This is a repository copy of Unthinking philosophy: Aimé Césaire, poetry, and the politics of Western knowledge.

This article is an attempt at reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze, considering how the latter’s writings on the image might produce a fresh understanding of Harris’s art of fiction. To do this, I highlight the interest that both Harris and Deleuze have in the theatre as a medium for illustrating their conception of the image in language and thought. Discussing mainly the novel Carnival, I show how Harris assimilates narrative to the theatrical medium itself as both a concrete and abstract space of spontaneous multiplicity, and relate this to Deleuze’s understanding of the image and of the text as objects of movement and of becoming. I also relate Harris’s art of fiction to Deleuze’s critique of conventional mimesis and its subject/object binarism, showing how codes and conventions of theatrical communication (and a readerly self-conscious perception of this) are injected into Harris’s narrative protocols, creating an aesthetic that communicates to or, more specifically, performs with, the reader in ways that challenge the conception of narrative as self-contained representation. In sum, this paper demonstrates the way in which Harris’s narrative evokes, and is evoked by, the play of theatre — in other words its quintessentially differential nature, through images that resist the very concept of representation.

I examine the staging of time, justice and performance in The Trial of Governor Eyre, investigating what this site-specific performance reveals about the experience of time in the context of colonial violence. In doing so, I show that the work’s discourse on temporality reflects a vital sense of performativity within an Afro-diasporic context. The work’s use of temporality, besides reflecting a cultural adaptation, allows for a remoulding of forms, coupling law and theatre in confronting Eyre’s mass executions of 1865. This remoulding of forms (law as theatre, theatre as law) provides a potential for postcolonial witnessing not available when either performance protocol is used on its own. Using Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s concept of ‘misperformance’, I argue that this play-trial arises out of a Benjaminian sense of historicity, providing an experience of inchoate justice that finds fulfilment in the present. The Trial of Governor Eyre points, more broadly, to a new ‘problem-space’ in African diaspora political theory, where resistance against colonial structures of oppression is increasingly mounted on the ground of justice itself and through which the legal apparatuses of colonialism become a site of critical memory. Through the play’s deployment of ritual and its plastic moulding of time, 1865 is enlisted as a key historical conjuncture for thinking through the cultural disenchantment of race, but also of the formalist, creative resources that can be mobilised for reimagining humanness in the contemporary moment.

This article considers the Western civilisational ethos of the human person as an ethos of mastery with respect to the natural world. The age of climate disaster has begun to turn this ethos into an object for thought, as is evidenced by an increasing number of eco-poetic and eco-philosophical writings and reflections that seek to re-think or un-think prevailing Western construals of the human. My own entry point into the conversation is through Afro-diasporic knowledge systems that evidence construals of the human being not rooted in the Western paradigm of the individual. I ask how such knowledge systems help us to achieve a necessary thought revolution with respect to the current dangers of our technological civilisation (particularly climate disaster and capitalist extractivism). I emphasise the fact that animist thinking systems have for centuries, due to the violences of modernity, existed in a parallel space and time to what I call 'capitalist time' and propose that the failures and crises of Western industrial/technological civilisation warrant renewed examinations of their benefits in human living practices.

This article offers a critical reading of Chemin de fer, a play written by Congolese author Julian Mabiala Bissila and directed by Haitian director Miracson Saint-Val as part of the Quatre Chemins Theatre Festival in Haiti in 2017. It discusses the uses and meanings of the absurd in both the text and the performance, showing its links to the theme of violence as this relates to the Congolese Civil War, the immediate context of the play. The article also shows how Haitian director and actor Miracson Saint-Val grounds his performance in Vodou, using the theory of "ethnodrama" developed by the ethno-psychiatrist Louis Mars. This approach enables us to see how the play lends itself to the juxtaposition of several historical realities, and the possible resonances between the Congolese Civil War and Haitian history and contemporary reality. All of this raises an important question which this paper tries to answer: can we speak of a 'theatre of the absurd' in the context of colonialism, one in which the absurd, the tragic and ritual performance are necessarily intertwined?