Christian Filostrat

Christian Filostrat (born 1945) is an American diplomat, recipient of the 1994 Presidential Award and a writer, author of The Beggars’ Pursuit,[1] a novel about political relations between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Gospel of Thomas, his second novel, is on an American intervention in a papal election where a Congolese cardinal is in the running. "Jerome's Pillows," a novel about two nuns sent to the Congo at the end of WWII. He is also the author of Negritude Agonistes, Assimilation Against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyana.

A Négritude specialist, Filostrat is a researcher in the field of politics and literature in the French-speaking Caribbean and the oral tradition and the literature of Africa. Filostrat assesses in what manner issues related to colonialism upended civilizations and affected people’s lives. He examines the disadvantages male dominated societies have imposed on Africa, arguing that greater change will not be discernable until African women achieve equality.

He knew the Negritude founders, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, intimately and documented their works and ideas in Negritude Agonistes. In The Beggars’ Pursuit he retells their personal lives in Paris circa 1935, their foundation of the Negritude movement and their activities at the time of the creation of L’Etudiant Noir, the publication in which Negritude saw first light. He was Damas’s sounding board while Damas was composing his last collection of poems, Mine de Riens. Filostrat organized Damas’s funeral in Washington, D.C., and carried the ashes to Martinique for the eulogy given by Aimé Césaire.[2]

Filostrat is the author of Racial Consciousness and the Social Revolution of Aimé Césaire and at the request of President Senghor lectured on the subject at the University of the Mutants on Gorée island in Senegal in 1980. In Negritude Agonistes, Assimilation Against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyana Filostrat introduces issue No. 3 (May–June 1935) of L'Etudiant Noir, Journal Mensuel de l'Association des Étudiants Martiniquais en France (The Black Student, Monthly Journal of the Martiniquan Student Association in France),[3] in which Aimé Césaire coined the expression and defined the concept of Négritude. Christopher l. Miller, Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University, said: "In 2008 Christian Filostrat published a book that contains negritude’s missing link: an article by Césaire in L’étudiant noir, number 3, May–June 1935."[4]

Filostrat interviewed Frantz Fanon's wife, Josie. The entire interview, as well as a recording of Fanon’s lecture on Félix Houphouët-Boigny's relations with the French government before independence, is on his website.

Works

References

  1. ↑ "The Beggars' Pursuit", Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers.
  2. ↑ "Hommage posthume à Léon-Gontran Damas", Présence africaine, 1979, p 134.
  3. ↑ Christian Filostrat, Negritude Agonistes, Assimilation Against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyana (Cherry Hill, NJ: Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2009), pp. 123-128.
  4. ↑ Christopher l. Miller, "The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and "the Immanent Negro" in 1935 (PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 3, May 2010), p. 743.

External links

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