-
Red Front/Black Front: Aimé Césaire and the Affaire Aragon
- Diacritics
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2006
- pp. 64-84
- 10.1353/dia.2008.0001
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This essay asks why, historically, the politics of postcolonial theory require of poetry that it be anchored in the concrete material conditions of a specific population. What are the parameters of analysis that have been established by overtly committed works? What obligations to contextualize does a poem like Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal impose? Conversely, what pressures does the Cahier place on content-oriented postcolonial approaches? Through a careful examination of the Cahier and the specific political valence it would have acquired when written, I seek to understand poetry's relationship to postcolonial theory as it has developed over time.