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

About the Author
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 Ecole normale superieure (Ulm), he is the author of Theatre 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
Jason Allen-Paisant introduces us to a pedagogy of spirit in which the rigid divisions of Western thought, and the rigid Western interpretations of Aime Cesaire, are transformed into a homage to the daily inspirited materialities of African/diasporic social poiesis. The most original and inspiring reading of Cesaire 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 Aime 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 Aime Cesaire'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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192867223
Author Jason Allen-Paisant
Format Hardback
Page Count 160
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 330g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 145mm * 14mm