Description: In this inventive and thoughtful study, renowned poet Jason Allen-Paisant provides a timely critical reappraisal of Aimé Césaire's works. The book showcases Césaire as a major Black thinker, whose writings remain deeply relevant to today's crises and debates.
Review Quotes: "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"This is an elegant and inspiring work offering a complex reading of Césaire and demonstrating his extraordinary timeliness still today. Its fairly brief chapters invite development through further engagements with Césaire's rich and wide-ranging poetic works." -- Jane Hiddleston, French Studies"This book is an exciting addition to the existing literature on Négritude, but will also appeal to anyone interested in post-humanism, eco-poetics, and the growing discourse around post-extractivist futures." -- Maisie Lee, Textual Practice"Engagements with Aimé Césaire is manifesto in content and form: a wonderfully compact book, it skilfully delineates Césaire's politicized aesthetic....Engagements is a satiating clarion call, a joyous, taut blast portending a future wholly reliant upon the beleaguered arts, and poetry in particular. Allen-Paisant offers a wide-ranging and well-argued account of Césaire's intellectual thinking, drawing heavily upon his extensive essays and interviews, many yet to be translated." -- Sara Crangle, The Black Scholar