ABSTRACT
Writer, poet, playwright, philosopher and politician, Aime Césaire (1913–2008) was one of the founders of the postcolonial movement whose oeuvre both drew from and advanced the surrealist movement. For Césaire, surrealism – here understood as a radical empiricism – made it possible to expose the logics and rationalities of coloniality in which what was claimed to be rational, real, normal and even scientific, rendered imperialist relations invisible, normalising objectifications and consequently also normalising both inequality and injustices. Turning to the era of planetary crisis, this chapter proposes that Césaire’s surrealism contra the logics of objectification, offers ethnographers of neoliberal governance a suite of techniques to refute the creation of a “new normal”: market-driven governance, in which marketability frames democratic agreement; utilities are commodified, financialisation defines value, and both contract science and spin-doctoring seek to market doubt, discredit independent research and justify inaction.
