The Ir/Replaceable and “Walking in the Rays of a Beautiful Sun”: Dante Alighieri’s and Aimé Césaire’s Deployments of the Solar

Adopting a longue durée approach and drawing on etymology and translation, as
well as a certain critical account of how we have inherited current notions of the
human, the present chapter works through the notion of replacement in conversation
with two poets whose lives are separated by centuries – Dante Alighieri
(1265–1321) and Aimé Césaire (1913–2008). Contextualizing this longue durée approach
means laying out the variables of what scholar, poet, and writer Jason
Allen-Paisant articulates as “the complicity of Christian ethics in the imperial history
of the West” (Allen-Paisant 2021: 670) and considering how this complicity
has itself informed and generated the concept of replacement.1
A longue durée approach affords a critical lens of analysis that thinks through
Christianity – and notably Christendom (Slabodsky 2018: 216) – as a doctrine of replacement.
Within this purview, Dante and Césaire’s long poems stand as end-ofthe-
world narratives. Dante’s katabatic structure announcing a break with the
pagan ethos of co-existence and presaging the emergence of replacement as an imperial
logic, while Césaire’s deploys katabasis to perform a complex reckoning with
the world to which Dante’s poem turns.