Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy(Creolizing the Canon)

Creolizing Critical Theory highlights the Caribbean as a philosophical site from which, for centuries and until today, theorists have articulated pressing critiques of capitalism and colonialism. Some of these critiques, such as those of the Saramaka Maroons, have stressed the value of autonomy. Others, such as those of the West Indies Federation, have emphasized solidarity in the face of European occupation. Critical Theory, as an emancipatory project rooted in the values of autonomy, solidarity, and equality, then, has long been a Caribbean practice. Drawing on a range of voices, Creolizing Critical Theory centers Caribbean critiques with a view toward praxis in the present.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Critical Theory at the Crossroads, Benjamin P. Davis and Kris F. Sealey Chapter 1: Sylvia Wynter’s’ Caribbean Critical Theory, Romy Opperman Chapter 2: Creolization’s Newness, Jeta Mulaj Chapter 3: The Promise of Manumission, Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez Chapter 4: Against Ethnocratic Emancipations, Derefe Chevannes Chapter 5: Creolization from Below, Ashley Boher Chapter 6: Conserving Ethical Blackness, Gabriella Beckles-Raymond Chapter 7: The Tricontinental Recollected, Eli Portella Chapter 8: Strategic Anti-Essentialism, Rafael Vizcaíno Afterword: Critical Theory Caribbeanized, Deborah A. Thomas Index About the Contributors

About the Author :
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.

Review :
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. 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.