Aimé Césaire's work is deeply marked by the experience of exile, deportation, and the African presence to the world born of slave trade and slavery. Césaire has contributed to the deconstruction of the colonial library. He has done it from a singular space, Martinique, a French colony, which experienced two centuries of slavery; a century of colonial status, and which became a French department in 1946. On territories born of European colonization and slavery, movements of resistance fought against the prison of race to obtain full citizenship. To Césaire, emancipation was an horizon, constantly renegotiated, a position which is reduced neither contained within a singularity nor diluted into universalism. It is in the tension between these two extremes where neither idealization nor bitterness is present that Césaire imagines the process of emancipation.
Martinique; colonization; slavery; movements of resistance