1:00pm to 4:30pm
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
Aimé Césaire was the foremost Black French intellectual-statesman-writer of the 20th and 21st centuries. Co-founder of the négritude school of literature in the 1930s, parliamentarian to the National Assembly in Paris for nearly 5 decades, and author of 16 books, plays, and poetry collections, Césaire’s recent demise is understandably mourned by Francophones throughout the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. But Aimé Césaire also inspired generations of American students, educators, and humanists who, either in translation or in the original, have read and pondered his inimitable poems and prose. It is fitting that a university that embraces Césaire’s values of intellectual rigor, human dignity, and racial inclusiveness should, on the one-year anniversary of his death, commemorate his life and work.
At the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University will host a Memorial Symposium on April 17, 2009, the one-year anniversary of Césaire’s death. Keynote speaker will be Prof. Abiola Irele of Harvard University, eminent scholar on negritude and Césaire.
Supported by the Africana Studies department, French Studies Department, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University, and the French Politics, Culture and Society journal.
For more information, contact Professor William Miles, b.miles@neu.edu.
