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.

This volume is the first to contain all of Rosa Luxemburg's eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German revolutions. Also contained here are articles, essays, and manuscripts on the European socialist movement prior to World War I and on her efforts to rebuild the socialist movement on revolutionary foundations in its aftermath. Much of this material appears in English for the first time. Luxemburg's contributions on revolutionary strategy and the transition to socialism reveal a profound commitment to radical democracy, which becomes evident as she elaborates on her lived experience with razor-sharp conceptualizations of the mass strike. Her democratic commitment is also highlighted in her deepening conflict with the bureaucratic conservatism afflicting the German Social Democratic Party. She is horrified yet, at the same time, grimly analytical while surveying the unfolding violence and brutality of World War I. Deeply inspired by Russia's 1917 upsurge, she is nonetheless compelled to analyze and criticize fatal limitations of the Russian Revolution. Swept up in the revolutionary chaos sweeping through Germany in 1918-19, which results in her own martyrdom, she gives voice on the eve of her assassination to the revolution's final testament: "I was, I am, I shall be."

This volume is the first to contain all of Luxemburg’s eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian Revolution and 1918-19 German Revolution This volume is the first to contain all of Luxemburg’s eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German Revolutions. It also contains articles, essays and manuscripts on the European socialist movement prior to World War I and her effort to rebuild the socialist movement on revolutionary foundations in its aftermath. Much of this material appears in English for the first time. Her incisive contributions on revolutionary strategy, the German and Russian Revolutions, and the transition to socialism reveal a profound commitment to radical democracy, which becomes evident as she elaborates on her lived experience with razor-sharp conceptualizations of the mass strike.Her democratic commitment is also highlighted in her deepening conflict with the bureaucratic conservatism afflicting the German Social Democratic Party. She is horrified yet at the same time grimly analytical while surveying the unfolding violence and brutality of the First World War.Deeply inspired by Russia’s 1917 upsurge, she is nonetheless compelled to analyze and criticize fatal limitations of the Russian Revolution. Swept up in the revolutionary chaos sweeping through Germany in 1918-1919 which results in her own martyrdom, she gives voice to revolution’s final testament: “I was, I am, I shall be.”

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.

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.

Creolizing Practices of Freedom argues that many of our long-standing debates over the concept of freedom have been bound up in the politics of purity—explicitly or implicitly insisting on clear and distinct boundaries between self and other or between choice and coercion. In this model, freedom becomes a matter of purifying the self at the individual level and the body politic at the larger social level. The appropriate response to this is a creolizing theory of freedom, an approach that sees indeterminacy and ambiguity not as tragic flaws, but as crucial productive elements of the practice of freedom.

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.

Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis takes up the question of how to theorize and revive revolutionary hope in the present era of political disillusion. The collection consists of new cutting-edge research essays written by an interdisciplinary mix of established and emerging scholars, bringing together a wide range of intellectual traditions and perspectives. The contributors confront the challenge of relearning hope by exploring the politically transformative potential of past disappointments and defeats. They encourage us to acknowledge, come to terms with and learn from the complexities, failures, and losses entailed in resistance, and to consider them as an occasion for rethinking the established patterns of revolutionary thought. Specifically, the essays question how engagement with past disappointments, losses, and defeats can help us creatively respond to the difficulties and failures of resistance—and inspire our imagination of revolutionary possibilities in the present. Written in an accessible tone without theoretical density or academic jargon, Revolutionary Hope in a Time of Crisis provides theoretical and historical contexts to what it means to engage in left activism today. A vital resource for those interested in intellectual history, political history, radical politics, democracy, and contemporary political theory.

The black insurgence movement and experiments in Caribbean socialism, following the work of the committed revolutionary CLR James, have resounding significance for the political struggles of today. This book addresses class struggle and the battle against racialized capitalism, which in turn makes us reconceptualize the idea of revolution, liberation and rebellion by focusing on this great revolutionary theorist. Renowned political theorist Drucilla Cornell argues that the universal heartbeat of the struggle for socialism is a new praxis of being human together beyond the exploitation of colonial-racial capitalism. On this basis, this book’s intervention emphasizes the continuous history of revolution, rather than understanding revolutions as “events” that either succeed or fail. In today’s moment, with the simultaneity of the collapse of the post-Cold War neoliberal order and climate change, the struggle over what it means to be human on the planet has taken on a new urgency. Cornell argues that the greatest vectors of this revolutionary struggle for a new humanity are Black, decolonial, and queer movements, as they show us ways of being beyond the reign of white economic man. Placing the insights of these struggles in conversation with “traditional” Marxist thought, this book speaks to the pragmatic questions of insurrection, insurgency, rebellion, and revolution in a way that speaks to the politics of our time.