Decolonial Notes on the Journey toward the Future: Négritude, Abject Blackness, and the Emancipatory Force of Spectrality
In this essay, we advance an “interpretative analytic,” to address the character of the politics and strategic intent in Césaire’s poetics and life work. In so doing we focus on Césaire’s commitment to the method of poetics articulated through the movement, project and politics of Négritude. We argue that Césaire’s interventions should be treated as part and parcel of the set of cultural practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization,” and that he is concerned, to conduct a Creole line of escape, from the hegemony of modern/colonial cultures of power. We tease out the mode of opening that Césaire sought after in “dwelling with power” and eschew a premature closure on his Négritude. Certainly, the problem of Blackness is implicated in the undoing of the sets of contradictions embedded in our modern/colonial present and its historical legacy. However, we believe that it is the spectral case of “abject Blackness” which lies at the decolonial heart of Césaire’s critique. Given the peculiarity of the conditions sustaining this experience of “being-Black-in-the-world” we interpret Césaire’s poiesis through an analysis of his decolonial aesthesis and aesthetic judgment, which falls within a class of performances called “liminal acts.”
