How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity-an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Monahan calls for the emergence of a creolizing subjectivity that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race.
Winner, 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities. Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood. Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance, and their ongoing negotiations with power should be understood as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but rather can support new possibilities for liberation and justice.
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.
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.
The term 'creolization' has now migrated from its prior use in linguistics and colonial settings. Increasingly 'creolization' is used to analyze 'cultural complexity', 'diversity', 'hybridity', 'syncretism', and 'mixture', prominent and growing characteristics of the global age. The Creolization Reader captures all these meanings and illuminates old creole societies, emerging cultures and identities in many parts of the world. Areas covered include Latin America, the South Atlantic/Indian oceans, the Caribbean, West and East Africa, the Pacific and the US. The book is truly inter-disciplinary and provides a timely, reader-friendly and informative overview of creolization.
The 19th-century German thinker G.W.F. Hegel is a towering figure in the canon of European philosophy. Indeed, most of the significant figures of European Philosophy after Hegel explicitly address his thought in their own work. Outside of the familiar territory of the Western canon, however, Hegel has also loomed large, most often as a villain, but sometimes also as a resource in struggles for liberation from colonialism, sexism and racism. Hegel understood his own work as aiming above freedom, yet ironically wrote texts that are not only explicitly Eurocentric and even racist. Should we, and is it even possible, to bring Hegelian texts and ideas into productive discourse with those he so often himself saw as distinctly Other and even inferior? In response to this question, Creolizing Hegel brings together transdisciplinary scholars presenting various approaches to creolizing the work of Hegel. The essays in this volume take Hegelian texts and themes across borders of method, discipline, and tradition. The task is not simply to compare and contrast Hegel with some 'outsider' figure or tradition, but rather to reconsider and reconfigure our understandings of all of the figures and ideas brought together in these cross-disciplinary essays.
Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean experience through analyses of the concepts of identity and diaspora. Through close readings of selected literary works and film, H. Adlai Murdoch explores the ways in which these immigrants and their descendants represented their metropolitan identities. Though British immigrants were colonial subjects and, later, residents of British Commonwealth nations, and the French arrivals from the overseas departments were citizens of France by law, both groups became subject to otherness and exclusion stemming from their ethnicities. Murdoch examines this phenomenon and the questions it raises about borders and boundaries, nationality and belonging.
Creolization, the process of cultural interchange--in this case, between peoples of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean--is an important aspect of the American experience. Language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures. Only recently, though, have scholars fully begun to understand creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture. Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, five scholars here examine the process of creolization: its origins, historical and modern meanings of the term, and the various manifestations of the complex, continuing process of cultural exchange and adaptation that began when Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other. While the authors vary in their approaches and, in some respects, their conclusions, they essentially agree that the notion of cultural syncretism--whether described as acculturation or creolization--is a conceptual tool of crucial importance for analyzing the interchange that occurred between peoples of Europe and the Americas. Contributors to this ground-breaking volume and their respective chapters are David Buisseret, "The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica"; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "`The Facility Offered by the Country': The Creolization of Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley"; Mary L. Galvin, "Decoctions for Carolinians: The Creation of a Creole Medicine Chest in Colonial South Carolina"; Richard Cullen Rath, "Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, 1730-1790"; and J. L. Dillard, "The Evidence for Pidgin Creolization in Early American English." Buisseret also contributes an introduction that places the other articles within the context of recent scholarship on creolization
In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge—that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology. While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt—and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics—the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noëlle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn
