  Ultimately, what Césaire was seeking in formulations such as “it should be Marxism and communism at the service of black peoples, not black peoples at the service of the doctrine” was to define the notion of a people by means of culture rather than politics. And consequently he was refusing to just dilute the cultural dimension of the existential response of black peoples to colonial negation in Marxist universalism: Césaire’s “letter” was also, eight years later, a political response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Black Orpheus. Is my decision an expression of “provincialism”, Césaire asked at the end of his letter. “Not at all”, he answered.  “I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism.  There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal’” (Césaire, 2010, 152).