Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits

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Jason Allen-Paisant (Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing, University of Manchester)

Engagements with Aimé Césaire

Thinking with Spirits

Jason Allen-Paisant (Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing, Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing, University of Manchester)

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English

Oxford University Press
30 April 2024

Literary theory; Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Literary studies: poetry & poets; Social & political philosophy; Politics & government

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.

By: Jason Allen-Paisant (Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing University of Manchester)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 222mm, Width: 145mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 330g
ISBN: 9780192867223
ISBN 10: 0192867229
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 30 April 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction: Thinking with Spirits: An Unlearning 1: (Un)thinking Philosophy 2: Possession as Paradigm of Consciousness 3: Sound and Otherliness 4: Animist Time and the White Anthropocene Coda: Reawakening an Animist Politics of the Self Works Cited Index

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing in the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. An alumnus of the University of the West Indies (Mona), the University of Oxford, and the École normale supérieure (Ulm), he is the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial (2017) and of two books of poetry: Thinking with Trees (winner of the Poetry category of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize) and Self-Portrait as Othello (winner of the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection).

Reviews for Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits

Jason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aim'e C'esaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poesis. The most original and inspiring reading of C'esaire in decades. * Professor Stefano Harney, Professor Stefano Harney, Academy of Media Arts Cologne - co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study *