In Praise of an Unsteady Humanism

In F. Abiola Irele's critical volume on The Négritude Moment: Explorations in Francophone African and Caribbean Literature and Thought (2011), several lines from Aimé Césaire's "Liminal Vampire" (from the 1960 collection Ferrements) appear as an epigraph: "for the memorable vision of a world to build / for the fraternity that cannot fail to come / albeit unsteady." Emblematic of the ideals of global solidarity that characterize both Césaire's and Irele's intellectual projects, Césaire's words sum up the core contributions that 'Biola made to French and Francophone Studies during a career that spanned continents and decades, and left an indelible mark on the evolution of the field.

Irele did more than anyone to make the thinkers of Négritude and decolonization accessible to his Anglophone audience. For that audience, generally less familiar with dialectical complexities, he explained concepts and ideologies that are at the core of the first twentieth-century movement to make discussions of racial identity and politics central to philosophical debates. His signal contributions lie in this elucidation of a great tradition of Francophone thought that was nourished by the histories and poetic sensibilities of three continents—Africa, Europe, and North America.

Trained at the Sorbonne in Paris, Irele has often been described as a giant in the field of African literary scholarship; but Caribbean philosophy and poetry were always central to his thinking. He defended his distinguished doctoral thesis on Négritude in 1966, three years before the Pan African Festival of 1969 in Algiers that showcased the radical brotherly atmosphere of post-independence Algeria. Irele was one of the first to set the tone for an elegant and subtle understanding of African continental and diaspora culture that was and continues to be global, multilingual, and transnational. His work remains to date the most complete and erudite interpretation of the full intellectual and identitarian aspects of Négritude, a movement that would both be appropriated by fervent nationalists, on the one hand, and pointedly critiqued by fellow African intellectuals, such as Wole Soyinka and Stanislas Adotevi, on the other.

Where some embraced it as an inspiring form of Black nationalism, others dismissed the perceived cultural essentialism of the movement and found it lacking in revolutionary edge. Irele, however, never veered from his goal of making us understand the underpinnings of its philosophy of liberation rooted in the memorable vision of fraternity first articulated by the most influential Caribbean thinkers of the day: Césaire of course, but also Frantz Fanon and Léon-Gontran Damas. By virtue of their position in the entre-deux of Europe and Africa, these engagé Caribbean intellectuals are the ones who compelled Irele beyond the prevailing Sartrism of the early 1960s, and influenced the development of his own "praise of alienation," as famously articulated in an inaugural lecture delivered in 1982 at the University of Ibadan.

More than the many African writers he also knew well and wrote about, it is above all Césaire who best qualifies as the African critic's maître à penser. The poet's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal prominently bookends 'Biola's long career, from the 1960s to today, as colleagues mourn his passing. A new translation of the Cahier by Gregson Davis, longtime friend of Irele's, will soon be coming out with a revised version of the classic commentary that Irele first provided in his dissertation, expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, and that now culminates with this new edition from Duke University Press. This volume will become the critical and pedagogical gold standard for its balanced historical, philosophical, and philological interpretations, for its elegant and subtle engagement with the politics of culture and identity, and for Irele's and Gregson's modeling of the kind of collaborative endeavor that gives rise to new interpretive frameworks. The brilliant English title of this new edition, Journal of a Homecoming, captures better than previous translations the true meaning of the original.

I first met 'Biola in Dakar in 1989, and later invited him to speak to my graduate students at Northwestern University, where...