SOURCE: Rix, Lucy. “Maintaining the State of Emergence/y: Aimé Césaire's Une tempête.” In “The Tempest” and Its Travels, edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, pp. 236-49. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

In the following essay, Rix offers various interpretations of Cêsaire's A Tempest.

The Martinican malaise is the malaise of a people that no longer feels responsible for its destiny and has no more than a minor part in a drama of which it should be the protagonist.¹

What is this distinctive force of Fanon's vision that has been forming even as I write about the division, the displacement, the cutting edge of his thought? It comes, I believe, from the tradition of the oppressed, as Walter Benjamin suggests; it is the language of a revolutionary awareness that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We...