SOURCE: Livingston, Robert Eric. “Decolonizing the Theatre: Césaire, Serreau and the Drama of Negritude.” In Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and Performance 1795-1995, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, pp. 182-98. London: Routledge, 1995.

In the following essay, Livingston discusses Césaire's collaboration with the French director Jean-Marie Serreau and acknowledges these works as vehicles for advancing the political aims of the negritude movement.

Poet, politician and anti-colonial theorist, Aimé Césaire is best known as one of the founders of the negritude movement. Launched as a literary movement in the hothouse of 1930s Paris, negritude rejected the French colonial policy of cultural assimilation, and espoused a renewal of African culture as a vehicle for black consciousness. The movement achieved postwar prominence with the publication of Leopold Sedar Senghor's Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in 1948, which featured extended excerpts from Césaire's great autobiographical...