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.
Creolizing Political Institutions Gordon, Jane Anna
Journal of French and Francophone philosophy,
12/2017, Volume:
25, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This essay engages the contributions to the forum by Nathalie Etoke, Kevin Bruyneel, Michael Neocosmos, and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun to consider what it means to creolize political identities, political ...memory, and political institutions.
When our heroes are broken, it's up to us to remake them.We are giving over our time and attention and our hard-won platforms to people too frightened and angry to build lives for themselves that ...don't involve tearing down others. And we need to stop. There are many ways to silence a woman, and not all of them involve getting her to stop speaking. Sometimes it's enough to simply ensure all she speaks about is you. So when people tell me that including "so many" nonwhite characters in my fiction is "political" or that I'm trying to make some kind of "statement," I can't help countering with the fact that the "statement" made by every writer with a white monochrome world is also deeply political, even more so because it's based on a false sense of normal that's been carefully and systematically constructed for hundreds of years in the United States and elsewhere. . . . As a creator, as a mediamaker, I know I can choose to blindly perpetuate those myths, or help overturn them. But I couldn't make that choice until I stopped eating up the lie of what the world was really like.
Since decolonizing aesthetics should demand that we question historical templates that are treated uncritically as the vehicles for conveying authoritative knowledge, this experimental essay aims at ...the level of form to enact the content for which it is arguing. It suggests that interacting with the works of three African-American women artists involves viewers in a mode of creolizing or reenfranchising marginalized creative resources. Specifically, the relevant aesthetic objects facilitate relationships among spheres of life that have been attenuated or made distant from one another in worlds dominated by Euromodern hegemony and its models of scientific and technical rationality. These works cultivate the meeting of the once and still living by centring the continued dynamism of shared aspirations; they bridge an affirmation of dignified Black femininity and ladyhood with facing and fighting the gruesome attacks on projects of Black freedom; and they connect ancestral and contemporary artists similarly involved with making the everyday sublime through concretely interweaving the extraordinary with the quotidian. As they clasp together what have been severed domains, they offer their viewers a distinct context for becoming in ways that exemplify the larger quality of a decolonizing aesthetics focused on creating a world in which many worlds thrive.
Since decolonizing aesthetics should demand that we question historical templates that are treated uncritically as the vehicles for conveying authoritative knowledge, this experimental essay aims at ...the level of form to enact the content for which it is arguing. It suggests that interacting with the works of three African-American women artists involves viewers in a mode of creolizing or reenfranchising marginalized creative resources. Specifically, the relevant aesthetic objects facilitate relationships among spheres of life that have been attenuated or made distant from one another in worlds dominated by Euromodern hegemony and its models of scientific and technical rationality. These works cultivate the meeting of the once and still living by centring the continued dynamism of shared aspirations; they bridge an affirmation of dignified Black femininity and ladyhood with facing and fighting the gruesome attacks on projects of Black freedom; and they connect ancestral and contemporary artists similarly involved with making the everyday sublime through concretely interweaving the extraordinary with the quotidian. As they clasp together what have been severed domains, they offer their viewers a distinct context for becoming in ways that exemplify the larger quality of a decolonizing aesthetics focused on creating a world in which many worlds thrive.
This book offers a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary society and its impact on the construction of social and political life. The theory is premised upon what the authors call "the sign ...continuum," where disaster spreads across society through efforts to evade social responsibility for its causes and consequences. Phenomena generated by such efforts include the social manifestation of monstrosity (disastrous people and other forms of living things) and an emerging antipolitics in an effort to assert rule and order. A crucial development is the attack on speech, a fundamental feature of political life, as manifested by the increased expectations of categories of people whose containment calls for shunning and silence.
"Readers may find this compact book (120 pages, excluding notes and bibliography) a challenging read as it employs complex arguments and research from a variety of academic fields like cultural studies, history, philosophy, and political science. However, I found its difficulty balanced well by its discussion of entertaining contemporary popular cultural topics and issues."
--Political Affairs
"Since the publication of Roland Barthes Mythology (1957) no one has attempted with equal rigor, erudition, creativity and elegance, to unveil the politics of current events through the signs and the monsters of popular imagination. . . . The argument is not just a tour-de-force. It is a radical shift in the geography of reasoning, argued with the calm and serenity of intellectual mastery."
--Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University
This short piece engages contributions to Renée T. White and Karen A. Ritzenhoff's Afrofuturism in Black Panther (2021) to argue that the film outlines some ingredients needed to cultivate universal ...first-class citizenship. The inclusion of council-structured political decision-making modeled in Wakanda combines pre- and post-1960s modes of progressive political organizing that, as Dolita Cathcart argues, build on ideas of both historical Black reformers and revolutionaries. Still, absent Neal Curtis's insistence, through the figure of Erik Killmonger, on the indispensability of continued radical dissent, these political arrangements could easily collapse into a progressive conservatism in which would-be queen Nakia's argument for diasporic relational responsibility is easily dismissed. Commitment to bringing the radical outside in therefore proves central to imagining how a polity whose wellbeing was premised on isolationism can enter a Global Southern anti-imperial and anti-enslavement internationalism, centering diasporic imaginings of Blackness.
A Companion to African-American Studies is an exciting and comprehensive re-appraisal of the history and future of African American studies. Contains original essays by expert contributors in the ...field of African-American Studies Creates a groundbreaking re-appraisal of the history and future of the field Includes a series of reflections from those who established African American Studies as a bona fide academic discipline Captures the dynamic interaction of African American Studies with other fields of inquiry.
In the specific contexts of Anglo-American settler-colonialism, Robert Nichols writes that the dispossession "refer(s) to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under ...structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to 'have' something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another." T. D. Harper-Shipman's incisive new book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019), makes several significant contributions. At their center is her account of how the old - in this case, models of aid giving in Africa - has been made new, through the paradigm of "ownership of development," and the attendant political consequences.
One of the unique challenges of reading Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) today is that while it is an irredeemably revolutionary text, we live in a counter-revolutionary moment or ...in a global context that has tried very hard to discredit even the possibility of revolution. Fanon’s text does not only narrate the effective undertaking of an anti-colonial struggle—of what is required for people to identify the actual causes of their alienation and unfreedom and together to will their elimination—it also outlines the various, often dialectical challenges of restructuring a society from the bottom up. Guiding and evident in the latter is the flourishing of what Fanon suggestively called national consciousness. Elaborating its meaning and ongoing usefulness is the focus of this essay.
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