The Alignment of Writing : Cold War Geopolitics and Literary Form in Francophone Caribbean Literature

In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that Negritude poetry was the only authentically revolutionary poetic writing of his time. The postwar situation in Europe called for realistic prose that would mobilize the proletariat, but black poetry for Sartre had a political purchase that its European counterpart lacked: it asserted the existence and specificity of black consciousness in the face of colonialist discourse. Sartre was not alone in linking black liberation to poetry: an entire generation of politically engaged French Caribbean writers claimed poetry as the key literary vehicle for black emancipation. Leon-Gontran Damas' Pigments (1937) and Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939) exemplify this paradigm of experimental poetry oriented towards exploring black consciousness---or, to paraphrase Martinican Marxist critic Rene Menil, towards "the conquest of ourselves.";This dissertation demonstrates, however, that French Caribbean literature changed on or around the year 1956. Cesaire's key text from this year is his "Lettre a Maurice Thorez," a prose polemic in which he renounces the French Communist Party and enjoins colonized peoples to articulate a new form of socialism. In the same year, Haitian communist author Jacques-Stephen Alexis delivered a manifesto, "Du realisme merveilleux des haitiens," argued for the novel's emancipatory potential as the only "total" form of writing and condemned formalistic poetry as depoliticized and decadent. These cases exemplify a broader turn towards topical prose in the mid-1950s: French Caribbean intellectuals came to see the novel and the essay as genres beter suited to serve the ends of emancipatory politics.;This dissertation accounts for this shift from the poetic cri to referential prose in French Caribbean literature by situating this literary debate within the geopolitical context of the Cold War. More precisely, it argues that the Cold War---and especially the ongoing doctrinal quarrels within the international Marxist left---exerts a distinct ideological pressure upon French Caribbean authors of this period that informs and to some extent determines their reflections upon and experimentation in literary form, especially their turn towards prose.;While many scholars have discussed French Caribbean literature within the context of early-1960s decolonization, the geopolitical context of the Cold War has largely been ignored. This project claims that the Cold War---the logic of the bloc, the sorting out of nations into the two "worlds" of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and the urgent question of "alignment"---was simultaneously present in the minds and in the writings of Caribbean authors and was inextricably bound up with the incipient clamor for independence. I posit 1956 as a turning point because in this year a sequence of local challenges to both Western colonialism and Soviet communism erupted; Frantz Fanon's apt shorthand for these small-scale resistances to the planetary superpowers is "Suez and Budapest." Subjugated peoples found themselves inextricably plugged into the world system in 1956, their particular struggles subsumed into the geopolitical contest between superpowers. This project asks how the debate over literary genre described above was informed by this new moment of global connectivity: as French Caribbean writers reconsidered the position of their islands within the world system, their literary imagination turned away from existential questions of consciousness and subjectivity towards concrete geopolitical and geographical preoccupations.