Two exceptional events celebrating the poet Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) are occurring this winter: on December 2^nd, a conversation with A. James Arnold at Trinity College Cambridge, and from November 14^th to January 10^th, an exhibition at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, with an international symposium on December 4^th. This gives us the opportunity to discover, or re-discover, the works of Césaire, a great intellectual figure of the 20^th century, well represented in the Cambridge libraries collections.

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A. James Arnold, one of the most eminent specialists of Aimé Césaire, is the author of numerous research works, including Modernism & Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Harvard University Press: 1981, available as an ebook and in print). La littérature antillaise entre histoire et mémoire (1935-1995). (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020) and Aimé Césaire: Genèse et transformations d’une poétique. (Würzburg: K&N, 2020) are also important works to consult.

A. James Arnold has edited a monumental volume of Césaire’s Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014) and, in collaboration with Clayton Eshleman, he translated and edited The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan University Press: 2013, available online and in print) ;  Solar Throat Slashed: The Unexpurgated 1948 edition (Wesleyan Poetry: 2011), and a bilingual edition of the Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Wesleyan University Press: 2017, available online and in print).

You are warmly invited to attend A. James Arnold’s conversation with Prof. Charles Forsdick and Prof. Jean Khalfa on Tuesday 2 December, from 5:15 to 6:30pm, in the Old Combination Room of Trinity College Cambridge, about his latest book Reading the French Caribbean, from the Postmodern to the Postcolonial (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2026).

Césaire exhibition and symposium at the ENS Paris

The Historical Library of the École Normale Supérieure, where Césaire was a student from 1935, is currently showing an exhibition starring the original annotated typescript of the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1939), which Césaire wrote while a student there. On view are also a series of remarkable and rare documents, from the collections of ENS, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, the Jacques Doucet Library, the Library of the French National Assembly, the French Communist Party and the Wifredo Lam Foundation. Notable are the correspondence between Césaire and several artists and poets, including letters by and to André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Mabille, Suzanne Roussi Césaire, Helena Holzer, Wifredo Lam ; one of the 6 surviving copies of Fata Morgana (1941), a poem by André Breton illuminated by Wifredo Lam ; the great Annonciation portfolio where Césaire’s poems dialogue with Lam’s engravings (see the copy held by the Wren Library at  Trinity College and the blogpost written on the occasion of the 2018 Lam exhibition) and Césaire’s letter of resignation to Maurice Thorez, Secretary General of the French Communist Party, which became a manifesto of the non-aligned movement.

Besides this exhibition, a symposium organised by Jean Khalfa (Trinity College Cambridge), Dominique Combe (École Normale Supérieure), Cecile Gobbo (Chief librarian and co-director of the ENS-PSL libraries), Camille Dorignon (Head of French and English literature collections at the ENS library) will take place at the ENS on the 4^th of December, covering Césaire’s writing and political career. The place of women at the avant-garde will be underlined and this event will also be anchored in the present: the poet Nimrod will read passages of his collection Babel Babylone (Obsidiane, 2010, in process), in tribute to Césaire, while students from the Africana-ENS association will give readings of Césaire’s texts at regular intervals.

Irene Fabry-Tehranchi, Jean Khalfa, Anne-Elise Rakotovao