Miroir des Antilles: Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé—Francofonia 61 ed. by Catherine Maubon, Sara Tagliacozzo (review)

production that move seamlessly from landscape to poem and back again. Mackenzie’s reconsideration of Du Bellay’s L’Olive shows how the poet hijacks the Petrarchan love lyric in order to celebrate the rivers of his Angevine homeland. In the later Regrets, however , the poet translates the trauma of the Roman landscape as well as the mundane economic concerns facing him upon his return to France into a volume documenting the limits of idealization. Mackenzie shows that the poets Pontus de Tyard and Belleau were similarly conscious of the gap between ideal and real, and emphasized the constructed nature of their poetic landscapes in order to point to the impossibility of achieving pastoral, classical peace in their world. In the fifth chapter, Mackenzie calls attention to growing environmental threats to the French landscape during this period, suggesting that the Pléiade poets addressed the alarming problems of water pollution and deforestation.Her fascinating examination of Ronsard’s complex relation to Bernard Palissy, a self-made Protestant who recommended the cutting of trees as a means of increasing national wealth, sheds new light on the poet’s blend of nostalgia and selfglorification . In the sixth and final chapter, Mackenzie examines Vauquelin’s Foresteries and Jacques Peletier’s La Savoye, in which both authors attempt to construct poetic refuges of hope against growing consciousness of the violence of history, refuges that are increasingly difficult to locate inside of France. Indeed, as Mackenzie notes in her conclusion, the religious wars that nearly tore the nascent country to pieces would put an end to poetic efforts to construct and critique the ideal nation, and “mere landscape description”was supplanted by efforts to discern divine favor and intent through the study of the world (183). Mackenzie’s original study brings a fresh perspective to French Renaissance poetry, allowing specialists and non-specialists alike to appreciate the complex relationship between the work of the Pléiade poets and the forces shaping the French landscape. Her readings are never reductive; rather, they demonstrate a rare attention to detail and nuance—very much in keeping with her intent, stated in the introduction, of producing a“situated and specific study: a generational moment during which poetry, consciously contrasted with other cultural discourses, staged a particular landscape in a particular way” (12). The result is a book that opens new avenues not only for the study of the French Renaissance but, through its careful specificity , for ongoing efforts to appreciate the complex and fascinating intersection between literature and material culture. University of Illinois, Chicago Ellen McClure Maubon, Catherine, et Sara Tagliacozzo, éd. Miroir des Antilles: Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé—Francofonia 61. Florence: Olschki, 2011. ISSN 1121-953X. Pp. 243. 44 a. This volume features papers from a 2010 University of Siena conference on the legacy of Aimé Césaire and négritude in Antillean literature. The editors maintain that 236 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 237 despite the créolistes’polemic about their filiation to Césaire, his legacy as“un héritage d’insoumission” continues, as found in Maryse Condé’s work (4). Jacques Coursil’s linguistic review of the neologism elucidates what is at stake (“La grammaire de Caliban”): the root “nègr-” posits “la race comme essence,” as celebrated by Léopold Sédar Senghor and foundational in mythic perceptions of Africa; the suffix “-itude” implies narrative, seen in Césaire’s portrayal of “la condition nègre” (17), the history of the effects of colonialism worldwide. Rather than a cry of racial pride, Césaire’s négritude is an act, the act of writing (15). As Bénédicte Monville De Cecco and Antonelle Emina elaborate, his work, whether poetry, theater, or the letter to Maurice Thorez resigning from the French Communist Party, performs a cry for liberation. Legacies and influences run both ways: the volume’s title pays homage to Michel Leiris (Au miroir de l’Afrique), a rebel in ethnography. Catherine Maubon explores Césaire’s influence on Leiris, while Lilian Pestre de Almeida reads Le roi Christophe in dialogue with theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Writers of the next generation deconstruct Senghor’s racialized négritude and carry on...