Aimé Césaire memorial collection

1982-2013 [bulk 2008-2009]

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Black Martinican poet, politician, and social critic. As a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he was a key figure in the literary and political movement known as Négritude, along with Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guyana. While students, the three men also created the literary review L'Étudiant noir (The Black Student). Returning to Martinique in 1939, Césaire taught at Lycée Schoelcher where he tutored a young Frantz Fanon. Césaire was elected Mayor of Fort-de-France and Deputy to the French National Assembly in 1945; in 1958, he founded the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). He continued his literary and critical work, founding the journals Tropiques and Présence Africaine (now a major publishing house). His literary output includes the book-length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal; a historical essay on Toussaint Louverture, "Discours sur le colonialisme", which was published in Présence Africaine in 1950; and the plays Une tempête (a response to the racist depictions in Shakespeare's The Tempest) and Une saison au Congo, about the death of Patrice Lumumba. Césaire served as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988. He retired from politics in 2001. He died in April 2008, and proclaimed as a national hero in Martinique in 2011. This collection, donated by Martinican social geographer François Rosaz, contains commemorative materials about Aimé Césaire, mostly from 2008-2009. Materials consist of memorial programs and eulogies, including one given by Serge Letchimy, a member of the National Assembly of France; conference and theater programs, including a 2007 conference highlighting Césaire's relationship with the French Communist Party and his break from it in 1956; articles on Césaire (including a copy of a special issue of Small Axe from October 2008, and three commemorative issues of Le Progressiste, the PPM's weekly magazine); four issues of the newspaper France-Antilles from the days immediately following Césaire's death; bibliographies; commemorative postcards and stamps; and posters.