Neo-liberalism often reduces pluralism to a social fact based on the collapse of the big ideals that once claimed to stand in for the ideal of humanity. Tolerance of inevitable value diversity is all that can be offered by the rationalized modern western state. This understanding of pluralism is completely inadequate in the post colony. Ernst Cassirer offers a philosophical understanding of symbolic plurality that allows us to respect divergent symbolic forms, including myth and religion. This understanding of pluralism opens (...) the space for respect for the customary law and the great indigenous ideals such as uBuntu which has often been denigrated as mythical and thus outdated or, worse yet, not law at all. This denigration is inseparable from colonial violence, and demands a process of transculturation as integral to this struggle to transform the new South Africa into a society that lives up to the Constitution’s call for the respect of all of its citizens. This respect can only be done if there are serious economic reforms and a challenge to the hegemonic neo-liberal capitalism. (shrink)

This essay explores the philosophical productions of women from the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Here the Caribbean is understood as a multiplicitous and polyphonic space that exists amidst modernities engendered by colonization. I present the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Petronila Angélica Gómez, Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Yomaira Figueroa as fertile philosophical starting points from which to frame a feminist tradition of the Spanish‐speaking Caribbean that appreciates the multiple and often conflicting body of ideas that emerge (...) from within a sea of islands. (shrink)

This essay proposes that the work of Sylvia Wynter, a canonical figure in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, demonstrates other ways of doing philosophy, a comparative philosophy carried out as a cross-cultural exercise. Sylvia Wynter has argued for a “New Science of the Word” by drawing from the contributions of Frantz Fanon (sociogeny), Aimé Césaire (poetic knowledge), and the field of cybernetics, among other sources. This essay aims to explain the framework and methodology of the New Science and the original transdisciplinary engagement that (...) such a framework facilitates. It argues that, by appropriating the concept of “autopoiesis” beyond the natural sciences, Wynter refashions autopoiesis as autopoetics to answer the age-old question of what it means to be human. Comparative philosophy, the essay concludes, can be fertile ground for Wynter’s project and epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

This article focuses on the analysis of the geo-politics and body-politics of being, and perception as the key concepts in the decolonial option grounded in the spatiality and corporeality of our cognitive and perceptive mechanisms. Revived spatiality refers in this case not only to a physical space that we inhabit but also to our bodies as specific spatial entities – the privileged white male bodies or the damned, non-white, dehumanized and often gendered and sexualized bodies from the underside of modernity. (...) The article presents a decolonial interpretation of the human/non-human binary aimed at rethinking the fundamental modern/colonial division into anthropos and humanitas and the subsequent animalization of large human groups. The main questions are then what does it mean to be animalized by and in modernity and what ways out are possible, desired and attainable for the dehumanized others? The main goal of the article is to further question liberal Western humanism from a decolonial perspective, without yet dropping this concept altogether, and considering instead another humanism model suggested by Sylvia Wynter. Contemporary critical anti-humanist and “other humanism” theories often find a much more accurate and immediate realization through artistic metaphors and activist art projects than traditional theory, problematizing the border between the human and the animal, the man-made and the natural, the individual and the communal. Therefore, the article dwells at some length on one such project balancing between art and critical anthropology – the works of the Northern Caucasus decolonial artist Taus Makhacheva. (shrink)

Civilizational analysis is increasingly being used to capture the plurality of routes to and through the modern world order. However, the concept of civilization betrays a colonial legacy, namely, a denial that colonized peoples possessed the creative ability to cultivate their own subjecthoods. This denial was especially acute when it came to enslaved Africans in the New World whose bodies were imagined to be deracinated and deculturated. This article proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address this legacy and, (...) to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body – the New World slave – with subjecthood. From this discussion, the article makes the case for developing a ‘poetics of slavery’ that could help to address the colonial strictures still residual in the concept of civilization. (shrink)

This essay explores the philosophical productions of women from the Spanish speaking Caribbean. Here the Caribbean is understood as a multiplicitous and polyphonic space that exists amidst modernities engendered by colonization. I present the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo, Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Petronila Angélica Gómez, Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Yomaira Figueroa as fertile philosophical starting points from which to frame a feminist tradition of the Spanish‐speaking Caribbean that appreciates the multiple and often conflicting body of ideas that emerge (...) from within a sea of islands. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to provide an account of the relation between feminist theory and the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. I offer a twofold approach to this account. On the one hand, I outline a series of texts that have addressed Wynter's critique of feminist theory. These authors note how Wynter problematizes a universal conception of woman that marginalizes women of color. On the other hand, I have provided an account of various authors who have turned (...) to Wynter for the purpose of developing a feminist project. I make evident why it is the case that these two approaches are not contradictory or paradoxical in Wynter's work, but rather provide the foundation for a theory of liberation that is relevant to a variety of socio, geopolitical, and temporal locations. (shrink)

The whiteness of American philosophy must be appreciated as an epistemological and ontological achievement. Thus, I contend that the only way forward for American philosophy entails an Africana philosophical critique, which consists of two methodological ventures—one deconstructive and the other radical. I will briefly present six voices that exemplify this Africana philosophical critique. The deconstructive voices include (1) Sylvia Wynter's genealogy of “MAN,” (2) Leonard Harris's insurrectionist challenge to Pragmatism, and (3) Charles Mills's and Chandra Mohanty's rejection of Ideal Theory. (...) The radical voices include (1) Lewis Gordon's Africana-existential-phenomenology as a decolonial “antidote” to Eurocentrism, (2) Tommy Curry's culturalogical solution to the “derelictical” and “methodological” crises of African American philosophy, and (3) Africana literature as “new” philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I shall address the connections between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and Caribbean thought. However, I will only focus on Antonio Benítez Rojo’s essay The Repeating Island, since I have found in it the presence—or expression—of some key deleuzian and deleuzo-guattarian concepts. I will use the deleuzian concept of repetition to defend this stance, as well as to argue that one may find some of the most interesting readings of Deleuze’s texts in the work of Caribbean authors such (...) as Benítez Rojo, not only in spite of their relative understanding and lack of exegetical rigour, but rather thanks to the fact that this is, in no case, their main intention. The angle I have chosen does not intend to point out consistencies or inconsistencies in Benítez Rojo’s “appropriations” or “rewritings” of Deleuze and Guattari, for this would only keep us within the logic of the copy versus the original. Instead, this reading tries to destabilize the boundaries between philosophy and literature as well as between French and Caribbean thought. The undoing of these types of distinction intends to produce a new theatre of thought, a theatre of repetition, not of representation, in order to set up the scene for a contrapunteo between two images of thought: one deleuzian, the other Caribbean. Thus, we embark upon this journey hoping to have an encounter that promises yet another becoming to Deleuze’s philosophy. The angle I have chosen does not intend to point out consistencies or inconsistencies in Benitez Rojo’s “appropriations” or “re-writings” of Deleuze-Guattari, for this would only keep us within the logic of the copy versus the original. Instead, this reading tries to destabilize the boundaries between philosophy and literature as well as between French and Caribbean thought. The undoing of these types of distinction intends to produce a new theatre of thought, a theatre of repetition not of representation in order to set up the scene for a contrapunteo between two images of thought: one deleuzian, the other Caribbean. Thus, we embark on this journey hoping to have an encounter that promises yet another becoming of Deleuze’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that the images evoked in the literature of the Spanish indignados, and other contemporary global justice movements, specifically those of disciplinary and social decadence, a space–time beyond the limits of the possible, obligations across generations, and, ultimately, of universal history as horizon and anticipation, reactivate the legal critique of absolute property that featured so prominently in nineteenth-century accounts of law, civil society, and revolutionary right, and then again in the context of twentieth-century decolonization and revolutionary movements. Insofar (...) as such images can be distinguished from concepts, following a certain reading of the critical tradition against the grain, they pave the way towards the formulation of a systemic critique or a ‘jurisprudence of indignation’, in the wake of the emergence, rise and current crisis of the global market. (shrink)

This article examines an Africana philosophy of culture of black existence through, after offering a critique of a theodicy of textuality and social reality, exploration of the construction of “problem people,” of people whose existence, marked by blackness, has been treated as a challenge to reason and the search for knowledge in the modern world. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case for the central importance (...) of philosophy of culture in modern and late modern thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn a debate between two outstanding Guyanese thinkers, Walter Rodney and Wilson Harris, Rodney asked Harris the pointed question: ‘…so what happens when we stop dreaming? Does the tree we u...

The Caribbean is a site where multiple cultures, peoples, waysof thinking and acting have come together and where new formsof philosophy are emerging. The promise of Caribbean philoso-phy lays in its ability to give shape to an intellectual tradition which is both true to and beneficial to Caribbean peoples whilesimultaneously being provocative enough to engage wisdom-seekers of various geographies and identities. I argue that onlyby pursuing a “New Dialogic” which engages the philosophicaltraditions of Africans, African Americans, and Native Ameri-cans can (...) we hope to assert a unique philosophy of value toCaribbean peoples and cultures. The highest form of Caribbeanphilosophy thus must be plural and dialogical. Unfortunately,dialogues in philosophy have been typically characterized bya fixation with Europe, and a lack of consideration of otherphilosophical traditions or sources. The “New Dialogic” thatI propose here involves a more dynamic model of dialogue toopen or intensify different and multiple avenues of conceptualelaboration. I provide general guidelines or principles for this“New Dialogic” and demonstrate the extent to which Caribbeanphilosophers can both contribute to the expansion of this projectand be aided by it in their formulations of the field. (shrink)

Critical engagement involving philosophers trained in continental and analytic traditions often takes its purpose to be a reconciliation of tensions arising from differences in style, or method. Critical engagement in Africana philosophy, however, is rarely focused on method, style, or orientation because philosophic research in this field, regardless of orientation, has had to accommodate its empirical grounding in disciplines outside of philosophy. I focus primarily on the comparative dimensions of three important strands of this research: (1) a history of ideas, (...) (2) a problem-orientation, and (3) a sub-area specialization, to indicate why a need to reconcile tensions between continental and analytic orientations has very little currency in Africana philosophy. Socio-economic problems faced by African-descended people require multiple perspectives to accommodate the wide variety of diasporic social contexts for a given proposal. I employ a selection of cases to illustrate how Africana philosophy benefits from an interplay of many intersecting factors and that, as an interdisciplinary area of research with a commitment to the incorporation of multiple perspectives, it fosters cross-pollination and hybridization of continental and analytic traditions. (shrink)