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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
‘Blackness is not absence, but refusal’ said Aimé Césaire. The only trouble with refusal as a literary posture is that it is inclined to produce writing which is concerned with public gesture rather than with private and particular observation. Until recently, the great bulk of French writing by Africans could be fairly labelled as romantic, rhetorical, and directed at general rather than individual situations. That is to say, there was a preference for romantically revolutionary statements about ‘the situation of the negro’, rather than exploratory statements about the situation of the individual writer at a particular moment in space and time.
page 61 note 1 Hosties noires (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1948).Google Scholar
page 62 note 1 Coups de pilon (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1956).Google Scholar
page 62 note 2 Ibid.
page 63 note 1 Leurres et lueurs (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1960).Google Scholar
page 64 note 1 Black Orpheus, I (Ibadan, 1957).Google Scholar
page 65 note 1 Clark, John Pepper, Poems (Ibadan, Mbari, 1962).Google Scholar
page 65 note 2 The Times Literary Supplement, 10 Aug. 1962.
page 66 note 1 Orphée noir (Paris, Presses Universitaires, 1948).Google Scholar
page 66 note 2 ‘Les Mamelles’, from Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba (Paris, Présence Africaine, 1947).Google Scholar
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