For the Love of Revolution: Rene Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life

My presentation reflects on the extraordinary life of Haitian writer and one-time communist militant René Depestre, whose global 20th-century peregrinations provide a window onto the political and poetic formations that emerged among key Caribbean and Black Atlantic thinkers in the decades following the second World War. Placing Depestre within the frame of both postcolonial Caribbean and postwar European literary and political movements, tracing Depestre’s relentless displacements illuminates the colonial and postcolonial networks, political principles, and artistic perspectives that shaped 20th-century Atlantic modernity. In this paper, I consider the questions raised by Depestre’s oxymoronic identity as an individualist Marxist-Leninist erotic poet – his insistently idiosyncratic Haitianness and equally insistent faith in a global anti-capitalist project – questions about radical Black subjecthood that marked Leftist politics throughout the latter decades of the 20th century and that continue to resonate in the present.