Robert Eric Livingston

Poet, politician and anti-colonial theorist, Aimé Césaire is best known as one of the founders of the negritude movement. Launched as a literary movement in the hothouse of 1930s Paris, negritude rejected the French colonial policy of cultural assimilation, and espoused a renewal of African culture as a vehicle for black consciousness. The movement achieved post-war prominence with the publication of Leopold Sedar Senghor's Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in 1948, which featured extended excerpts from Césaire's great autobiographical poem Return to My Native Land as well as an influential introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre (Mudimbe: 83-7). Pre-occupied during the 1950s with the intellectual foundations of the black independence movement, Césaire turned, in the 1960s, to the theatre as a medium for advancing the political project of negritude. Working in close collaboration with the French director Jean-Marie Serreau, Césaire produced a set of dramas that together comprise a triptych of decolonization in the African world. Given the combative and dialectical energies of negritude itself, the turn towards dramatic form is hardly surprising: as early as 1946, a collection of Césaire's poetry, Les Armes Miraculeuses, culminated with a “lyrical oratorio, ” “And the dogs fell silent” (in Césaire 1990:3-74). Where the plays of the 1960s do mark a departure, however, is in their efforts to make the visionary poetics of negritude more widely accessible. Developed explicitly for theatrical realization, Césaire's plays-The Tragedy of King Christophe (1964); A Season in the Congo (1966); and the adaptation of Shakespeare entitled A Tempest (1969)-seek to integrate the fierce lyric energies of negritude poetry with forms of popular festivity and cultural expression.

Given Césaire's status as a spokesman for negritude, his plays have received a fair amount of critical attention, including translation into English. Most critics, however, have seen the plays as direct extensions of Césaire's poetic vision, and have tended to ignore both the significance of dramatic form and the context of performance. Such an approach, while sensitive to the verbal density of the plays, risks homogenizing their political texture and fails to grasp the extent to which the plays reflect

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