If Toussaint Louverture is the founding figure of Caribbean Critique, Aimé Césaire is surely its greatest and most steadfast practitioner. Césaire's legacy is to have remained faithful to a single axiom in the face of unmitigated and intolerable injustice: fidelity to the revolutionary imperatives of freedom, equality, and fraternity, the unknown implications of which must be at every moment interrogated and experimentally confirmed in the pursuit of the universal, undivided equality of all. While he rightly celebrated the legacy and accomplishments of afro-Atlantic cultures, these specificities never served to ground the ethical and political claims he made against global imperialism. Following his initial invocation of Négritude, Césaire's every intervention brought the claims of universal equality to bear on diverse planes of being, from the poetic to the political. Slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism: the inaugural master of Francophone writing wielded these words with political mastery to shatter the inertial resistance of an intolerable situation.

The lived experience of racism, exclusion, and the systematic impoverishment and dependency of colonized Martinique and Guadeloupe defined Césaire's commitment to overcome the divisive and pernicious effects of colonial subalternity, racial classification, and stigmatization. Following his encounter with Senghor in the 1930s, Césaire sought to affirm the universal legacy of black culture in the face of its systematic debasement, but – as I have argued throughout this book – Césaire largely shunned what we now call ‘identity politics’. Rather, he sustained and renewed the dedication to universal rights he discovered in the struggles of Toussaint Louverture, Grégoire, and Victor Schoelcher. In this struggle, Césaire's unparalleled mastery of an incendiary poetic language was, in a dazzling multiplicity of forums, genres, and modalities, the unerring arme miraculeuse of a singularly Caribbean modality of bloodless, divine violence.

The initial period of political insurgency in the francophone world, in which culture and politics were fundamentally linked under the general name of decolonization, stretched from the 1930s to the 1960s. During this phase, culture and politics, while remaining separate spheres of creativity, they yet informed and responded to one another.