Isoje Iyi-Eweka Chou African Writing Online

"[Aime] Césaire was self-consciously preoccupied with making something new in art and politics alike, but reading his poetry today (with a stronger sense of the historical specificity of his writing) provides the present with the kind of historical investigation of blackness that [Frantz] Fanon felt was unavailable. But more important, the fact that Césaire did so through the materiality of language indicates blackness’s power for a new “communicability” not rooted in an essentialized idea of race, but in new methods of critiquing the cultural machinery that essentializes. For Césaire, new words hold the promise of new worlds." David B. Hobbs • The Nation