Aimé Césaire

Bien sûr qu'il va mourir le Rebelle. Oh, il n'y aura pas de drapeau même noir pas de coup de canon pas de cérémonial...

INTRODUCTION

Travails consists of both a digital edition of all substantially variant versions and a study of the textual and contextual history of Aimé Césaire's "Et les chiens se taisaient." This ever-mutating text, worked and reworked into one form or another at every stage of the artist's career, proves to be an excellent laboratory for reevaluating not only Césaire's own intellectual trajectory, but also our notions of the role of European modernisms in the rise of modern Caribbean literature in general, and Caribbean theater in particular. Departing from the work of Arnold, Gikandi, Patterson, Glissant, and others who pursue a holistic approach to the Caribbean, I examine the ways in which Césaire repeatedly reworked his text in dialogue with an inter-American and trans-continental network of trends and influences.

Two critical essays accompany the edition. The first retraces in detail the history of the text from inception until the play was included in Œuvres complètes in 1976 with an eye on textual and paratextual difference, citing both the author's ever-changing collaborations and his penchant for play and indeterminacy as the main causes for the astonishing transformations. The transition from the recently discovered manuscript of the play to the version published as part of Les armes miraculeuses receives most of my attention, as I argue that the Ur-text marks a significant moment in the development of Césairean poetics from their militant origins in the 1939 version of the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, to the surrealist "high-art" which defines them during the post-war period; it furthermore lays bare the Caribbean writer’s anguished relationship with historical specificity. A second essay compares the play to Derek Walcott's parallel use of the Haitian Revolution as subject-matter in Henri Christophe to tease out the tensions that give rise to modern Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean theater. Using the evidence provided to us by both texts, I hope to demonstrate that European modernisms enter Caribbean discourse in disjunctive ways which cannot be easily reconciled to a simple narrative of revision or appropriation as others have argued in the past.

Since this project is driven by textual evidence, the editorial work itself makes up the bulk of the dissertation. The TEI encoded texts form part of a fully searchable and annotated digital archive developed using sustainable open-source tools which are becoming standards in the digital humanities. The edition is documentary in nature and tries to stay as close as the medium allows to specific instantiations of the text. Since the play transforms in such outstanding ways through the years, the archive also serves as a great testing ground for current online collating tools and our ability to generate pedagogical visualizations. Working closely with the Scholar’s Lab, the EELS team and SHANTI, my goal is to develop ways in which we can use digital environments not only for presentation and dissemination, but to help us generate synthetic arguments, to borrow from Kant, about the texts and their genesis.

In the end, the purpose of this digital work goes beyond its contributions to digital humanities and its lessons about Césaire’s complex relationship to transcontinental modernisms. I hope it will serve as a model for the much needed work of editorial preservation and textual criticism absent thus far from the new canonical formations that follow in the wake of postcolonial studies. It is through the edition itself, that I make the wider claim that close attention to textual instability and fluctuation in the new canon can help us refine our theorization of colonial, postcolonial and other Third World literatures. In Césaire’s case, I hope the edition will show that we cannot easily make him the carrier for any given ideology, unless we offer the caveat that these are dependent on distinct moments on a course marked by revision and invention.

Alex Gil