Aimé Césaire’s Insensé Réveil

The introduction, Aimé Césaire’s Insensé Réveil, delineates a theory called “crossings” that breaks away from a Western-centric understanding of madness through Césaire’s overlooked critique of psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni and Césaire’s exploration of madness, psychiatry, and empire in his life and works, specifically in Discours sur la colonialisme and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Moreover, the chapter explains what it means to decolonize (empire)icism. (Empire)icism argues that the essence of an invariant madness or an interiority of another individual is produceable and can be captured through language by a knowing subject. This fantasy in (empire)icism is inherently imperialistic and colonizing. And the introduction shows that an empirical view of the mind can be found not only in science, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis but in the language of literary criticism, theory, and cultural discourse. In order to decolonize empiricism, the book moves away from a language that suppresses and alienates alternative understandings of the mind and colonial traumas toward an interpretative model of understanding madness; one that brings in the epistemic interrogation of global empire.