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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Aimé Césaire’s work is foundational for decolonial and postcolonial thought. His Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1955, influenced generations of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean and it remains a classic of anticolonial thought.
This unique volume takes the form of a series of interviews with Césaire that were conducted by Françoise Vergès in 2004, shortly before his death. Césaire’s responses to Vergès’ questions cover a wide range of topics, including 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. The book includes a substantial postface by Vergès in which she situates Césaire’s work in its intellectual and political context.
This timely book brings Césaire back into the present-day conversation on race, slavery and the legacy of colonialism. His penetrating insights on these matters should appeal to scholars and students throughout the humanities and social sciences as well as to the general public.
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Contents
Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Note on the Translation
Notes
Preface by Françoise Vergès
Notes
Conversations
Notes
Postface by Françoise Vergès
Césaire and Slavery
Césaire and Colonialism
Césaire’s Relevance Today
Notes
Works by Aimé Césaire in English
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
Conversations
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Series title
Critical South
The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Resolutely Black
Conversations with Françoise Vergès
Aimé Césaire
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
polity
Copyright page
First published in French as Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès, © Albin Michel, 2005
This English edition © Polity Press, 2020
Excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe reproduced by kind permission of Northwestern University Press and Présence Africaine Éditions. Translation copyright © 2015 by Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney. Translation published 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Originally published in French under the title La tragédie du roi Christophe. Copyright © 1963 by Présence Africaine Éditions. All rights reserved.
Polity Press
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Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3714-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3715-0 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Césaire, Aimé, interviewer. | Vergès, Françoise, 1952- interviewee. | Smith, Matthew B., translator.
Title: Resolutely black : conversations with Françoise Vergès / Aimé Césaire ; translated by Matthew B. Smith.
Other titles: Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: Critical South | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Aimé Césaire’s work is foundational for colonial and postcolonial thought. In this unique volume, his responses to Françoise Vergès’ 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”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019029720 (print) | LCCN 2019029721 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537143 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537150 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509537167 (epub) | ISBN 9781509539307 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Césaire, Aimé--Interviews. | Authors, Martinican--20th century--Interviews. | Negritude (Literary movement) | Postcolonialism.
Classification: LCC PQ3949.C44 Z4613 2020 (print) | LCC PQ3949.C44 (ebook) | DDC 841/.914--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029720
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029721
Typeset in 11.5 on 15 pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Note on the Translation
Translating race is no easy matter. This is because, at once a social construct and a lived reality, race is experienced differently in different contexts. To be black means something different in France, and in Francophone countries, than it does in the United States and the Anglophone world. This point – as intuitive and commonsensical as it may seem – is far too often lost in translation.
Efforts to overcome these differences linguistically risk oversimplifying the diversity of black experience. Take the English term “black” itself, for instance, which was widely used in France in the 1990s and early 2000s in place of the French term noir. Proponents of the English term saw in its use a sense of belonging to a larger, international black community, one that evoked the civil rights movement in the United States, which knows no equivalent in France. But critics saw it as an unnecessary euphemism – why use an English expression when a French one already exists? – and a refusal to acknowledge race openly. Noir has since reemerged as the term most frequently used to speak of black experience in France.
But what does it mean to be black in France, or even in French, for that matter? France, casting itself as a color-blind society, officially rejects race as a category and even prohibits the collection of census data according to race. The lack of statistics relating to race, however, does little to hide the brute reality of racism, which proves the extent to which race is very much a category that matters in France. To be black in France, many have argued, is thus “primarily a response to and rejection of anti-black racism.”1 If the English term “black” allowed the French to ignore race, noir, many believe, takes a step in openly acknowledging it. Still, the question of whether “black” adequately translates noir or noir adequately translates “black” remains unsettled.
In these 2004 interviews, Aimé Césaire only occasionally uses the term noir. His term, and one that is forever associated with his name, is nègre (the title of the French version of this book is “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai”). Césaire wasn’t the first to reclaim this term, but he is perhaps responsible for elevating and popularizing its use at a time when both noir and homme de couleur were both available as relative terms of distinction.2 Rather than drawing on these mildly “accepted” terms, Césaire deliberately chose a more confrontational approach with the use of nègre, a word rejected by many at the time as offensive (the term remains pejorative today). Hence the name “Négritude,” a neologism created by Césaire, for the international movement he started with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas, a movement whose goals were twofold: to contest racism and colonialism by cultural means; and to create a collective identity based on a set of shared cultural values and experiences. In Césaire’s hands, the term nègre is thus double-edged. On the one hand, the appropriation of this once pejorative term is used as a rallying cry; on the other, it is meant to serve as a stark reminder of slavery and colonialism.
In this respect, Césaire’s use of this term is not unlike his much-discussed stance on reparations, articulated here in these conversations with Françoise Vergès. Césaire feared reparations could offer France an easy way out of its dark past and troubled present. By paying its due, not only would France be free of guilt, but it would be easier for it to elude accusations of structural racism. Failing to acknowledge the weight of history, acts of racism could be falsely perceived as chance occurrences spontaneously produced by individual actors, rather than part of a deep-rooted historical phenomenon shaping French society on a more fundamental level. Césaire believed France could still be forced to own up to its past and provide aid to countries in need without succumbing to a fantasy of reconciliation. The past, however, would remain – and should remain – irreparable.
Once synonymous with “slave,” the term nègre prevents one from forgetting the irreparable damage caused by slavery and colonialism. Its range of meaning – from offensive slur to a self-affirming designator – knows no exact equivalent in English. Throughout the history of its use, it aligns with a different set of English terms depending on the period in question. Brent Hayes Edwards suggests that during the interwar period, when Césaire adopted the term, though its function was similar to the “n-word” in English, it was more closely aligned with “black,” which was also a derogatory term in the 1920s, whereas “Negro,” written with a capital N in the manner of W. E. B. Du Bois, corresponded at that time more to the French term Noir. Of course, these are all rough and fleeting correspondences that would continue to shift over the ensuing decades. For a while, nègre was most frequently translated as “negro”; now it isn’t uncommon to translate it as “black”. It goes without saying that neither of these can account for the historical shifts in its meaning.
Thus, any attempt to translate Césaire’s use of nègre in 2004 would remain approximate, if not misleading. For this reason, I have decided against seeking a single linguistic match for it. At times, I have left it untranslated when I believe it speaks for itself. At others, I offered what I felt was an appropriate translation for a given context while providing the original in square brackets. My hope is that this will allow the reader to gain a sense of the nuance and range of the term as used by Césaire while serving as a reminder of the plurality of black experience and of the history of slavery and colonialism.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that race and gender are often ignored when discussing a translator’s approach. This is unfortunate. As a translator who is both white and male, I am aware that my position affords me certain privileges just as it imposes certain limitations on the strategies I can choose from. Césaire’s writing has been deftly handled by a wide range of translators, many of whom are black or people of color, and their strategies are by necessity different from mine. I admire these translations and don’t see my approach in opposition to theirs. Nor do I think recognizing the race and gender of a translator should be seen as an apology or justification for the linguistic or stylistic choices made. Still, I believe it is important to acknowledge limits and to see them for what they are: an opportunity to recognize difference, to make a certain level of distance felt, rather than as an excuse to speak on the behalf of others. After all, as Césaire reminds us, the specificity of different cultures is often best seen in the gaps that hold them apart.
Matthew B. Smith
Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1
See
Black France/France Noire
. Edited by Tricia Keaton, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Stovall (Duke University Press, 2012), p. 3.
