Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language

Evidence

A.C.: I don’t deny French influences myself. Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me. But I want to emphasize very strongly that - while using as a point of departure the elements that French literature gave me - at the same time I have always strived to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage. In other words, for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the project of ‘Antillean French’ or ‘black French’ — a key concept for how the colonized writer reclaims the colonizer’s tongue.
• XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory of language appropriation; foreshadows how Islamophobia readings will address the repurposing of ‘Western’ categories like secularism or Orientalism itself. — connects to: A colonial script meant to sever ties became the medium of national solidarity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 470; Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 516; Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 667 (+10 more)

Related

• Colonial writers must renounce inherited forms to gain their own voice (similarity 0.86)
• Surrealism served colonized writers as a weapon against colonial language (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.80)
• The colonial seeks French refinement to prove he has measured up (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial discourse variants are incommensurable scripts not reducible to one model (similarity 0.78)
• Decolonized writers transformed English fiction via imported-colonial language (similarity 0.78)
• Language’s irreducible privacy, rooted in mortality, fuels colonial rage at the colonized (similarity 0.78)
• Language mastery determines how human a colonized black man is considered (similarity 0.78)
• The colonized Antillean internalizes the culture that enslaves him (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Surrealism served colonized writers as a weapon against colonial language #exemplifies (0.88) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 287
• Colonized writers internalize the colonizer’s aesthetic to erase their own identity #complicates (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 330