The Poetics of Second Liberation

I am happy to share my latest article, “The Poetics of Second Liberation: Revisiting Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe,” recently published in the Nordic Journal of African Studies. This piece is particularly close to my heart, as it revisits one of Aimé Césaire’s most compelling plays to explore the complexities and contradictions of decolonization in postcolonial contexts.

I grapple with Césaire’s dramatization of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, using it as a lens to discuss the fraught nature of what some scholars have termed as “bad decolonization” and “good decolonization.” Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe has always fascinated me for the way it engages with questions of liberation, freedom, and sovereignty in the postcolony, and I wanted to unpack how this work prefigures a “second liberation”—a form of decolonization that transcends mere emancipation from physical subjugation to embrace self-determination and "will to community."

I argue that Césaire’s portrayal of King Christophe, a leader caught between the struggle for autonomy and the risk of becoming a tyrant, speaks to the paradoxes and failures that many postcolonial states experience. To support this reading, I draw on the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, particularly Mbembe’s notion of “self-abolition” and the “will to community.” For me, the play is not just a historical drama but a philosophical inquiry into the nature of freedom and what it means to be truly liberated.

You can find the article here:

• Title: The Poetics of Second Liberation: Revisiting Aimé Césaire’s King Christophe
• Published in: Nordic Journal of African Studies, Vol. 33 No. 3 (2024)
• DOI: 10.53228/njas.v33i3.1172