The Center for International Exhibition and Performance since 1987
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE: A VOICE FOR HISTORY/Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour
l'histoire
Directed by Euzhan Palcy. France, Senegal, 1994 165 min.
Introduction Jacqueline Stewart
A three-part documentary about Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. "The first
part covers the poets life, works and political action. Aimé Césaire takes
the audience on a tour of his beloved Martinique. The second part deals
with the ethics, the theory and the philosophy of negritude in its
beginnings. Césaire reflects on his various Parisian encounters with
intellectuals ... as well as his encounter with Africa through the mediation
of Léopold Sédar Senghor. The third part attempts to answer the
questions, how does one find "the strength to face tomorrow" after the
disappointments of decolonization, the failures in the Third World, the "ills
of development" and the strength to face the planetary crisis,
Featuring many of the most important world-renowned artistic and
intellectual figures of the past six decades.
Introduced by Jacqueline Stewart
Jacqueline Stewart is a film historian, author and archivist whose
scholarship and public engagement work amplifies underrepresented
voices in cinema. She is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the
University of Chicago, and host of “Silent Sunday Nights” on Turner
Classic Movies (TCM). Stewart served as Director and President of the
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She is the author of
Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, and co-
editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema and William
Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission. In 2015, she co-curated the five-disc set
Pioneers of African American Cinema for Kino Lorber. A 2021 recipient of
a MacArthur Fellowship, Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie
Project, a community-centered archival program housed at the University
of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life initiative that will celebrate its 20 th year in
2025.
Reception sponsored by Villa Albertine
ABOUT AIMÉ AND SUZANNE CÉSAIRE
Aimé Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician.
In the 1930’s Césaire received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris.
There he met a Senegalese student, the future poet and African politician Léopold Senghor. In 1934
Césaire, with Senghor and Guyanan poet Léon Damas, founded the student journal Etudiant Noir (Black
Student). This group of Black Francophone intellectuals developed the concept of “Negritude,” the
embrace of Blackness and Africanness as a counter to a legacy of colonial self-hatred.
His intellectual work is tied to anticolonial movements. Author of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (first
published in Spanish 1942; original French version 1947; translated as Memorandum on My Martinique,
1947), a widely acknowledged masterpiece documenting the 20th-century colonial condition. Also an
accomplished playwright exploring the paradox of Black identity under French colonial rule. Césaire’s
shift to drama in the late 1950s and 1960s allowed him to integrate the modernist and surrealist
techniques of his poetry and the polemics of his prose to resist the powers of colonial domination.
Suzanne Césaire was a theorist affiliated with the négritude movement and with
surrealism. She was one of the first theorists to emphasize the potential of the multi-
ethnic and multi-natural composition of the Caribbean and called for an experimental
cultural appropriation rather than a return to essences or assimilation.
Most of the Césaire’s work was published in the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques,
which she co-founded along with her husband Aimé and fellow lycée teachers.
Published during the fascist Vichy government, the journal established a dialogue with
surrealism both as a means of cultural liberation and as a means to obscure political
messages for the censors. In her contributions, Suzanne Césaire heavily reappropriated
colonial stereotypes such as the ‘cannibal’ and the ‘lazy negro’ as provocations for both
colonizer and colonized to re-examine deeply internalized (self)perceptions. This
strategy of inversion was even used in a letter of protest against the impending
censorship of the journal.
Overall, the négritude writers’ embracing of a black identity was regarded as scandalous
at the time, even by fellow black intellectuals including Frantz Fanon. The search for
empowerment in an alignment with the bodily – along with the natural and the cosmic –
was dismissed as escapist, narcissist or even fascist. This danger was recognised by
Suzanne Césaire and reflected in her wariness of essentialisms. For instance, while
embracing blackness as a unifying force against oppression, she proposed that ‘it is not
a question of a return to the past, of resurrecting an African past that we have learned to
appreciate and respect. On the contrary, it is a question of mobilizing every living force
mingled together on this land where race is the result of the most continuous brazing’