Engagements with Aimé Césaire

In this inventive and thoughtful study, renowned poet Jason Allen-Paisant provides a timely critical reappraisal of Aimé Césaire's works. The book showcases Césaire as a major Black thinker, whose writings remain deeply relevant to today's crises and debates.

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Aimé Césaire is due a major critical reinterpretation and that is exactly what this book carries out. Through an in-depth grasp of the trajectory and core significance of Césaire's work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between 'spirit,' 'poetry,' and 'knowing'. These explications, setting Césaire's work in relation to a rigorously accounted for set of influences, reframe how we understand his writings, enhancing their philosophical, rather than merely political, aspects.

Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits is about more than Negritude (which has come to mean something less than a deep poetic sensibility with its own aspirational aesthetics and metaphysics, and rather something more like a fantasy-ridden iteration of pan-Africanism). It shows an Aimé Césaire deeply relevant to today: to the crises of ecological collapse, capitalist dystopias, and ideologies predicated upon fear and the threat of foreigners; and to contemporary chatter around interspecies collaboration and the need to rethink the entrepreneurial subject of Western political thought.

Recasting Césaire's work is not just a matter of transforming a significant figure. It is also about rethinking legacies. This book is an engagement in the truest sense--the work of a contemporary Black poet who expounds the ways in which Césaire's work articulates for him a new politics of the self.