throughout his long political career, which lasted for most of his life, Cesaire fought not only for his own people but for those who had been wronged by vestiges of colonial regimes. This book is an exploration of Cesaire's life in his never-ending decolonizing battle.

About the Author
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is Professor of French Literature and Creative Writing, the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her publications include Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers (co-edited with Nicole Roberts); Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2004 and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks (both co-edited with Martin Munro); the novel Mrs B and the short story collections Four Taxis Facing North and Stick No Bills.


Book Information
ISBN 9789766408305
Author Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
Format Paperback
Page Count 92
Imprint University of the West Indies Press
Publisher University of the West Indies Press