What Life Is Not: Aimé Césaire as Phenomenologist of Domination

Abstract

What does “life” mean in the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”? This article draws on a close reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to offer an answer to this question. In his poem, Césaire carefully examines the ways racial and colonial domination distort life. He identi􀏔ies various false accounts of life complicit in domination, and he points toward an alternative. The article com-pares Césaire’s alternative to accounts of life put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, suggesting that Césaire pushes his cri-tique in a similar direction, but goes further.