During his visit to Cuba in 1968, at the zenith of Cuba’s internationalist and third wordlist efforts, the Martinican intellectual, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire spoke of the necessity of “tropical Marxism,” a non-dogmatic Marxism creatively adapted to the needs of third world countries.

Dr. Awan situates Césaire’s call within his larger intellectual trajectory and his lifelong concern with the stultifying impact of colonialism on the creative abilities of peoples in colonial societies. She traces the impact of Marxist-Hegelian ideas on Césaire’s thinking about tropical Marxism by studying his links with the interwar French intellectual group the Philosophies, the first to translate Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts into French. She also traces the wider resonance of these ideas of restoring to human beings their active and creative abilities in the broader anticolonial discourses influenced by Marxism, particularly those of the Cuban Revolution.