BOOK NEWS: A Critical Reassessment of Aimé Césaire's poetry

Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits

BY JASON ALLEN-PAISANT

Oxford UP, April 2024

ISBN: 9780192867223

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/engagements-with-aim-csaire-9780192867223?cc=us&lang=en&#

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.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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.

"Jason 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

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).