AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was best known as the cocreator of the concept of negritude. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aime Cesaire. He is the author of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader and translator of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo. A. JAMES ARNOLD is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Cesaire's complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aime Cesaire. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual;… he is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University.