Afro-Caribbean Philosophy

This article argues that, despite their distance across the colonial divide, a creolizing reading of Frantz Fanon and Paul Ricœur can yield valuable insights into decoloniality. Tracing their shared philosophical concerns with embodied phenomenology, social ontology and recognition, I argue that their respective accounts of sociogeny and hermeneutics can be productively read together as describing a shared end of mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality – a ‘new skin’ for humanity, as Fanon describes it. More specifically, Fanon contributes to (...) Ricœur an understanding of how divergences in social location can be overcome through liberatory action that posits a new logic of sociality; likewise, Ricœur provides Fanon with an account of how liberatory horizons are produced through this praxis, based on the imaginative connection between ideology and utopia. This article concludes by arguing that these congruent methodological and normative concerns can be read together to concretize – and potentially actualize – the utopic end of liberatory struggle in mutual recognition through fashioning this new skin. (shrink)

This note on human rights practice observes that some pedagogical methods in human rights education can have the effect of making human rights violations both seem to be performed by abnormal, bad actors and seem to occur in places far away from US classrooms. This effect is not intended by instructors; a methodological corrective would be helpful to human rights education. This note provides a corrective by suggesting two practices: (1) a pedagogical emphasis on what the Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant (...) calls ‘entanglements’, or the way in which normal, local actions are tied to global consequences in our contemporary world; and (2) a pedagogical exercise of performing a phenomenology of, or first-person reflection on, daily life as it relates to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The emphasis and exercise work together to implicate the actor in larger patterns of human rights violations and protections. Overall, the emphasis and exercise prevent an insidious insinuation of some human rights education: that human rights violations are to be theorized in the global North but suffered in the global South. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Frantz Fanon’s position regarding Hegelian dialectics. Dialektik von Herr und Knecht is one of the most important analytical keys of Phänomenologie des Geistes, published by G.W.F. Hegel in Jena in 1807. However, in his Peau Noire, Masque Blancs, written when he was 25 years old and published in 1952, Fanon argues that under the colonial yoke, reciprocity, a fundamental characteristic of dialectics, is not effective. The question I seek to answer in this study is: does (...) the argument presented by the author represent a rupture, reaffirmation or transfiguration of the Hegelian dialectic? Faced with this challenge, I place some excerpts from Phenomenology, and from Black Skins, White Masks, as well as other later writings by Fanon, in dialogue, to then problematize the closeness, tensions and ruptures between both. The argument I present here will revolve around Fanon’s defense of the existence of a transfigured appropriation of the dialectic, based on three interdependent elements: 1. Fanon shares the Hegelian assumption that identity is produced in the reciprocal relationship with its otherness. 2. Colonial estrangement interdicts this reciprocity by promoting a decay of political domination to the level of objectifying and bestialized denial; 3. Colonial negation is not ontological, but historical and, therefore, can be overcome by a practical-sensitive negation, carried out by the colonized themselves. Throughout this paper, I discuss some implications of the argument defended here in the context of the specialized literature on the thinking of both authors. (shrink)

This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the “decolonial reduction” as an instrument of phenomenology and ideological critique. Comparing the decolonial reduction to Edmund Husserl’s notion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction or epoché, I argue that working through the demands of rigor for either mode of reduction points to areas of overlap: the work of transcendental phenomenology is incomplete without the performance of the decolonial reduction and vice versa. I then assess Maldonado-Torres’s anchoring of the decolonial reduction (...) in the spirit of the “decolonial attitude” and criticism of the Husserlian theoretical attitude. I conclude that foreclosing the theoretical attitude as a framework from which to perform the decolonial reduction implies significant limitations and pitfalls for the decolonial project. (shrink)

James H. Cone is without question the most important Black Theologian of the last century in U.S. theology. This essay is an engagement with his work, focusing in particular on the shifts from European theology, in his Black Theology & Black Power, to Black Aesthetic Religious production, in The Spirituals & The Blues, to The Cross and the Lynching Tree. The core theme of this essay is the entanglement of spiritual/religious colonization with production/invention of racial hierarchies that then became the (...) crucibles for the forging of racist imaginaries that entailed, authorized, enshrined, and sacralized white supremacy. The Janus face of this alchemy, however, was the production of a black religion of liberation that entailed decolonizing the “blackness” invented by the modern project of religious racist colonization. The essay considers how Cone’s works empowers us to think through the analogies between the process of the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the so-called “New World” and the “enslavement” of African peoples. The similarities have to do with the coupling of the colonization of imaginaries with the imposition of racial imaginaries, i.e. religious conquest is also a racial conquest, and conversely, racial conquest is also a religious conquest. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to explore Hip Hop as an expression of marronage. I identify marronage as an existential mode of being which restitutes human temporality. Slavery and flight from slavery constituted two inextricable historical processes, therefore logics of marronage must also constitute contemporary human experience. I argue that Hip Hop offers a distinct way of affirming and expressing one’s existence through what has been called a “maroon consciousness.” In the same way that maroons created new worlds free from (...) the tyranny of slavery, Hip Hop offers the Hip Hoppa a space free from colonial logics. (shrink)

In the mid-twentieth century, many philosophers took up as their aim the destruction of Western metaphysics. Martinican philosopher, novelist, poet, and playwright Édouard Glissant and German philosopher Martin Heidegger were two such authors. Driven by a profound dissatisfaction with the logocentrism of Western metaphysics and concerns over what the tradition excluded—for Glissant, the experience of the creolized and post-colonial subject, and for Heidegger, the “Question of Being”—both advocated for more creative engagement with language and advanced particular views about the link (...) between language and Being. Through a comparative examination of the two authors’ poetics, I aim to “unconceal” an implicit dialogue between their views. I conclude by considering the implications of a key exchange in this proposed dialogue: Glissant’s substitution of Relation for Heideggerean Being. I suggest that this exchange and Glissant’s substitution make plain the problematic tendency in Western philosophy to promote an exclusionary view under the guise of universal truth, that it provides Caribbean philosophy with a greater vocabulary through which to further “produce” itself, and that it is better suited to allow for a process of unceasing transformation and creolization, in contrast to a Western philosophical emphasis on fixity. (shrink)

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is (...) not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition. (shrink)

This article offers an unprecedented close reading of the poetic texts created by the Martinican author René Ménil, whose poetry has been almost entirely neglected by scholars to date and who is better known for his philosophical and political writings than for his verse. I pay particular attention to Ménil’s treatment of geographical and cultural spaces in his published poetry from 1932 to 1950, and place that verse in dialogue with a text by another Martinican author at work around this (...) period: Edouard Glissant, and his first poetry collection, Un champ d’îles. Despite their otherwise dissimilar literary approaches, I show how both Ménil and Glissant created verse in these years where landscapes shift unpredictably, where human subjects are often overwhelmed, and where bewildering, vertiginous contact between Europe and the Caribbean is emphasized. This stands in contrast to more descriptive or directly political depictions of local nature created by other Afro-Caribbean poets during the period, and, I argue, underscores the complexities of the unsettling encounters between places and peoples occurring with increasing frequency in these years of rapid change around the Second World War. (shrink)

It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy (...) around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today. (shrink)

The figure of the tracée is significant for Ménil’s understanding of spatio-temporality, an understanding upon which rest, so this essay argues, his concepts of critique, poetic knowledge, and literary form. The argument takes as its starting point the work Ménil did to conceptualize history as the poesis of recuperation. In doing so, the essay argues for a renewed understanding of Ménil’s contribution to Caribbean philosophy as a whole. One of the most important components of this contribution, the essay claims, is (...) the manner in which Ménil shifts the focus from how linguistic and cultural identity forms in the Antilles to how history appears. What this means is that Ménil works to displace the centrality of folklore and orality to the construction of Antillean identity in order to imagine how Antillean culture comes also to be expressed non-discursively. In Ménil’s work, this displacement occurs primarily by his re-thinking the relationship of architecture to literature. Re-thinking this relationship entails for Ménil recuperating the traces of an Antillean “past passed over,” which unexpectedly appear in both architectural structures and literary works. Paying attention to this particular and peculiar intellectual focus in Ménil’s work, this essay ultimately reconsiders the roles played by both discursive and non-discursive arts in the constitution of a decolonized aesthetics in the Antilles. (shrink)

This paper seeks to situate the idea and intellectual narrative of “world revolution” in its modern historical context, tracing it back to the age of democratic revolution in the late eighteenth century, and then developed by great revolutionary thinkers like Marx and Engels. It examines the possible limitations of Marx and Engels’s vision of world revolution with respect to the Third World as a result of their European intellectual formation in the tradition of the Enlightenment, and examines the charge of (...) “Eurocentrism” advanced by post-colonialist theorists among others against classical Marxism. It then explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution for those fighting racism and imperialism, and how black radicals brought their revolutionary narratives of black liberation into communist narratives for the first time in its aftermath. The essay then discusses C.L.R. James’s pioneering 1937 history of the Comintern, World Revolution, among other things a theoretical intervention into the debates raging among socialist black radicals during the 1930s, and critically examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” often levelled at World Revolution. (shrink)

René Ménil was a renowned Martinican essayist, critic, and philosopher who, along with Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant, left an indelible mark on the Franco-Caribbean world of letters and intellectual thought. Ménil saw in surrealism a critical framework, a means to the specific end of exploring and expressing the specificities of the Martinican condition. Ménil assessed Martinique’s pre-war psychological condition through the telling metaphor of relative exoticism, pointing clearly to the typically unacknowledged fact that the exotic is a (...) slippery signifier, dependent on perspective, distance and location. If the core of these conditions were to be recognized and contested, it would have to be addressed at its root, and here, there was no question for him but that colonialism was ultimately enabled by capitalism and its corollaries of avarice and accumulation. His editorship of the journal Tropiquesconstituted cultural combat. Ménil’s thought and writing were arguably aimed at achieving universality out of particularity, and so he eventually broke with Césaire—and more specifically with Senghor—over several key tenets in the Negritude platform, arguing for the actual existence of a Martinican culture. Marxism for Ménil offers a corrective to the perceived shortcomings of Negritude’s political aesthetics, namely its historical blind spots and its foregrounding of mythologized black unity at the expense of class struggle. (shrink)

The dynamic mother-daughter relationship can be loving and supportive at best as well as contentious and tragic. It is a relationship predicated on maternal instinct which can provide direction and support for deep insight into notions of womanhood, personal and political philosophies. However, in providing this guidance, ironically this same maternal guidance can act to stifle the growth of an adolescent daughter as she transitions into womanhood. Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Annie John’ can be seen as an exemplar of this transition. Annie (...) has to contend with not only her mother’s maternal pressure on her to conform, but she must also adhere to cultural expectations of a creolized culture predicated on both Africana and British understandings of femininity, social expectations, womanhood, and etiquette. This challenges Annie’s own emerging philosophy and desire for independence and self-definition. As discussed in this paper, success can be achieved outside and beyond the mother-daughter dynamic once a daughter has had the opportunity to consider, realize, defy the hypocrisy of being encouraged to be independent whilst being forced to follow one’s mother’s notion of womanhood. In a valiant attempt to avoid the tragedy of replicating her mother’s own flaws, Annie John’s personal growth was no easy feat and created at times a contentious dynamic. However, this journey not only facilitated her success and independence so that she could travel beyond the shores of Antigua, it demonstrated an independence of thought that African Caribbean creolized women must experience in order to realize their own success. (shrink)

Between January and February 2009, the longest general strike in French history took place in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The labor movement had far reaching implications for the relationship between France and its overseas departments. In particular, they brought to the fore France’s colonial history in the Antilles, with attendant questions of race, citizenship and sovereignty that highlighted once again the cracks in the image of Antilleans as full French citizens. René Ménil’s essays provide a unique lens through which to read (...) the philosophical underpinnings of the 2009 labor movements in the Antilles. Ménil’s articulation of “a non-mythological elsewhere” posits a three-fold process of excavating history in order to articulate a myth of origin that in turn allows for the possibility of reclaiming a non-colonized identity. (shrink)

On the eve of 1945, after the retreat of Admiral Robert but before the end of the war, René Ménil wrote an essay extolling humor as a quintessential literary mode of resistance and predicting that colonial authors would go on to contribute significantly to a literature of humor. This article seeks to clarify what humor means to Ménil by illuminating his engagement with Dada, the surrealist movement, Freud, and the concept of irony. In contemplating both the essay’s poetics and politics, (...) this article suggests that Ménil’s vision not only anticipated the Antillean literature to come, but also offered a precocious illustration of it. (shrink)

Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant are twentieth-century cultural theorists from Jamaica and Martinique, respectively. Their literary work critiques western knowledge production and the ways in which colonial modes of thinking have negatively impacted Caribbean subjectivity. This essay explores the counter-hegemonic poetics of Wynter’s essay “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” and Glissant’s book “Poetics of Relation,” comparing their epistemologies and methods of literary production. To understand the philosophical resonances of these texts, they are situated in a framework of western (...) critical theory and analyzed alongside the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss and the poststructuralist theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This essay aims to illustrate how Wynter and Glissant conceptualize historic, social, and epistemic relationality, and in doing so point us towards a decolonial future. (shrink)

Filosofía del cimarronaje proposes a phenomenology of marronage in order to explore how marronage can be used as a framework to understand contemporary sociopolitical movements. More fundamentally still, Filosofía del cimarronaje seeks to explore how marronage can be understood as a particular way of being in the world of racial capitalism and anti-Blackness. The text begins by providing the reader a broad history of slavery and colonization in the Americas, the production of whiteness as a political category in those processes (...) to safeguard the consolidation of racial capitalism, and the ubiquity and diversity of marronage across the hemisphere. Crucially, it emphasizes that flight from the plantation also constituted flight from the underlying logics which manifest on the plantation. The text then transitions to explore the ways in which logics of slavery and colonization persist today and argues that if slavery and marronage are inextricable, then logics of marronage must persist today as well. This book argues that a maroon subjectivity is constituted by a tension which involves the affirmation of one’s existence beyond the confines of Western humanism and a confrontation which seeks to fracture those logics of the plantation, which then manifest on multiple registers. The book then applies this framework to contemporary sociopolitical occurrences in Puerto Rico, specifically the summer of 2019 and instances of autogestión, in an attempt to shed new light on how these events and practices are viewed. Filosofía del cimarronaje contributes to the growing literature of marronage, while also contributing to the canon of contemporary Caribbean and Puerto Rican philosophical thought. -/- With a foreword by Anayra Santory Jorge and an afterword by Nelson Maldonado-Torres. (shrink)

This text intends on putting what may be called a philosophy of marronage1 in conversation with Indigenous thought, particularly by engaging with the thought of Cherokee Nation philosopher Brian Burkhart from his essay “Locality is a Metaphysical Fact.”2 While the topic is treated in detail in Burkhart’s Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land (2019), my engagement with that specific text will be reserved for a separate project. What is of interest to me here is Burkhart’s elaboration of the concept of locality, (...) which refers to an “ontological kinship with the land” that serves as a bulwark against the sedimentation of the coloniality of being in the ontology of the Indigenous subject. I would like to add some nuance to it from the positionality of a subject whose ontological kinship with the land was severed through the kidnapping and enslavement of the ancestors from the African continent. In the process, my intent is to offer an alternate reading of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) which may allow Fanonian thought to be reconciled with North Native American Indigenous thought, which has typically rejected Fanon’s rejection of a return to ancestral ways. This alternate reading of Fanon shows that a reconnection with ancestral ways, and reconstruction of locality, constitutes only part of the liberation project for Afro-diasporic subjects. (shrink)

This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the (...) class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. Once these points are made clear, several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear. First, James’s claim that the slaves of San Domingo were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” follows from his organic concept of the proletariat. Second, James’s revision of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades does not signify a move in the direction of “history from below” but a changed estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s inordinate interest in the individual leader, finally, is more properly understood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations. (shrink)

In a 2012 review article, Anthony P. Maingot made a case for each generation rewriting history according to its own needs and preoccupations. Everyone, he suggested, has their own C.L.R. James. Everyone, perhaps, except students of international relations and international history, where references to James’s copious and critical body of work are less common. In the spirit of finding one’s own James, this article employs The Black Jacobins and James’s other magnum opus, World Revolution,1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the (...) Communist International, to think historically about two interrelated processes of the twentieth century: the rise of the state, and the relationship between nationalisms and internationalisms. Along with encounters with revolutionary Marxism and pan-Africanism, James bore witness to the challenges of the state, and the tensions between nationalism and internationalism that were so central to understanding the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article summarizes the Afro-centric ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Cheikh Anta Diop between 1960 and 1974, the dates on which he defended his thesis on the African identity of Egypt and argued his thesis, with Théophile Obenga, before the UNESCO Cairo Conference on the “General History of Africa.” I discuss both the unhappy reception, by European Egyptologists and others, of Diop’s ground-breaking, multidisciplinary research, as well as its gradual spread, among others, to Diasporic thinkers. One such thinker, Marimba Ani took a (...) further step by rethinking, in Africanist terms, the philosophical bases underlying the unfolding of what she probatively shows is the European Asili, as exemplified in its patterns of thought and affective-ideological patterns. I attempt to show, here, how Ani inherits and prolongs Diop’s “Copernican” displacement. (shrink)

The central claim of this essay is that Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity” is most fruitfully understood not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment. That is, opacity is not a given but an achievement. Taken up in this way, opacity is relevant for ongoing decolonial work today.