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The Rendezvous of Victory: Translations of Bandung Humanism

The Rendezvous of Victory: Translations of Bandung Humanism This article tracks the engagement of several twentieth-century writers with a line from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming): “et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (and there is room for all at the appointed place of conquest; translated by C. L. R. James as “there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory”). This line came to define an ethics and an aesthetics for the cultural movement that ensued in the wake of the Bandung conference, which brought together heads of state from the third world in pursuit of national independence. In the critical commentaries and artistic engagements with Césaire’s work by James, Frantz Fanon, Nadine Gordimer, and Edward Said, a form of internationalism emerged that was sustained by a common investment in this poetic image. These writers weren’t bound by an identity of interest, however, but rather by the displacements to which they subjected Césaire’s poem through their linguistic, generic, affective, and semantic translations. The essay concludes that Bandung humanism supposed a contingent and revisable understanding of the human and promoted an aesthetic of reworking rather than timeless forms. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

The Rendezvous of Victory: Translations of Bandung Humanism

Spanos, Adam
Comparative Literature , Volume 74 (1) – Mar 1, 2022
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Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-9434485
Publisher site
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Abstract

This article tracks the engagement of several twentieth-century writers with a line from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Journal of a Homecoming): “et il est place pour tous au rendez-vous de la conquête” (and there is room for all at the appointed place of conquest; translated by C. L. R. James as “there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory”). This line came to define an ethics and an aesthetics for the cultural movement that ensued in the wake of the Bandung conference, which brought together heads of state from the third world in pursuit of national independence. In the critical commentaries and artistic engagements with Césaire’s work by James, Frantz Fanon, Nadine Gordimer, and Edward Said, a form of internationalism emerged that was sustained by a common investment in this poetic image. These writers weren’t bound by an identity of interest, however, but rather by the displacements to which they subjected Césaire’s poem through their linguistic, generic, affective, and semantic translations. The essay concludes that Bandung humanism supposed a contingent and revisable understanding of the human and promoted an aesthetic of reworking rather than timeless forms.

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2022

References

  • Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness
    Azeb, Sophia
  • The Assumption of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics
    Bernasconi, Robert
  • Egyptian Movement Poetry
    Colla, Elliott
  • Tragedy of the Possible: Aimé Césaire in Cuba, 1968
    Frost, Jackqueline Tavárez, Jorge E. Lefevre
  • Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans
    Gillman, Susan Cristina Fumagalli, Maria Hulme, Peter Robinson, Owen Wylie, Lesley
  • At the Rendezvous of Victory
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Letter from the 153rd State
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Living in the Interregnum
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism
    Halim, Hala
  • The Pre-postcolonial and its Enduring Relevance: Afro-Asian Variations in Edwar al-Kharrat’s Texts,
    Halim, Hala Albrecht, Monika
  • Translating Solidarity: An Interview with Nehad Salem
    Halim, Hala
  • Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
    James, C. L. R. Grimshaw, Anna
  • The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States
    James, C. L. R. McLemee, Scott
  • Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era; The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung
    Lee, Christopher J. Lee, Christopher J.
  • The ‘I’ as Messiah in Césaire’s First Cahier
    McIntosh, Malachi
  • Poetry’s Circumstance and Racial Time: Aimé Césaire, 1935–1945
    Melas, Natalie
  • The Late Style of Bandung Humanism
    Mufti, Aamir R.
  • The Missing Homeland of Edward Said
    Mufti, Aamir R Braidotti, Rosi Gilroy, Paul
  • Permission to Narrate
    Said, Edward W.
  • The Politics of Knowledge
    Said, Edward W.
  • Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors
    Said, Edward W
  • Black Orpheus,
    Sartre, Jean-Paul
  • Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South
    Yoon, Duncan West-Pavlov, Russell
  • ‘Our Forces Have Redoubled’: World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau
    Yoon, Duncan M
  • Crossing the Saharan Boundary: Lotus and the Legibility of Africanness
    Azeb, Sophia
  • The Assumption of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics
    Bernasconi, Robert
  • Egyptian Movement Poetry
    Colla, Elliott
  • Tragedy of the Possible: Aimé Césaire in Cuba, 1968
    Frost, Jackqueline Tavárez, Jorge E. Lefevre
  • Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans
    Gillman, Susan Cristina Fumagalli, Maria Hulme, Peter Robinson, Owen Wylie, Lesley
  • At the Rendezvous of Victory
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Letter from the 153rd State
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Living in the Interregnum
    Gordimer, Nadine
  • Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism
    Halim, Hala
  • The Pre-postcolonial and its Enduring Relevance: Afro-Asian Variations in Edwar al-Kharrat’s Texts,
    Halim, Hala Albrecht, Monika
  • Translating Solidarity: An Interview with Nehad Salem
    Halim, Hala
  • Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity
    James, C. L. R. Grimshaw, Anna
  • The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States
    James, C. L. R. McLemee, Scott
  • Introduction: Between a Moment and an Era; The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung
    Lee, Christopher J. Lee, Christopher J.
  • The ‘I’ as Messiah in Césaire’s First Cahier
    McIntosh, Malachi
  • Poetry’s Circumstance and Racial Time: Aimé Césaire, 1935–1945
    Melas, Natalie
  • The Late Style of Bandung Humanism
    Mufti, Aamir R.
  • The Missing Homeland of Edward Said
    Mufti, Aamir R Braidotti, Rosi Gilroy, Paul
  • Permission to Narrate
    Said, Edward W.
  • The Politics of Knowledge
    Said, Edward W.
  • Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors
    Said, Edward W
  • Black Orpheus,
    Sartre, Jean-Paul
  • Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South
    Yoon, Duncan West-Pavlov, Russell
  • ‘Our Forces Have Redoubled’: World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau
    Yoon, Duncan M