Situating Césaire: Pragmatics of Freedom and the Proleptic Politics of Radical Literalism

by Gary Wilder (Associate Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center)
Friday, April 27th, 3:30 PM
13-19 University Place, Room 222

This talk is a reconsideration of Césaire’s wartime writings in the journalTropiques. Wilder suggests that these critical pieces already indicate the kind of political strategy Césaire would pursue during the postwar period, namely a program for self-determination without state-sovereignty based on what he called a “politics of inflection.” Reading them closely thus helps us reconcile what only appear to be contradictions between his aesthetics and politics or between what seem to be radical and moderate aspects of his anticolonialism.

Response by Laurie Lambert, (PhD Candidate in English, NYU)

Interested attendees should email rajiv.menon@nyu.edu for a copy of the paper.

Presented by the NYU Postcolonial Symposium