Engagements with Aim Csaire: Thinking with Spirits [Hardcover]

In this inventive and thoughtful study, renowned poet Jason Allen-Paisant provides a timely critical reappraisal of Aim? C?saire's works. The book showcases C?saire as a major Black thinker, whose writings remain deeply relevant to today's crises and debates.Aim? C?saire 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 C?saire's work, Jason Allen-Paisant highlights a set of links it makes between 'spirit,' 'poetry,' and 'knowing'. These explications, setting C?saire'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? C?saire: Thinking with Spiritsis 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? C?saire 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 C?saire'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 C?saire's work articulates for him a new politics of the self.Introduction: Thinking with Spirits: An Unlearning1. (Un)thinking Philosophy2. Possession as Paradigm of Consciousness3. Sound and Otherliness4. Animist Time and the White AnthropoceneCoda: Reawakening an Animist Politics of the SelfWorks CitedIndexJason Allen-Paisant,Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing, lÓ)