Cannibalizing Doudouisme, Conceptualizing the Morne: Suzanne Césaire's Caribbean Ecopoetics

Focusing on Suzanne Césaire's essays published in Tropiques (1941–45), this study examines how through key concepts such as morne, homme plante, cannibal, camouflage, and doudou, Césaire articulates a Caribbean ecopoetics. As a conceptual cannibalism and a declaration of cultural and civilizational existence, her ecopoetics is an emancipatory aesthetics that annihilates the tenets of exoticism and mimicry and excavates the historical and political matrix of the Caribbean landscape. This study also expands the epistemological underpinnings of the Euro-American ecocritical canon and brings ecocriticism to Caribbean studies through the rehabilitation of Césaire. Ultimately, the essay argues that, as the spokes-theorist of Tropiques, Césaire markedly articulated meaningful prefaces to ongoing debates on entangled constructions of identity and land consciousness in Caribbean critical theory.