John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of At the Margins of Nihilism (Fordham University Press, 2025, forthcoming), Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern University Press, 2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (EUP, 2012), Godard Between Identity and Difference (Continuum, 2008) and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (SUNY, 2001).

In Atlantic Theory, Drabinski follows in the footsteps of the great Aimé Césaire by asking what kind of contact colonialism produced. What did this relation (or non-relation) yield on the level of thought? And what future world does it render either possible or impossible? The questions he asks are as urgent as the answers are invigorating.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Vicissitudes of RelationI. Relations1. Creolizing Levinas2. Between the Book and the Sea3. Senghor’s Anxiety of Influence4. Reproduction and Ideology in Glissant’s Late WorkII. Dislocations5. Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word6. Fanon’s Two Memories7. The Problem of Relation in the Later Glissant8. Orality and the Slave SublimeIII. Reconciliations9. Wright and the Violence of Tradition10. Davis, Cultural Politics, and the Blues Aesthetic11. Necropolitics, Afropessimism, and the Aesthetic after Wright12. The Middle Passage as Philosophical EventIndex

John E. Drabinski is Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of At the Margins of Nihilism (Fordham University Press, 2025, forthcoming), Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (Northwestern University Press, 2025), Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (EUP, 2012), Godard Between Identity and Difference (Continuum, 2008) and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (SUNY, 2001).

In Atlantic Theory, Drabinski follows in the footsteps of the great Aimé Césaire by asking what kind of contact colonialism produced. What did this relation (or non-relation) yield on the level of thought? And what future world does it render either possible or impossible? The questions he asks are as urgent as the answers are invigorating.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Vicissitudes of RelationI. Relations1. Creolizing Levinas2. Between the Book and the Sea3. Senghor’s Anxiety of Influence4. Reproduction and Ideology in Glissant’s Late WorkII. Dislocations5. Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word6. Fanon’s Two Memories7. The Problem of Relation in the Later Glissant8. Orality and the Slave SublimeIII. Reconciliations9. Wright and the Violence of Tradition10. Davis, Cultural Politics, and the Blues Aesthetic11. Necropolitics, Afropessimism, and the Aesthetic after Wright12. The Middle Passage as Philosophical EventIndex