Books by Aime Cesaire

French-English bilingual edition. Andre Breton called Cesaire'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. Aime Cesaire (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 departement 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 Negritude appeared for the first time. Negritude 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 Leon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana; Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal; and Aime Cesaire, 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, Cesaire 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.

"Aimae Caesaire's work is foundational for colonial and postcolonial thought. In this unique volume, his responses to Frandcoise Vergaes' questions range over the origins of his political activism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, the question of reparation for slavery and the problems of marrying literature to politics"--

A collection of poems by the Martinician poet Aime Cesaire, who was read as a poet of revolutionary zeal during the Black Power movement of the 1960s. This collection is the first English edition to include "And the Dogs Were Silent" and "i, laminaria". There is a critical introduction.

A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.

Originally published in 1939, Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Negritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Cesaire's surrealist masterpiece.

The only bilingual edition of this radically original collection

Contains an introduction, notes, the French original, and a translation of Cesaire's poetry - the complex and challenging later works as well as the famous Notebook.

A Tempest is Aime Cesaire's anti-colonialist retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest.