Farcical heroism: Aimé Césaire reads Homer, Virgil, and Plautus

Abstract

The article analyses how Aimé Césaire in his seminal book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal carefully yet discrepantly reworks the tradition of epic writing to appropriate central topoi of the epic, which he claims as a point of departure for postcolonial writing. In this foundational text of Antillean literature, Césaire presents an intertextual rebuttal of the key features of epic writing that allows him to redirect the genre’s orientalist trajectory towards resistance to colonial oppression. The article argues that Césaire challenges the authority of epic tradition with a notion of heroism that reflects the subversive mode of farce in the vein of Plautus.

Keywords:

• Aimé Césaire
• epic tradition
• Homer
• Virgil
• writing back
• Antillean literature
• négritude

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.