Cold War Negritude: Form and Alignment in French Caribbean Literature

Christopher T. Bonner

ISBN 10: 1836245548 / ISBN 13: 9781836245544

Published by Liverpool University Press, 2025

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781836245544

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cold War Negritude: Form and Alignment in French Caribbean Literature
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1836245548
• ISBN 13: 9781836245544
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 526 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Cold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers―René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis―whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape.

The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.

About the Author

Christopher T. Bonner is an Assistant Professor of French at Texas A&M University.