This editorial note introduces the translations that follow of two pieces written in fall 1956 by Aimé Césaire: his speech "Culture and Colonization," delivered at the first Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, hosted by the journal Présence Africaine in Paris in September, and his open letter to Maurice Thorez in October, in which he resigned from the French Communist Party. The editorial note places the two pieces in the context of the political currents of French colonialism at the time (on the eve of the Algerian revolution) and of Césaire's own development as a politician and writer. In particular, it highlights the links between these documents and his well-known book Discourse on Colonialism (1955), which is widely considered to be one of the classics of anticolonial thought.»
Social Text Collective Member
Brent Hayes Edwards
Recent Entries
Authored by Brent Hayes Edwards:
Introduction: Césaire in 1956
June 21, 2010 2:31PM
Editorial Note
December 17, 2009 4:46PM
From its inception, SOCIAL TEXT has regularly published work in translation. Although translations have perhaps been less prominent than in some other journals (the early New Left Review, New German Critique, and Telos, for example), the commitment to making significant texts in foreign...»
Collective
October 30, 2009 8:20AM
The story of the SOCIAL TEXT collective begins with the desire to establish a counterpoint to possessive individualism, creating a means for valuing collaborative engagement against the singular authorship of genius; later it would come to stand against the deadening metric of disciplinary accountability as well. The editorial collective foments a deliberative process that aims to set its own context and hence to make something generative of its internal disciplinary difference.»
Poetry
October 30, 2009 4:20AM
Literature has been part of the purview of SOCIAL TEXT since the journal's inception, although the literary has never been presumed to be its paradigmatic or primary object of study. Moreover, from issue 4 (1981) through issue 39 (1994), the journal not only published scholarship on literature, but also sporadically published poetry and fiction. There are intriguing parallels between the experimentalism of the essays in the journal, especially in the rubric of short, theoretical pieces called "Unequal Developments" featured in early issues, and the experimentalism of the poetry and fiction.»
Social Text
October 30, 2009 2:20AM
Despite the divergence between the accounts given by Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson of the origins of the name SOCIAL TEXT, it is worth exploring the use of the phrase in the work of Henri Lefebvre. Even if it is ultimately a false cognate, the chapter titled "The Social Text" in the second volume of his CRITIQUE OF EVERYDAY LIFE (1961) is an intriguing intertext for the journal, especially given the importance of the category of the "everyday" in its early issues. The occasional invocation of the title phrase in SOCIAL TEXT articles over the years might be described as heuristic rather than categorical: an ongoing, dialogic effort to limn an arena of investigation, rather than the attempt to define once and for all an aspect of a broader social field.»
Co-authored by Brent Hayes Edwards:
The essay provides a short introduction to the special anniversary issue of Social Text, explaining the protocol for the "keyword" essays that make up the majority of the issue: each contribution takes up particular points (single essays) or threads (themes in a number of essays over the years) in the publication history of the journal as starting point for a consideration of broader issues of knowledge production, critique, or methodology. The introduction begins with a discussion of the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of Social Text, and recounts the origins and history of the journal in some detail. The piece describes the ways the editorial collective has functioned since 1979, both in the production of the journal itself and in a variety of other activities (including meetings, soirées, and conference panels). The introduction also discusses some of the major shifts in the organization of SOCIAL TEXT, including its affiliations since the mid-1980s with the CUNY Graduate Center, Rutgers University, and Columbia University (which have provided in-kind support and funded the managing editorial position) and with the University of Minnesota Press and Duke University Press (which have published the journal's book series and the journal itself).
Photo by Jorge Alberto Perez.»
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About Brent Hayes Edwards
Location: New York, NY
Bio: Brent Hayes Edwards teaches at Columbia University and is a co-editor of Social Text.
