The Poetics of Paradox: Camouflage and the Political Writings of Suzanne Césaire in Tropiques Journal, 1941-1945

• In Event: Ecological perspective through women writers

Description for Program

Suzanne Césaire’s intellectual work remains vital to the history of the Negritude movement, the Black radical tradition, and Afrofeminism. While the Black radical tradition and Negritude as a subsidiary movement within it are common in scholarly discourse on global Black politics and histories, the latter is not. Afrofeminism was coined by women of African descent born in francophone Europe (and colonies). The effort to weave their mosaic of African and Caribbean heritages makes their approach distinct from U.S-based Black feminism. As a global, diasporic endeavor with its own “long history,” Afrofeminism also interrogates the historical and lingering manifestations of colonialism of European empires.

Building with the constellation of discourse in Black Studies that thinks critically about gender, radicalism, and global politics, this paper will look at Césaire’s writings and conceptual interventions in Tropiques, a quarterly literary magazine based in Martinique that ran from 1941-1945. This inquiry is significant for conversations that evaluate how colorblindness is mythologized and espoused as a social fact in France (and the West writ large). Césaire is often overlooked in favor of thinkers like her husband Aimé, but her work demonstrates the importance Black French Antillean women’s perspectives on antiblackness, anticolonialism, and Caribbean identity. Thus, this paper also considers how the effort to recover the politically repressed canon of Black radicals to amplify a tradition can also create fissures of erasure.

Contextualizing the landscape of the Negritude movement alongside anticolonial strands of Black women’s intellectual thought, I attend to three concerns:
(1) Suzanne Césaire’s Afrosurrrealist perspective, anticolonial vision, and poetic imaginings of revolution during the World War II years of the Vichy Regime
(2) The need to take Afrofeminist radicals seriously as architects of Black social movements and intellectual traditions
(3) Why gender persists as an Achilles heel in the tradition of Black radicalism

Author

• Logan Phillips, Northwestern University