Atlantic Theory: On the Vicissitudes of Relation(Incitements)

About the Book

This largely new collection of essays explores how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world through treatments of key figures in Atlantic theory, including Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Leopold Senghor and douard Glissant. Out of these critical and comparative readings emerges a portrait of Atlantic theory as a distinct orientation toward complex relations of colonial power, memory of atrocity, negotiation of the aftermath of empire, and the creativity of the oppressed living under impossible conditions of violence.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Vicissitudes of Relation I. Relations 1. Creolizing Levinas 2. Between the Book and the Sea 3. Senghor’s Anxiety of Influence 4. Reproduction and Ideology in Glissant’s Late Work II. Dislocations 5. Césaire’s Apocalyptic Word 6. Fanon’s Two Memories 7. The Problem of Relation in the Later Glissant 8. Orality and the Slave Sublime III. Reconciliations 9. Wright and the Violence of Tradition 10. Davis, Cultural Politics, and the Blues Aesthetic 11. Necropolitics, Afropessimism, and the Aesthetic after Wright 12. The Middle Passage as Philosophical Event Index

About the Author :
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).

Review :
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. Sustained intellectual engagement with a thinker has a fecund residual effect. Because of such a longstanding tarrying with a figure, it becomes impossible to free oneself from the thinker and the thinker’s ideas. John Drabinski has for decades now taken up figures such as Baldwin, Glissant, Levinas and Wright. In Atlantic Theory: On the Vicissitudes of Relation, Drabinski situates himself once more in the milieu of his old companions, and in so doing Drabinski reveals to us how there is always something more to be thought, how new and often surprising lines of inquiry open up when the critic dedicates himself to the work of the thinker. With extraordinary range and ethical clarity, John Drabinski’s Atlantic Theory reframes critical theory through the lens of relation, dislocation, and reconciliation. He takes seriously the Middle Passage as philosophical event and charts a decolonial project attentive to memory, violence, and vernacular life. This is a necessary and essential book—restless, rigorous, and deeply moving. John Drabinski accomplishes what Paul Gilroy inaugurated three decades prior: the centering of the Atlantic Ocean to comprehend our modern world. Atlantic Theory probes the event of the Middle Passage and nuances of Africana philosophy, Caribbean thought, and vernacular culture. Furthermore, it delves into processes of decolonization and creolization that demonstrate how thinkers ranging from Angela Davis and Aimé Césaire to Édouard Glissant and Emmanuel Levinas present interweaving narratives of refusal, beauty, inheritance, and freedom in relation. Our experiences of relation and attendant vicissitudes are key facets of the human condition, as are, as Drabinski reveals, acts of reconciliation and new beginnings. Atlantic Theory is an expansive and capacious work that refuses binary thinking as it undoes philosophical thought only to rescue it by engaging that which it must submerge. The project in these pages extends and repositions relation as both thought and being. The ontologies that emerge from this book boldly remake the foundations of modern thinking as flowing from the ongoing catastrophe of the Middle Passage and how ethically engaging its ongoing shape of the world might bring us into another relation of what life might be. Atlantic Theory is not a rejoinder it is a joining in relation. It is the kind of intellectual work that remakes how we think the future in the present.