Rousseau, Fanon, and the Question of Method in Political Theory, a review of Jane Anna Gordon\u27s \u3cem\u3eCreolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon\u3c/em\u3e

Putting in walls for the new classrooms at Parks. (May 1969) [Parks 1969 vol 02 folder, page 14

Introduction: Forum on Creolizing Theory

This introduction outlines why the author assembled a community of scholars with the task not of commenting on Jane Anna Gordon’s work on creolizing political theory but instead placing it in dialogue with their own.   The idea is that the value of theory depends also on the extent to which it could be engaged as a communicative practice with other theories dedicated to a shared concern.  In this case, it is scholars committed to thought devoted to concerns of dignity, freedom, and liberation as well as the critical question of the ultimate value of doing theoretical work.   

Creolization and the collective unconscious : Locating the originality of art in Wilson Harris' Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar and The Ghost of Memory

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Creolization and the collective unconscious: locating the originality of art in Wilson Harris' Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar and The Ghost of Memory

Alongside the essays and fiction of Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris's writings stand as one of the most important contributions to Caribbean creolization theory. Drawing from the philosophical projects of both authors, this essay argues that while creolization has typically been cast as a process of cultural, linguistic, and racial mixing akin to hybridity, it should, rather, be understood as providing a paradigm for the shifting structural relations necessary for the generation of genuinely original forms. As such, it has great significance for imaginative and literary production, and provides a framework for my readings of Harris's novels, Jonestown (1996), The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006), which explore the creative potential of creolization as a dialogue between consciousness and, what Jung and Harris refer to as, the collective unconsciousness. This essay brings into focus Harris's use of Jungian-inspired concepts, such as archetypes and the collective unconscious, in a development of creolization theory as a imaginative response to historical trauma and the generation of originality in art

Creolizing Cultures and Kinship: Then and There, Now and Here

This paper considers literary texts by women writers that trouble mainstream definitions of family and love to figure shared knowledges. Through intercultural performances, they stage conversations between Euro-American, African-American, and African-Caribbean cultures to re-present kinship (Judith Butler) as a concept which by being as elastic as intimacy (Ara Wilson) and affects (Leela Gandhi), enables figurations (Donna Haraway) and hence actions that point towards a shared planetarity (Gayatri C. Spivak). I argue that these cultural products nourish creolizing agency (Edouard Glissant and Kamau Brathwaite) which prevents us from falling into a regime of terror, where crisis is equated to public and domestic paralysis under a state of emergency. This is so because they effectively show how to join poetics with politics and ethics, and thus to build collectivities of belonging (Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich). I seek to demonstrate that the creolizing capability of such discourse, as articulated for example by Toni Morrison, Kim Ragusa, Joan Anim-Addo, and Jamaica Kincaid, deconstructs otherness without assimilating it, because it embraces translation as the mode (Walter Benjamin) of the always already necessary impossibility. In tune with Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan’s emphasis on translation as a mode which allows us to imagine conjunctures and intersections that have no originals and cannot speak in a single language, this paper insists on the primary importance of critique to confront questions of power; It offers figurations of the global that, by incorporating intimacy, affects, and by troubling kinship, map material and discoursive reality in a manner that is widely inclusive, through affiliation (Edward Said) rather than filiation. By thematizing love as political practice, the literary texts here examined contribute to the phenomenological grounding of the discourse on affects inaugurated by Eve K. Sedgwick and further elaborated by Rosi Braidotti. Kincaid’s See Now Then provides the wording of my argument: because these figurations never forget the then of colonialism, they bring forward a now of globalization that is populated by subjectivities—Radical Others—capable of subverting and transgressing the establishment, without erasing their own vulnerability

Creolizing Political Institutions

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

Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era

The collective memory of the Reconstruction era in US history is a good example of Jane Anna Gordon's notion of 'creolization' at work. I argue that this is an era that could do with even further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory. Settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that serve as the fundamental bases for creating settler colonial nations-states. One of the most important works on the Reconstruction Era is W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935. I examine both the creolizing elements of DuBois' argument and also suggest how attention to settler memory can further creolize our grasp of this period through a re-reading of his text and putting it into the context of other developments occuring during the years he examines

The Creolization of Political Theory and the dialectic of emancipatory thought: a plea for synthesis

publisher versionThe paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorporate the theoretical inventions of popular actions

The Creolizing Genre of SF and the Nightmare of Whiteness in John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”

The alien in science fiction has not often been seen as part of an imperial colonial discourse. By examining John W. Campbell’s founding golden age SF text, “Who Goes There?” (1938), this paper explores the ways in which the alien adheres to an invisible mythos of whiteness that has come to be seen through a colonizing logic as isomorphic with the human. Campbell’s alien-monster comes to disseminate and invade both self and world and as such serves as an interrogation of what whites have done through colonization. It is thus part and parcel of imperial domination and discourse and appears as the very nightmare of whiteness in the form of its liminal and estranged shadow side. Part of what has made Campbell’s text so influential is that it offers a new type of alien invasion in the figure of “contagion,” which speaks “to the transition from colonial to postcolonial visions of modernity and its attendant catastrophes” (Rieder, 124), and which can be further examined as a race metaphor in American SF—indeed, as the white man’s fear of racial mixing that has a long and dehumanizing history. Through its threat of mixture, I read the alien as a creolizing figure that both troubles and undoes the white/black, human/nonhuman binary in science fiction, which I also read as being a creolizing, i.e., hybrid and plastic, genre