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1 Anchorings and New Departures Tropiques between Local Culture and Radical Poetics At the dawn of the Second World War, Aimé Césaire and René Ménil returned to Martinique after having studied in Paris. They became colleagues at Lycée Schoelcher where Ménil taught philosophy and Aimé Césaire, literature. Together with Césaire’s wife Suzanne and Aristide Maugée, who were their colleagues at the school, they founded Tropiques (1941–1945), a journal for Martinican art, literature , and philosophy. In the fourteen issues published, the journal shows impressive thematic homogeneity despite its vast scope and eclectic texts. Celia Britton accurately describes the journal as a bricolage of art, literature, philosophy, psychology, history, biology, Marxism, and ethnography (Race 7). What seems, however, to hold together the journal ’s different aspects is the persistent focus on culture. Often Tropiques is seen as either a vehicle for the ideology of negritude or a forum for francophone Caribbean surrealism. But when Aimé Césaire spoke of it in an interview with Jacqueline Leiner, he clarified that the aim of the publication was to fill what he called a “cultural void” (un vide culturel) from which the island suffered.1 Significantly , in his presentation in the first issue, Césaire describes the island entirely in negative terms: “No city. No art. No poetry. No civilization , at least in its true sense, meaning that projection of man onto the world; that modeling of the world by man; that stamp of man’s effigy on the universe” (Refusal 88).2 This denunciation is an indirect critique of the Vichy regime that governed Martinique during the war. Tropiques had to cover up any explicit political message, which partly explains the dominant focus on cultural issues. In his quote, Aimé Césaire assesses that Martinican society did not create culture but blindly consumed imported (French) colonial culture. The journal aimed to correct this “cultural void” by not only exploring a new aesthetic that better 22 Anchorings and New Departures accounted for Martinican reality but also by enhancing denigrated local cultural expressions. Despite the fact that Tropiques had a number of predecessors such as Lucioles, Revue de la Martinique, and Revue des Antilles with similar agendas, the journal was a departure: Tropiques ostensibly set out to discover tradition and invent new poetic language and forms. Both of these aspects of culture are highlighted in the journal as forms of collective and individual self-articulation in resistance to the colonial domination. Yet upon closer examination, conceiving culture as tradition and a new poetics is, in fact, contradictory. Although the journal is preoccupied with making Martinicans conscious of themselves via a renewed attention to (Afro-) Caribbean culture , the collaborators’ concept of the self and of culture is, in fact, intimately tied to European romantic and modern philosophy and poetry. Aimé Césaire evokes Mallarmé and Bergson and claims that the self can only be captured through the poetic word (Tropiques xii). Ménil, with his more philosophical and Marxist perspective, reveals a tension between a subjective idealism that dominates the journal’s aesthetic vein and a materialism and historicity that characterize its social and political side (Tropiques xxxiii). In an essay that alludes to a title by Nietzsche, “Birth of Our Art,” Ménil tries to negotiate these opposing tendencies by linking culture first and foremost to the idea of expression. Culture is “man in his social expressions,” a “living set of determined conditions (land, race, economic forms, etc.) which is mitigated by all the contingencies of everyday life and concretely experienced by the human individual ” (Refusal 106). Reconciling space, practice, and forms of cultural expression allows him to conceptualize culture as a socially and historically determined way to deal with the present Martinican reality. Art is in this understanding not equivalent to imitation and compliances with aesthetic rules; it is a form of direct expression of life, of the authentic self. Borrowing from Frobenius, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and choosing the more German concept of culture rather than the French “civilization ,” Tropiques implicitly opposed the underlying universalist assumptions , especially in its colonial context. As Adam Kuper explains, civilization is “represented as a progressive accumulative distinctively human achievement” supposedly accessible to all, but implicitly civilization has reached its highest form in France (Culture 4). Conversely, the journal Tropiques claims that cultural expressions must be linked to the way in which Martinicans live, and only then can “true” Martinican art be born. Thus Ménil’s Nietzschean definition presents a...

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