Tragedy and Decolonization: From Pessimism to Emancipation

From the Haitian revolution to the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation, the project of decolonization has always faced seemingly overwhelming odds. The material, symbolic and psychic violence of imperialism and colonialism has meant that anti-colonial politics has often taken the guise of an “art of the impossible.” The history of decolonization has often been written as a chronicle of defeats, failures and betrayals: formal colonialism replaced by a similarly exploitative neo-colonialism, emancipators morphing into tyrants, historical breaks devolving into rituals of repetition. In the twentieth century, many of the greatest anti-colonial theorists and militants turned to tragedy—as a literary genre, a poetic practice, and a historical mode—to consider the ways in which decolonization appeared haunted by many of the dynamics that, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, characterised that dramatic genre: the fated fall of the hero, the seemingly inescapable weight of history, how action can often generate consequences that invert its original intentions. But for figures like the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Cesaire or the Trinidadian heterodox Marxist and historian C.L.R. James, to think anti-colonial revolution through the prism of tragedy was not to wallow in some melancholy wisdom, but to confront the negativities and complexities inhering in the most inspiring collective struggles for global freedom. But how can literary form enrich, and not trivialize, our understanding of complex historical phenomena? If tragedy marks the anti-colonial project, how can we refuse the temptations of political pessimism? Does tragedy limit, or expand, our horizons of the possible?

In this course, we will explore the nexus of tragedy and decolonization by reading plays, theoretical statements and political texts that tried to rethink the tragic through the prism of anti-colonialism. We will consider how James’s multiple rewritings (as a historian and a dramaturg) of the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution were marked by his understanding of ancient and modern tragedy, as well as by his reflections on revolutionary possibilities in the present. We will also investigate how Césaire’s idea of European fascism as a “colonial boomerang” and his representations of anti-colonial leaders from Henri-Christophe to Patrice Lumumba involve powerful reinventions of tragedy. Finally, we will consider how a tragic anti-colonialism was also developed—in theory, practice and dramaturgy—by a range of different authors, from Lorraine Hansberrry to Frantz Fanon, from Wole Soyinka to Ghassan Kanafani.