Engagements with Aime Cesaire 9780192867223 Hardback

Aim Csaire 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 Csaire’s work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between ‘spirit,’ ‘poetry,’ and ‘knowing’. These explications, setting Csaire’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 Aim Csaire: 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 Aim Csaire 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 Csaire’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 Csaire’s work articulates for him a new politics of the self.