Creolizing Critical Theory

Benjamin P. Davis is a postdoctoral fellow at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics and Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins.Kris F. Sealey is professor of philosophy at Penn State University. She is the author of Creolizing the Nation and Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre, and the Question of Transcendence.

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.

• Introduction: Critical Theory at the Crossroads, Benjamin P. Davis and Kris F. SealeyChapter 1: Sylvia Wynter’s’ Caribbean Critical Theory, Romy OppermanChapter 2: Creolization’s Newness, Jeta MulajChapter 3: The Promise of Manumission, Miguel Gualdrón RamírezChapter 4: Against Ethnocratic Emancipations, Derefe ChevannesChapter 5: Creolization from Below, Ashley BoherChapter 6: Conserving Ethical Blackness, Gabriella Beckles-RaymondChapter 7: The Tricontinental Recollected, Eli PortellaChapter 8: Strategic Anti-Essentialism, Rafael VizcaínoAfterword: Critical Theory Caribbeanized, Deborah A. ThomasIndexAbout the Contributors