Return to My Native Land (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets)

Aimà Cà saire,Michael Worton (series editor),Tim Mathews (series editor),Mireille Rosello (translator & editor)

ISBN 10: 1852241845 / ISBN 13: 9781852241841

Published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1995

Return to My Native Land (Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets) This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. . Seller Inventory # 7719-9781852241841

Synopsis:

French-English bilingual edition

André Breton called Césaire's Cahier 'nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. It is a seminal text in Surrealist, French and Black literatures - published in full in English for the first time in Bloodaxe’s bilingual Contemporary French Poets series.

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas département of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Négritude appeared for the first time. Négritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France.

As a poet, Césaire believed in the revolutionary power of language, and in the Notebook he combined high literary French with Martinican colloquialisms, and archaic turns of phrase with dazzling new coinages. The result is a challenging and deeply moving poem on the theme of the future of the negro race which presents and enacts the poignant search for a Martinican identity. The Notebook opposes the ideology of colonialism by inventing a language that refuses assimilation to a dominant cultural norm, a language that teaches resistance and liberation.

About the Author: Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was born in Basse-Pointe, a village on the north coast of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean (now an overseas département of France). His book Discourse on Colonialism (1950) is a classic of French political literature. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1956) is the foundation stone of francophone Black literature: it is here that the word Négritude appeared for the first time. Négritude has come to mean the cultural, philosophical and political movement co-founded in Paris in the 1930s by three Black students from French colonies: the poets Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Léopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aimé Césaire, who became a deputy in the French National Assembly for the Revolutionary Party of Martinique and was repeatedly elected Mayor of Fort-de-France.

Césaire attended high school and college in France, returning to Martinique during the Second World War. He was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984. He helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas département of France. He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993. He died in 2008, aged 94.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Return to My Native Land (Bloodaxe ...
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good