Description
Book SynopsisAimé 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 arou
Trade ReviewJason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aimé Césaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Césaire in decades. * Professor Stefano Harney, Academy of Media Arts Cologne - co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study *
Stunning, sensuous, and urgent, Jason Allen-Paisant's poetic meditation on the ecopoetics of Aimé Cesaire is also a wholly original philosophical inquiry into the shifting ways of being human under conditions of coloniality and climate catastrophe. He gives us a vibrant new language, deeply rooted in the ancestral lands and Black vitality of his native Jamaica, to engage the vibrational intelligence of the earth, and open ourselves to a regenerative ethics of life. * Professor Kris Manjapra, Northeastern University - author of Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation *
Beautifully written and propelled by a fascinating new approach and its direct intervention to Aimé Césaire's scholarship, Thinking with Spirits will cement Jason Allen-Paisant's reputation as a rigorous critical thinker. * Professor Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan - author of Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic: The Color of Black in Literary, Philosophical and Theater Discourse *
