Poetry's Circumstance and Racial Time
Aimé Césaire, 1935-1945
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4437682 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Natalie Melas (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 115 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 469-493 |
| Publication date | 2016-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Atlantic Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-2876 • E-ISSN: 1527-8026 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00382876-3608598 |
| OpenAlex | W2464784174 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
This essay starts from a consideration of the conditions of the emergence of Aimé Césaire's long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in terms of the problem racial enunciation presents for lyric form. The essay proposes the working thesis that Césaire's Notebook is an occasional poem, or a poem of circumstance, but where the occasion in question is of a highly paradoxical sort, namely, decolonization. Taking the poem's long period of open composition and revision (1935-56) as the central problem, the essay goes on to sketch a mode of "circumstantial reading" that would circumvent a reductively historicist understanding of how the poem, its ideas, and its poetics move through time. Underlying the argument is a claim about a particular conjugation of race and time in which contingency converts to necessity and circumstance is not reliably ephemeral
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Circumstantial evidence · Contingency · Historicism · Linguistics · Literature · Mode (computer interface) · Period (music) · Poetics · Poetry · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Computer Science · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
The Practice of Diaspora
The (Revised) Birth of Negritude
The French Imperial Nation-State
Cahier d'UN Retour Au Pays Natal / Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought
Freedom Time
C saire's Notebook as Palimpsest
Black and White and Re(a)d All Over
Untimely Vision
Alternative Modernities
The original 1939 notebook of a return to the native land
| Highly cited | No |
|---|