The Great Camouflage

The Great Camouflage translates and assembles in one volume the seven articles Suzanne Cesaire wrote for the cultural journal Tropiques during the politically and culturally repressive years of the Vichy Regime in Martinique. Cesaire engages anthropology, esthetics, surrealism, history, and poetry as she grapples with questions of power and deception, self-deception, the economic slipknot of a post-slavery debt system, identity and inauthenticity, bad faith, psychological and affective aberration, and cultural zombification. All are caught in the web of "the great camouflage." The collection provides a multi-faceted portrait of Cesaire, and includes short writings from others who wrote passionately about her, or in collaboration with her, including Andre Breton, Andre Masson, Rene Menil, Daniel Maximin, and her husband, Aime Cesaire, and daughter, Ina Cesaire.