Aimé Césaire Centenary: The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

07/29/2013 03:47 pm

PUBLIC LECTURE by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman 

Dodd Hall rm 103

In August 1939 Aimé Césaire, who had coined the term negritude in a student newpaper four years earlier, published a long poem that related, in mixed prose and verse, a quest for self-identity. The Poetry series at Wesleyan University Press has published A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman’s translation of this poem, in French and English, for the first time. They will read selections from the poem that show the poet’s alter ego coming to a realization of his own alienation, denouncing the process of acculturation that he must overcome, then undergoing a transformation that will permit him to be reborn culturally and spiritually. Discussion following the reading will clarify Césaire’s understanding of negritude before his commitment to anticolonialism in the mid-1950s covered over the 1939 text with a political overlay.

For more information contact: 
Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics

Florida State University

Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1540

Telephone 850.644.7636

Fax 850.644.9917

E-mail icffs@mailer.fsu.edu

Website www.winthropking.fsu.edu