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.

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.” Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s work has been taken up by writers outside of Europe, particularly in the Global South, who have developed phenomenological and existential analyses of racism, colonialism, and other structures of domination. Sartre’s philosophical concepts are fundamentally open, for instance his notions of humanism, bad-faith, and freedom. As a situational, committed thinker, Sartre worked to illuminate the urgent questions of his time at the concrete and the abstract level. The creolization of Sartrean thinking is consistent with the existential projects of engagement, authenticity, political commitment, and liberation from oppression. This volume asks how his European model of phenomenology was (and can be) transformed when it is taken up by thinkers who have lived experience with colonialism. They book also engages Sartre in his relation to key interlocutors (especially Beauvoir and Fanon) who were influenced by him and who influenced him in turn. The book demonstrates how Sartrean philosophy is productively related to Africana philosophy, Africana phenomenology, and Africana existentialism. This volume treats creolization not as a discrete topic, but as an interdisciplinary, global approach to reading and thinking. Each author’s contribution embodies an aspect of creolizing thinking, understood as the articulation of cultural and conceptual hybridity under conditions of eurocentrism, epistemic colonialism and the legacies of slavery. Creolizing Sartre re-reads Sartrean texts to recast existential themes through the lens of Caribbean philosophies and the broader philosophies of the Global South. Contributors: Lawrence Bamikole, Sybil Newton Cooksey, James Haile III, Paget Henry, T Storm Heter, Thomas Meagher, Michael J. Monahan, Anthony Sean Neal, Nathalie Nya, Kris F. Sealey, Hiroaki Seki, Jonathan Webber.

Creolizing Hannah Arendt is the first book to explore the implications of creolizing Hannah Arendt (1906-75) and thinking for: action, liberation, freedom, power, democracy, identity, racism, prejudice, totalitarianism, immigration, judgment, revolution, decolonial politics, the human, and the modern traditions of Caribbean political thought, Africana philosophy, and existential phenomenology. Contributors include: Cristina Beltrán, Roger Berkowitz, Angélica Maria Bernal, Robert Eaglestone, Stephen Nathan Haymes, Paget Henry, Thomas Meagher, Dana Francisco Miranda, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Niklas Plaetzer, Neil Roberts.

This bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities advocates the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical methodology attentive to the legacies of colonialism.

Creolizing Europe critically interrogates creolization as the decolonial, rhizomatic thinking necessary for understanding the cultural and social transformations set in motion through trans/national dislocations. Exploring the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization for thinking post/coloniality, raciality and othering not only as historical legacies but as immanent to and constitutive of European societies, this volume develops an interdisciplinary dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities. It juxtaposes US-UK debates on 'hybridity', 'mixed-race' and the 'Black Atlantic' with Caribbean and Latin American theorizations of cultural mixing in order to engage with Europe as a permanent scene of Édouard Glissant's creolization. Further, through a comparative methodological angle, the focus on Europe is broadened in order to understand the role of Europe's colonial past in the shaping of its post/migrant and diasporic present. 'Europe' thus becomes an expanded and contested term, unthinkable without reference to its historical legacies and possible futures. While not all the contributions in this volume explicitly address Edouard Glissant's approach to creolization, they all engage with aspects of his thinking. All of the chapters explore the usefulness, transferability, and limitations of creolization to the European context. As such, this edited collection offers a significant contribution and intervention in the fields of European Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies on two levels. First, by emphasizing that race and cultural mixing are central to any thinking about and theorization on/of Europe, and second, by applying Glissant's perspective to a variety of empirical work on diasporic spaces, conviviality, citizenship, aesthetics, race, racism, sexuality, gender, cultural representation and memory.

Decolonial Pluriversalism offers a unique, powerful, and crucial perspective on decolonial theories, political thoughts, aesthetics, and activisms. In going beyond a postcolonial critique of eurocentrism, it provides some of the most original interventions in the field of decolonial theory. Drawing from the Francophone worlds, Latin American and Caribbean philosophies, it explores concepts of creolization, racialization, Afropean aesthetics, arts and cultural productions, feminisms, fashion, education, and architecture. Contributors: Zahra Ali, Luis Martínez Andrade, Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Jane Anna Gordon, Mariem Guellouz, Léopold Lambert, Alanna Lockward, Fátima Hurtado López, Olivier Marboeuf, Donna Edmonds Mitchell, Corinna Mullin, Marine Bachelot Nguyen, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Françoise Vergès, Patrice Yengo

In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. "We have in common," writes Jefferson Humphries, "one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated." Instead of simply taking "the South" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea--as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.

Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new paths of understanding the complexities of revolution.

Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction, Third Edition, presents a comprehensive introduction to the full range of contemporary approaches to the study of literature and culture, from formalism, structuralism, and historicism to ethnic, gender, and science studies. Introduces students to a variety of contemporary approaches to the study of literature and culture Demonstrates how the varying perspectives on texts can lead to different interpretations of the same work Features numerous updates that include new literary texts, new and expanded sections Represents the ideal accompaniment to the upcoming Third Edition of Literary Theory: An Anthology