AIME CÉSAIRE, WRITING THE (NON) HUMAN AND THE ONTOLOGICO-EXISTENTIAL SCANDAL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/2078-9785/2779Keywords:
civilisation, the colonised subject, faux humanism, dehumanisation, idea of Europe, subjection, the political, the returnAbstract
Aimé Césaire scandalised the question of the human subject by exposing the deceit and hypocrisy of the idea of Europe and its myth of civilisation. The question of the human is foundational and constitutive in Césaire’s subjectivity, which originates from the site of the dehumanised and also railing against all forms of dehumanisation that plagued the colonised subject. The human is interrogated here in the light of the distance and proximity to the non-human. It is from the positionality of being non-human that Césaire opposes faux humanism, which presents a scandal and it having a tendency of preaching humanism while engaging in dehumanisation. In order for there to be the insurrection of the colonised subject to become human, Césaire’s conception of ‘the return’ is re-engaged from the standpoint of Negritude as decolonial humanism and reconceptualising it in its complexity. This then serves as the launching pad to imagine the possibility of the emergence of another humanity coming into being through the end of the modern colonial world – the decolonised world.References
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Césaire, A. 1970. Return to my native land. Trans. J. Berger and A. Bostock. Ringwood: Penguin Books.
Césaire, A. 1972. Discourse on colonialism. Trans. R. D. G. Kelley. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Césaire, A. [1956] 2010. “Letter to Maurice Thorez.†Social Text 28(2): 145–152.
Delantry, G. 1995. Inventing Europe: idea, identity, reality. London: Macmillan.
Derrida, J. 1995. The gift of death. Trans. D. Wills. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Fanon, F. 1970. Black skin, white masks. Trans. C. L. Markmann. London: Paladin.
Fanon, F. 1990. The wretched of the earth. Trans. C. Farrington. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. 1989. The order of things. London: Routledge.
Garraway, D. L. 2010. ‘What is mine’: Césairean Negritude between the particular and the universal. Research in African Literatures 41(1): 71– 86.
Gordon, L. R. 2006. Is the human a teleological suspension of man? Phenomenological exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and biodicean reflections. In After man, towards the human: critical essays on Sylvia Wynter, ed. A. Bogues, 237–257. Kingston/ Miami: Ian Randle Publishers.
Gordon, L. R. 2011. Shifting the geography of reason in an age of disciplinary decadence. Transmodernity 1(2): 95–103.
Heller, A. 1992. Europe: an epilogue. In The idea of Europe: problems of national and transnational identity, ed. B. Nelson, D. Roberts and W. Veit, 12–25. New York/Oxford: Berg.
Henry, P. 2000. Caliban’s reason: introduction to Afro-Caribbean philosophy. New York/London: Routledge.
Irele, A. 1992. In praise of alienation. In The surreptitious speech: Présence Africaine and the politics of otherness, 1947–1987, ed. V. Y. Mudimbe, 201–224. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Maldonado-Torres, N. 2008. Against war: views from the underside of modernity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Maldonado-Torres, N. 2006. Césaire’s gift and the decolonial turn. Radical Philosophy Review 9(2): 111–138.
Marriot, D. 2012. Inventions of existence: Sylvia Wynter. Frantz Fanon, sociogeny, and ‘the damned.’ CR: The New Centennial Review 11(3): 45–90.
Mignolo, W. D. 2011. The darker side of western modernity: global futures, decolonial options. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Mouffe, C. 1993. The return of the political. London/New York: Verso.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2012. Beyond the equator there are no sins: coloniality and violence in Africa. Journal of Developing Societies 28(4): 419– 440.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. 2013. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa: myths of decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA.
Pagden, A. 2002. Europe: conceptualising a continent. In The idea of Europe: from antiquity to the European Union, ed. A. Pagden, 33–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rabaka, R. 2010. Africana critical theory: reconstructing the black radical tradition, from W.E.B. du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amìlcar Cabral. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Santos de Sousa, B. 2007. Beyond abyssal thinking: from global lines to ecology of knowledges. Review 30(1): 1–33.
Scharfman, R. 2010. Aimé Césaire: Poetry is/and knowledge. Research in African Literatures 41(1): 109–120.
Wilderson, F. B. III. 2003. Gramsci’s black Marx: whither the slave in civil society? Social Identities 9(2): 225–240.
Wynter, S. 1984. The ceremony must be found: after humanism. Boundary 2 12(3): 19–70.
X, Malcolm. 1970. By any means necessary: speeches, interviews, and a letter by Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder.
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Published
2017-06-21
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Sithole, Tendayi. 2017. “AIME CÉSAIRE, WRITING THE (NON) HUMAN AND THE ONTOLOGICO-EXISTENTIAL SCANDAL”. Imbizo 6 (1):1-26. https://doi.org/10.25159/2078-9785/2779.
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