Little girl/Hummingbird/Homme-plante: women and poetics in Aimé Césaire’s <i>Discourse on Colonialism</i> and the essays of Suzanne Césaire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since its publication in 1950, Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism has remained influential for its incisive reframing of the European “civilizing mission.” Nevertheless, feminist interventions have problematized the masculine nationalist project upon which both the essay and the wider Négritude movement rest. The recent surge of critical interest in Suzanne Césaire demonstrates a desire to—recuperate-as Kara Rabbitt phrases—it-the “missing mother” of Martinican cultural genealogy. In this paper, I will reckon with the gender gap separating the two Césaires, thinking through poetics as a gendered political epistemology in their essays. Beginning with Aimé Césaire and Discourse on Colonialism, I focus on his central rhetorical device of formal repetition, specifically anaphora, and draw on the work of Brent Hayes Edwards to argue that the anaphoric line is entrenched in a masculinist narrative of freedom, rhetorically foreclosing on gender consciousness. From there, I undertake a close and comparative reading of selections from Suzanne Césaire's oeuvre against Discourse, noting divergences in their varying figurations of colonized and racialized women. Considering new scholarship on Suzanne Césaire's influence and ecopoetics, including the work of Anny-Dominique Curtius and Lauren Nelson, I propose her posthuman ecopoetics as a source of gendered epistemology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".