In 1967, C.L.R. James, the much-celebrated Afro-Trinidadian Marxist, stated that he knew of no figure in history who had “such tremendous influence on such widely separated spheres of humanity” within a few years of his death as the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While this impact was most pronounced in revolutionary politics inspired by political theories that rejected basing political authority in monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church, it extended to European literature, to philosophies of education, and the articulation of the social sciences. But what particularly struck James about Rousseau was the strong resonance of his work in Caribbean thought and politics. This volume illuminates these resonances by advancing a creolizing method of reading Rousseau that couples figures not typically engaged together, to create conversations among people of seemingly divided worlds in fact entangled by colonizing projects and histories. Doing this enables us to grapple with the meaning of creolization and the full range of Rousseau’s legacies not only in contemporary Western Europe and the United States, but in the Francophone colonies, territories, and larger Global South.

Advancing a creolizing reading of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this volume explores Rousseau's strong resonances in Caribbean thought and politics.

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 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.

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.

Chapters emphasize exploration of substantive questions about political life in a range of global contexts, with attention to whether and how those questions may be shared, contested, or reformulated across differences of time, space, and experienceAn interdisciplinary volume that bridges the gaps between various traditions, regions, and concerns regarding political theoryProvides tags and keywords to aid navigation of the handbook and help readers trace disruptions, thematic connections, and conceptual contrasts across entries.

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.