Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez | University of Oregon (original) (raw)
Papers by Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy, 2024
In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved,... more In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved, Black populations in the Caribbean and South America in order to theorize a colonial mode of conceiving of freedom at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mode is marked by the figure of the promise, enacting a notion of freedom as a constantly deferred, external compensation. Indeed, instead of an immediate decision deeming the practice of enslavement and trade of human beings unacceptable, and an effective liberation of the enslaved Black populations in these different emancipation proclamations, the various histories of manumission in Latin America and the Caribbean show a long series of political and legal attempts to reduce and limit the extent of the slave trade that deferred the process of liberation for decades. Moreover, in many of these territories the practice did not end with the official proclamation of emancipation but was continued by illegal practices and mutations into legal forms of exploitation and oppression that are still operative today. After outlining this first trajectory, reconstructing the promise of manumission in the historical examples of Martinique (as read by Édouard Glissant) and La Gran Colombia and the Republic of Nueva Granada (contemporary Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), I analyze a second mode of investigation in examples of individual and collective strategies of liberation
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2023
This article offers the first step in an ongoing project of revisiting the foundations of latinid... more This article offers the first step in an ongoing project of revisiting the foundations of latinidad and lo latinoamericano by focusing on the exclusions enacted by thechistory of these concepts and the cultural and political identity that comes with them. In conversation with Susana Nuccetelli and Omar Rivera, the author focuses on two emblematic authors in the history of Latin American philosophy (Simón Bolívar and José de Vasconcelos) that are usually read as offering a novel, liberatory conception of the Latin American reality/identity, categorically different from European and AngloAmerican conceptions. This common reading of some of the foundational texts on Latin American identity, however, conceals not only the active, textual removal of Blackness in the construction of this identity, but also the literal subtraction of Black bodies, lives, and histories from the Latin American nations and communities. Both of these elements are an explicit part of the philosophical programs of Bolívar and Vasconcelos. The article shows how the thought and political practice of these two authors, celebrated in different ways as foundational of what we understand as Latin America today, exemplify the exclusionary historical demarcation of latinidad.
Ideas y Valores, 2022
En este texto reconstruyo una concepción decolonial de la belleza, a partir del pensa-miento de R... more En este texto reconstruyo una concepción decolonial de la belleza, a partir del pensa-miento de Robin Wall Kimmerer y Édouard Glissant, de acuerdo con la cual la belleza constituye una condición del mundo que, no obstante, debemos cuidar. En estos dos pensamientos, provenientes de tradiciones diferentes, la belleza es tanto lo que se ve amenazado por el proyecto colonial occidental, como lo que permite su resistencia decolonial. Reconstruir la belleza del mundo es necesario y, sin embargo, imposible: su búsqueda implica no solo atender al llamado de las diferencias, sino también a las instancias en las que se niegan a ser escuchadas.
Human Geography, 2022
A year ago, many would have considered the idea of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez becoming the... more A year ago, many would have considered the idea of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez becoming the President and the VicePresident of Colombia a delirium in a country with 200 years of right-wing political domination. In this contention piece, wereflect on critical points of their government’s agenda, some of its challenges, and their strategies to face them. To do that, wedraw from the election’s extensive press coverage and our own experience as scholar-activists in Colombia and the United States. We also combine our interdisciplinary analytical lenses (Sociology, Philosophy, Feminist Political Ecology, and Critical Race Feminism) to shed light on the complexity of this current political conjecture, the interplay between hope and despair,and the general affective politics that traverses our understanding
Memory, Migration and (De)colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond, edited by Jack Daniel Webb, Rod Westmaas, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and William Tantam. (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2020)., 2020
Although the place of Glissant’s philosophy of decolonisation in relation to Fanon and Césaire h... more Although the place of Glissant’s philosophy of decolonisation in relation to Fanon and Césaire has been theorized by some authors, the emphasis has not been placed on the fact that Glissant refers to both his predecessors as examples of the absence of a link between the two tactics of resistance – un détour [a tactical diversion] and un retour [a return]. For Glissant, both Césaire and Fanon are still diverters and not properly producers of a new reality, of a real Caribbean territory and history. Thus, following previous analyses by commentators, but departing from them (or adding a new layer, the layer of spatiality that should be combined with a traditional analysis of temporality), this chapter defends the idea that Glissant locates his decolonial thought between Césaire and Fanon: it neither advocates a reconstruction that points to a past located elsewhere (Africa), nor recommends the rejection and replacement of the here/now with a different, unknown spatiality and temporality. For Glissant, the locus of resistance is located in the present and in the possibilities of decolonization already contained in the Caribbean, although concealed and understated. This chapter begins by showing what is, according to Glissant, the necessary conjunction between the different tactics of resistance, then focuses on some of Césaire’s and Fanon’s texts in order to show why they do not offer this necessary link. The final section comes back to Glissant to analyze the notion of l’antillanité as the possibility of truly focusing on a here/now as a multilayered strategy of resistance.
Philosophical Readings, 2019
Philosophical Readings, 2019
What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use... more What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use the term 'trauma' here in a more technical sense, or should we give it the less strict connotation of an extreme form of an event in which the past no longer stays just in the past and the future never ceases to demand something from the pres-ent? In this paper I analyze the image of the abyss, used by Édouard Glissant to evoke poetically one of the beginnings of the Caribbean, as leading to a paradox on the attitude toward history: Caribbean communities have been burdened with a non-history that feels, at the same time, like too much history. I show that this image resembles the paradoxical structure of trauma developed in the works of Cathy Caruth, according to whom trauma is a paradoxical structure of experience in which the subject (or a community) is painfully possessed by an image that they have barely perceived and that is so minimal that it cannot be controlled. However, I argue, there are limits to this resemblance. I focus on the question whether the (traumatic) paradox is escapable in this region of the world, that is, whether Caribbean communities can be de-traumatized, and what are the connections of this possibility with the question, central to Glissant, of decolonization. In order to answer these questions, I analyze a central feature of the Caribbean history according to Glissant, transversality, to show in what way the paradox of history can be loosened.
Diacritics, 2018
This paper proposes a new way to read José Martí’s idea of “Nuestra América”, one that focus on t... more This paper proposes a new way to read José Martí’s idea of “Nuestra América”, one that focus on the mode of the call for unity toward liberation and decoloniality. In particular, I offer the arguments for this Latin American unity that would define a collective form of resistance against our colonial past and present (Europe) and an imperialist future (USA). It can be argued that it is extremely difficult to translate the Cuban author’s thought by itself to our contemporary struggles, and that this notion runs the risk of being an outdated, naïve, and even detrimental reduction of a too complex racial reality. In my paper, I defend a way in which this notion is still relevant today by alluding to the mode of a decolonial return to one's own land in the works of of Édouard Glissant’s and Gloria Anzaldúa. In these two authors I see elements of the criticism of a colonial rootedness and filiation, linking a decolonial attitude toward the land with a particular way of returning to it: one that challenges a mythical, pure territorial space, and also reimagines the temporality of the return by focusing on the present. With the help of this novel gesture of returning to the land, I argue that Martí's nuestra América voices a call for unity and independence that still has value beyond its undeniable shortcomings.
My purpose is to reconstruct the pure concept of recognition and its fundamental characteristics,... more My purpose is to reconstruct the pure concept of recognition and its fundamental characteristics, based on the analysis made by Hegel at the beginning of “Selbstbewußtsein”, in the "Phenomenology of Spirit". For this purpose, I begin with a concise reconstruction of the pure concept of recognition, which shall, further on, be analyzed in light of the first experience the consciousness has of this recognition, namely, the Master-Slave dialectic. As a third step, this text will try to deal with consequences such an interpretation of the pure concept implies, regarding the characterization of the spirit. The analysis will suggest, among other things, that regarding the relation between recognition and spirit, a careful study is necessary: one that not only includes the pure concepts involved in the process, but also the experience the natural consciousness has of these concepts, just as presented in the Phenomenology, even though on this experience only a few remarks will be made.
Books by Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Philosophical Readings, 2019
In this special issue we asked ourselves what does it mean to think Colombia philosophically, and... more In this special issue we asked ourselves what does it mean to think Colombia philosophically, and who has been producing this kind of thinking in recent years. Our interest was at least twofold: on the one hand, we were interested in showing the various forms in which the discipline of philosophy in Colombia has taken up the task of approaching its own present by questioning, making explicit, critically addressing and/or “reading” different aspects of Colombia’s reality and history. On the other hand, we wanted to explore the shape that philosophy takes when it is directed towards such a specific object of study: what kinds of voices are made audible and are produced in the process, what methodologies need to be questioned and which ones need to be thought anew, and specially, what does it mean to think philosophically in this context when most of the history of the discipline has explicitly ignored the singularity of non-European, non-Western forms of thought.
¿A qué suena La Perse? Prácticas artísticas contemporáneas y experiencias de comunidad
Book Reviews by Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Hypatia, 2022
Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales brings together the result... more Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales brings together the results of more than a year of workshops, exhibitions, public interventions, reflections, and artistic manifestations by the Colectivo Ayllu. Located in Spain, this action group brings together collective research and artistic and political intervention from racialized migrants and queer, sexual, and gender dissidents from former Spanish colonies all over the world. Devuélvannos el Oro includes more than thirty documents of this work, many of which were included in the exhibition of the same name organized in Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero Madrid in 2017. Across a wide variety of genres and styles, the collection comprises photo-performances, poems, visual interventions, personal reflections, and essays. Many of the documents, like their creators and the collective itself, resist being included in the traditional categories with which we have been taught to understand the world, performing the very disruption that the book aims to describe and prescribe, a “shifting/orgasming [corrimien to] of the normative forms of rationalist and intellectualocentric knowledge” (10).
Philosophy Today, 2021
Glissant and the Middle Passage is a unique book. With the exception of Sam Coombes's recent book... more Glissant and the Middle Passage is a unique book. With the exception of Sam Coombes's recent book Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (2018), which focuses mostly on Glissant's latter philosophical thought, the majority of the monographs in English that have theorized Glissant's politics and aesthetics have focused on his fiction, with only brief mentions of his collections of essays, manifestos, and theoretical works (cf.
Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, 2021
What does it mean to creolize something in an academic, theoretical context? Furthermore, how do ... more What does it mean to creolize something in an academic, theoretical context? Furthermore, how do we creolize the thought of an established, canonical figure such as G. W. F. Hegel? In the introduction to Creolizing Hegel, Michael Monahan explains the double register in which the word is taken by the theoretical movement affiliated with a project of creolizing the canon. On the one hand, creolization points, in a descriptive sense, to the emergence of peoples, languages, and practices out of the contact between diverse cultures and traditions, specifically in the American continent, as a consequence of its colonization by Europe. In a descriptive sense, creolizing means to uncover the clues, to follow the traces that show in what way traditions are never pure, uncontaminated, unambiguous, and how the canon (the authors and ways of thinking taken as authoritative) has been created out of clashes, erased conversations, removed influences, and so on. On the other hand, in a prescriptive sense, the call for creolization demands the explicit decentering of these central figures by putting them in conversation with unlikely interlocutors, in uncomfortable spaces and times, with regard to foreign questions and problems. As Jane Gordon puts it on her outstanding reflection on creolizing theory, the call demands "avoiding treating worlds of meaning as if they are already completely constituted, finished, and closed and instead writing as if we too are part of their construction and therefore broaden or foreclose, empower or silence many diverse and unequal coparticipants living and dead" (Gordon 2014, 197).
ALH Online Review, 2020
In Working Juju, Andrea Shaw Nevins offers a multidisciplinary and multimedia analysis of works o... more In Working Juju, Andrea Shaw Nevins offers a multidisciplinary and multimedia analysis of works of cultural production that, in some way, manifest a concern with the broad notion of "the fantastic" in the Caribbean. Remaining faithful to the polysemy of the term Juju, as it relates to forms of religious beliefs and practices of magic across continents and in different times of history, Shaw Nevins's approach to the fantastic encompasses a wide variety of genres such as novels, songs, films, history books, and journalistic writing. Yet it limits its scope to works in English and is trained mostly on cultural productions having to do with Jamaica and Haiti. Even though this linguistic and geographical constraint could narrow too much the scope of an investigation that promises to be about the "Caribbean fantastic," the wide variety of media considered as objects of the analysis actually broadens this focus to give us an impressive range of practices, voices, approaches, and textures to consider. This interdisciplinary consideration of the fantastic is doubtless one of the strengths of the book; plus, the author's methodology suggests that the investigative work could lead to many other places and languages. How would this project look like in a multilingual, geographically extensive form? Is it possible to conceive of a "Caribbean fantastic," taking the region as a unity of analysis, even if complex and multifocal?
Edited Volumes by Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez
Rowman & Littlefield, 2024
Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant ... more Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant intervention that takes the concept to a new and unwonted place. Brilliantly edited by Kris Sealey and Benjamin Davis, this germinal collection of essays—with the Frankfurt School firmly in its sights, as well as the formidable canon of Continental philosophical texts that subtend it—opens the way to an astonishing idea: by methodologically focusing on Caribbean intellectual resources and its fertile thinkers, a creolized critical theory aims ‘to demonstrate the critical interventions from modes of thinking for which Black and Native death is not a side issue, but rather what is most urgent for critically re-imagining the category of the human.’ This powerful turn toward demarks another shift in the geography of reason, but it also lays claim to the rejected insight of a critical European blindness.
—Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future.
—Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy, 2024
In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved,... more In this text, I consider two examples in the history of emancipation and manumission of enslaved, Black populations in the Caribbean and South America in order to theorize a colonial mode of conceiving of freedom at play in the first half of the nineteenth century. This mode is marked by the figure of the promise, enacting a notion of freedom as a constantly deferred, external compensation. Indeed, instead of an immediate decision deeming the practice of enslavement and trade of human beings unacceptable, and an effective liberation of the enslaved Black populations in these different emancipation proclamations, the various histories of manumission in Latin America and the Caribbean show a long series of political and legal attempts to reduce and limit the extent of the slave trade that deferred the process of liberation for decades. Moreover, in many of these territories the practice did not end with the official proclamation of emancipation but was continued by illegal practices and mutations into legal forms of exploitation and oppression that are still operative today. After outlining this first trajectory, reconstructing the promise of manumission in the historical examples of Martinique (as read by Édouard Glissant) and La Gran Colombia and the Republic of Nueva Granada (contemporary Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), I analyze a second mode of investigation in examples of individual and collective strategies of liberation
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2023
This article offers the first step in an ongoing project of revisiting the foundations of latinid... more This article offers the first step in an ongoing project of revisiting the foundations of latinidad and lo latinoamericano by focusing on the exclusions enacted by thechistory of these concepts and the cultural and political identity that comes with them. In conversation with Susana Nuccetelli and Omar Rivera, the author focuses on two emblematic authors in the history of Latin American philosophy (Simón Bolívar and José de Vasconcelos) that are usually read as offering a novel, liberatory conception of the Latin American reality/identity, categorically different from European and AngloAmerican conceptions. This common reading of some of the foundational texts on Latin American identity, however, conceals not only the active, textual removal of Blackness in the construction of this identity, but also the literal subtraction of Black bodies, lives, and histories from the Latin American nations and communities. Both of these elements are an explicit part of the philosophical programs of Bolívar and Vasconcelos. The article shows how the thought and political practice of these two authors, celebrated in different ways as foundational of what we understand as Latin America today, exemplify the exclusionary historical demarcation of latinidad.
Ideas y Valores, 2022
En este texto reconstruyo una concepción decolonial de la belleza, a partir del pensa-miento de R... more En este texto reconstruyo una concepción decolonial de la belleza, a partir del pensa-miento de Robin Wall Kimmerer y Édouard Glissant, de acuerdo con la cual la belleza constituye una condición del mundo que, no obstante, debemos cuidar. En estos dos pensamientos, provenientes de tradiciones diferentes, la belleza es tanto lo que se ve amenazado por el proyecto colonial occidental, como lo que permite su resistencia decolonial. Reconstruir la belleza del mundo es necesario y, sin embargo, imposible: su búsqueda implica no solo atender al llamado de las diferencias, sino también a las instancias en las que se niegan a ser escuchadas.
Human Geography, 2022
A year ago, many would have considered the idea of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez becoming the... more A year ago, many would have considered the idea of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez becoming the President and the VicePresident of Colombia a delirium in a country with 200 years of right-wing political domination. In this contention piece, wereflect on critical points of their government’s agenda, some of its challenges, and their strategies to face them. To do that, wedraw from the election’s extensive press coverage and our own experience as scholar-activists in Colombia and the United States. We also combine our interdisciplinary analytical lenses (Sociology, Philosophy, Feminist Political Ecology, and Critical Race Feminism) to shed light on the complexity of this current political conjecture, the interplay between hope and despair,and the general affective politics that traverses our understanding
Memory, Migration and (De)colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond, edited by Jack Daniel Webb, Rod Westmaas, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and William Tantam. (Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2020)., 2020
Although the place of Glissant’s philosophy of decolonisation in relation to Fanon and Césaire h... more Although the place of Glissant’s philosophy of decolonisation in relation to Fanon and Césaire has been theorized by some authors, the emphasis has not been placed on the fact that Glissant refers to both his predecessors as examples of the absence of a link between the two tactics of resistance – un détour [a tactical diversion] and un retour [a return]. For Glissant, both Césaire and Fanon are still diverters and not properly producers of a new reality, of a real Caribbean territory and history. Thus, following previous analyses by commentators, but departing from them (or adding a new layer, the layer of spatiality that should be combined with a traditional analysis of temporality), this chapter defends the idea that Glissant locates his decolonial thought between Césaire and Fanon: it neither advocates a reconstruction that points to a past located elsewhere (Africa), nor recommends the rejection and replacement of the here/now with a different, unknown spatiality and temporality. For Glissant, the locus of resistance is located in the present and in the possibilities of decolonization already contained in the Caribbean, although concealed and understated. This chapter begins by showing what is, according to Glissant, the necessary conjunction between the different tactics of resistance, then focuses on some of Césaire’s and Fanon’s texts in order to show why they do not offer this necessary link. The final section comes back to Glissant to analyze the notion of l’antillanité as the possibility of truly focusing on a here/now as a multilayered strategy of resistance.
Philosophical Readings, 2019
Philosophical Readings, 2019
What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use... more What do we mean when we describe the history of the Caribbean as traumatic? Is it possible to use the term 'trauma' here in a more technical sense, or should we give it the less strict connotation of an extreme form of an event in which the past no longer stays just in the past and the future never ceases to demand something from the pres-ent? In this paper I analyze the image of the abyss, used by Édouard Glissant to evoke poetically one of the beginnings of the Caribbean, as leading to a paradox on the attitude toward history: Caribbean communities have been burdened with a non-history that feels, at the same time, like too much history. I show that this image resembles the paradoxical structure of trauma developed in the works of Cathy Caruth, according to whom trauma is a paradoxical structure of experience in which the subject (or a community) is painfully possessed by an image that they have barely perceived and that is so minimal that it cannot be controlled. However, I argue, there are limits to this resemblance. I focus on the question whether the (traumatic) paradox is escapable in this region of the world, that is, whether Caribbean communities can be de-traumatized, and what are the connections of this possibility with the question, central to Glissant, of decolonization. In order to answer these questions, I analyze a central feature of the Caribbean history according to Glissant, transversality, to show in what way the paradox of history can be loosened.
Diacritics, 2018
This paper proposes a new way to read José Martí’s idea of “Nuestra América”, one that focus on t... more This paper proposes a new way to read José Martí’s idea of “Nuestra América”, one that focus on the mode of the call for unity toward liberation and decoloniality. In particular, I offer the arguments for this Latin American unity that would define a collective form of resistance against our colonial past and present (Europe) and an imperialist future (USA). It can be argued that it is extremely difficult to translate the Cuban author’s thought by itself to our contemporary struggles, and that this notion runs the risk of being an outdated, naïve, and even detrimental reduction of a too complex racial reality. In my paper, I defend a way in which this notion is still relevant today by alluding to the mode of a decolonial return to one's own land in the works of of Édouard Glissant’s and Gloria Anzaldúa. In these two authors I see elements of the criticism of a colonial rootedness and filiation, linking a decolonial attitude toward the land with a particular way of returning to it: one that challenges a mythical, pure territorial space, and also reimagines the temporality of the return by focusing on the present. With the help of this novel gesture of returning to the land, I argue that Martí's nuestra América voices a call for unity and independence that still has value beyond its undeniable shortcomings.
My purpose is to reconstruct the pure concept of recognition and its fundamental characteristics,... more My purpose is to reconstruct the pure concept of recognition and its fundamental characteristics, based on the analysis made by Hegel at the beginning of “Selbstbewußtsein”, in the "Phenomenology of Spirit". For this purpose, I begin with a concise reconstruction of the pure concept of recognition, which shall, further on, be analyzed in light of the first experience the consciousness has of this recognition, namely, the Master-Slave dialectic. As a third step, this text will try to deal with consequences such an interpretation of the pure concept implies, regarding the characterization of the spirit. The analysis will suggest, among other things, that regarding the relation between recognition and spirit, a careful study is necessary: one that not only includes the pure concepts involved in the process, but also the experience the natural consciousness has of these concepts, just as presented in the Phenomenology, even though on this experience only a few remarks will be made.
Philosophical Readings, 2019
In this special issue we asked ourselves what does it mean to think Colombia philosophically, and... more In this special issue we asked ourselves what does it mean to think Colombia philosophically, and who has been producing this kind of thinking in recent years. Our interest was at least twofold: on the one hand, we were interested in showing the various forms in which the discipline of philosophy in Colombia has taken up the task of approaching its own present by questioning, making explicit, critically addressing and/or “reading” different aspects of Colombia’s reality and history. On the other hand, we wanted to explore the shape that philosophy takes when it is directed towards such a specific object of study: what kinds of voices are made audible and are produced in the process, what methodologies need to be questioned and which ones need to be thought anew, and specially, what does it mean to think philosophically in this context when most of the history of the discipline has explicitly ignored the singularity of non-European, non-Western forms of thought.
¿A qué suena La Perse? Prácticas artísticas contemporáneas y experiencias de comunidad
Hypatia, 2022
Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales brings together the result... more Devuélvannos el Oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales brings together the results of more than a year of workshops, exhibitions, public interventions, reflections, and artistic manifestations by the Colectivo Ayllu. Located in Spain, this action group brings together collective research and artistic and political intervention from racialized migrants and queer, sexual, and gender dissidents from former Spanish colonies all over the world. Devuélvannos el Oro includes more than thirty documents of this work, many of which were included in the exhibition of the same name organized in Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero Madrid in 2017. Across a wide variety of genres and styles, the collection comprises photo-performances, poems, visual interventions, personal reflections, and essays. Many of the documents, like their creators and the collective itself, resist being included in the traditional categories with which we have been taught to understand the world, performing the very disruption that the book aims to describe and prescribe, a “shifting/orgasming [corrimien to] of the normative forms of rationalist and intellectualocentric knowledge” (10).
Philosophy Today, 2021
Glissant and the Middle Passage is a unique book. With the exception of Sam Coombes's recent book... more Glissant and the Middle Passage is a unique book. With the exception of Sam Coombes's recent book Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance (2018), which focuses mostly on Glissant's latter philosophical thought, the majority of the monographs in English that have theorized Glissant's politics and aesthetics have focused on his fiction, with only brief mentions of his collections of essays, manifestos, and theoretical works (cf.
Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, 2021
What does it mean to creolize something in an academic, theoretical context? Furthermore, how do ... more What does it mean to creolize something in an academic, theoretical context? Furthermore, how do we creolize the thought of an established, canonical figure such as G. W. F. Hegel? In the introduction to Creolizing Hegel, Michael Monahan explains the double register in which the word is taken by the theoretical movement affiliated with a project of creolizing the canon. On the one hand, creolization points, in a descriptive sense, to the emergence of peoples, languages, and practices out of the contact between diverse cultures and traditions, specifically in the American continent, as a consequence of its colonization by Europe. In a descriptive sense, creolizing means to uncover the clues, to follow the traces that show in what way traditions are never pure, uncontaminated, unambiguous, and how the canon (the authors and ways of thinking taken as authoritative) has been created out of clashes, erased conversations, removed influences, and so on. On the other hand, in a prescriptive sense, the call for creolization demands the explicit decentering of these central figures by putting them in conversation with unlikely interlocutors, in uncomfortable spaces and times, with regard to foreign questions and problems. As Jane Gordon puts it on her outstanding reflection on creolizing theory, the call demands "avoiding treating worlds of meaning as if they are already completely constituted, finished, and closed and instead writing as if we too are part of their construction and therefore broaden or foreclose, empower or silence many diverse and unequal coparticipants living and dead" (Gordon 2014, 197).
ALH Online Review, 2020
In Working Juju, Andrea Shaw Nevins offers a multidisciplinary and multimedia analysis of works o... more In Working Juju, Andrea Shaw Nevins offers a multidisciplinary and multimedia analysis of works of cultural production that, in some way, manifest a concern with the broad notion of "the fantastic" in the Caribbean. Remaining faithful to the polysemy of the term Juju, as it relates to forms of religious beliefs and practices of magic across continents and in different times of history, Shaw Nevins's approach to the fantastic encompasses a wide variety of genres such as novels, songs, films, history books, and journalistic writing. Yet it limits its scope to works in English and is trained mostly on cultural productions having to do with Jamaica and Haiti. Even though this linguistic and geographical constraint could narrow too much the scope of an investigation that promises to be about the "Caribbean fantastic," the wide variety of media considered as objects of the analysis actually broadens this focus to give us an impressive range of practices, voices, approaches, and textures to consider. This interdisciplinary consideration of the fantastic is doubtless one of the strengths of the book; plus, the author's methodology suggests that the investigative work could lead to many other places and languages. How would this project look like in a multilingual, geographically extensive form? Is it possible to conceive of a "Caribbean fantastic," taking the region as a unity of analysis, even if complex and multifocal?
Rowman & Littlefield, 2024
Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant ... more Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant intervention that takes the concept to a new and unwonted place. Brilliantly edited by Kris Sealey and Benjamin Davis, this germinal collection of essays—with the Frankfurt School firmly in its sights, as well as the formidable canon of Continental philosophical texts that subtend it—opens the way to an astonishing idea: by methodologically focusing on Caribbean intellectual resources and its fertile thinkers, a creolized critical theory aims ‘to demonstrate the critical interventions from modes of thinking for which Black and Native death is not a side issue, but rather what is most urgent for critically re-imagining the category of the human.’ This powerful turn toward demarks another shift in the geography of reason, but it also lays claim to the rejected insight of a critical European blindness.
—Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future.
—Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy