As scholars anticipate the structural reconfigurations arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, resistance to pandemic measures remains a site of rich discussion. While previous researchers have studied anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-lockdown action, here called anti-restriction movements, as a series of actions informed by individual characteristics like psychological profiles, political leanings, or gender, this paper emphasizes how anti-restriction actions evolved into social movements articulating the antagonisms between state and subject. This paper applies Jürgen Habermas’s theory of New Social Movements (NSMs) to theorize anti-restriction movements as reactions to bureaucratic and economic regulation in cultural and private life. Habermas’s original theory assigned NSMs a radical potential in reinvigorating public political discourse and democratic processes which remains to be seen today. By contrasting the discourses of anti-restriction movements in Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico and suburban communities in Orange County, California, this paper describes how profit-driven market algorithms steer social movements away from their radical potential towards sensationalism and misinformation. Not only do social media platforms “colonize” communication on the national level, but western countries’ control of social media platforms “digitally colonizes” peripheral countries by redirecting subaltern social movements with the hybridized discourses of imperial nations.

In this article, I briefly sketch the “right to opacity” that Édouard Glissant details in Poetics of Relation and situate it as an ethical imperative with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, contrasting the distinctive contributions of opacity and ambiguity toward ethical-political living. I apply the principles of opacity and ambiguity toward one of Beauvoir’s most political and only co-written works, Pour Djamila Boupacha. I argue that the polyvalent use of the Islamic veil during the Algerian War for Independence reveals the ethical application of opacity and ambiguity. Additionally, the veil clarifies the political stakes of gendered assumptions and racial hierarchy across geographies, positing a false body neutrality that obfuscates the violent global War on Terror.

This paper examines C.L.R James’s interpretation of Athenian democracy in “Every Cook Can Govern” (1956). It seeks to explain why Athenian democracy remained indispensable to James’s political thought. I argue that James reinterprets Athens as a proto-workers’ state, and explore the resulting contradictions and complexities. Within “Every Cook Can Govern” James presents a radical interpretation of Athenian Democracy at three points: (1) James claims that slavery in Athens was humane and economically insignificant, (2) he supports the theory of the “Athenian Miracle” found in Pericles’s Funeral Oration, and (3) he chooses to end his essay with a misleading interpretation of the anti-tyranny oath of Demophantos. James idealizes Athenian political realities, and ultimately invents his own version of Athens. But his idealization arose from principled skepticism regarding mainstream views of Athenian democracy and his political commitment to defending the capabilities of the ordinary person.

For those who subscribe to a pro-Black political ideology, like that of Pan-Africanism or Black Nationalism, is there a specific moral obligation between Black agents to protect one another against intersectional/multidimensional oppressions? Africana people are often subjugated to other forms of domination outside of anti-Black racism exclusively. When examining offenses against Black women, queer Black people, poor Black people, etc., both Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist ethics suggest a moral obligation of protection to all Africana people, but there are varying ways that obligation is explicated. In this argument, I assert that Amílcar Cabral’s text Resistance and Decolonization provides a critical framework for the ways in which disenfranchised, Africana people should be advocated for by their Africana counterparts that take Black collectivity seriously. This argument, as a starting point, conceptualizes Africana people defending one another as a form of decolonization, and it describes four dimensions of moral obligation for defense both within and outside of Black communities: political, economic, cultural, and armed defense.

Instigated by the incident of the chained woman in Feng County, Jiang Su Province, this paper offers a phenomenological argument on the workhorses legitimizing and sustaining women trafficking in China. Specifically, I leverage the Imperial Man and the Paradigm of War by Nelson Maldonado-Torres and construct a pair of paralleled concepts: the Patriarchal Man and the Paradigm of Family. In analyzing the social media coverage of the chained woman and government responses, I argue that the Patriarchal Man and the Paradigm of Family create and perpetuate a common understanding that enables and normalizes women trafficking within a broader circuit. This circuit includes both state actors such as government officials and local actors who are not directly involved in trafficking, in addition to the traffickers, buyers and sellers. To combat women trafficking, we need law reforms as well as a phenomenological reduction of the Patriarchal man. I suggest three potential ways for the phenomenological reduction.

The focus of this essay is Sylvia Wynter’s conception of ceremony. I argue that ceremonies provide the conditions for a new conception of what it means to be human, that is no longer hierarchical. As such, both ceremonies and this new human are necessary for processes of liberation. In order to be liberatory, however, ceremonies must be place-based and yet fluid and mobile, are steeped in history and are thrust into the future, depend upon community, and impact daily experiences. I argue that employing the best aspects of ceremony can provide the tools for developing coalitional movements, which are often already employed by Black and Indigenous communities. I call this process ceremonies of liberation.

This essay seeks to unsettle the overrepresented, Eurocentric grounds of a pivotal debate in the history of Western philosophy. The debate between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the topic of madness has had central significance for twentieth-century continental thought due to its lasting impact on the development, reception, and stakes of the respective thinker’s methodologies. While heavily written on and analyzed from the perspective of Western academic philosophy, little attention has been paid to the racialized, ‘Third World’ origins and structures of the debate and its content. I contend that the work of Sylvia Wynter addresses, critiques, and ameliorates these structures in heretofore previously unacknowledged ways. Specifically, Wynter’s work in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, her diptych on the Ceremony (Must Be) Found, and her critical engagements with the submerged “abducting logic” of Western thought marks an incisive critique of both Foucault and Derrida’s interpretation of reason and madness in Western philosophy. As I argue, Wynter is committed to deconstructing the binary of madness/reason so as to unsettle the overrepresentation of Western logos. She does so through the liminal figure of the “black cogito” which disrupts and shakes the foundations of the debate, nor can either conflicting interpretation neatly assimilate this figure. That is, by deconstructing the debate on the history of madness Wynter demonstrates the paucity of their arguments about, on the one hand, the history of reason and the exclusion of madness, and, on the other, the metaphysical ambiguity of the Cartesian cogito. This essay aims to set out on an alternative history of the deconstruction of Western metaphysics initiated from the demonic grounds of being.

Classic feminist social theory highlights the exploitation of women’s labor in capitalist societies traditionally through an examination of how housework and childcare is perceived and organized, excluding an explicit analysis of older adult care work. In light of the surge in the demand for older adult caregiving over the last several decades, this paper uses older adult care work as a new lens to understand how gender, and its intersections with other critical identities such as race, ethnicity, and nativity, are a basis for continued exploitation and marginalization in modern capitalist systems. Building on Marxist feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s work on social value and domination, I argue that women’s care labor, both paid and unpaid, is an instrument of capital accumulation that differentially exploits women based on key intersectional identities. An examination of the system of older adult care work in the United States allows us to see the multilayered and complex system of exploitation that creates and institutionalizes existing social hierarchies as capitalism seeks to expand. The paper ends with a discussion of two potential family care paths America could conceivably pursue in the coming years; one toward increased commodification of care work in line with neoliberal capitalism, and the other toward more comprehensive social welfare policies that alleviate women’s reproductive labor burden and begin to break down gendered and racialized hierarchies.

In this short tribute, the author outlines his personal and intellectual relationship with the writer George Lamming, which spans over three decades. He provides an account of the bricolage of Lamming’s mentorship and friendship, and its impact on his intellectual development. This panegyric essay focuses on the conceptual and narrative world which George Lamming occupied. It also provides insights into the bond he forged with other Caribbean writers, as well as the relationships he established with the region’s best-known politicians, academics and activists. The tribute addresses Lamming’s commitment to the Caribbean region and its people, especially those whom he called, “the people from down below.” The essay also seeks to shed some light on the less public aspects of his lived experience, namely his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and his wily sense of humor...

The focus of this paper are the themes and principles informing Gregson Davis’s innovative 2017 translation of Aimé Césaire’s, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. For long, the poem’s title was translated as Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, but Davis renders it as Journal of a Homecoming. To understand this and other highly nuanced changes, I argue that it is necessary to keep in mind at least five crucial aspects that guide Davis’s translation. First is the open-ended nature of his approach to translating this particular poem. This approach is necessary because the poem is about the unfinished and still ongoing process of decolonization. Second, is the principle of committed listening, which is a mode of reading and translating that involves a complex series of returns, revisions, and re-evaluations. Third, is the motif of katabasis or the journey to the underworld, which for Davis is an important metaphorical frame operating in the poem. Fourth, is nostos or a homecoming, because the journey to the underworld requires a homecoming. These classic archetypal themes introduce a vertical dimension to the journey back from the underworld that makes a spiral out of the linearity of historical/postcolonial time. Fifth, is granularity. A granular translator must keep re-evaluating what to prioritize as a new translation of a word must open up spaces for new images to appear in the poem. This is indeed the granularity of Davis’ thought-provoking translation. Taken together, these aspects account for the excellence of Davis’s translation.

This paper is an attempt to introduce the thought of the Martinican philosopher, René Ménil to the English-speaking world. It suggests that his philosophy can best be characterized as an aesthetic Marxism, which moved through three crucial phases: (1) a surrealist/French communist phase; (2) a Black poeticist/French communist phase; and (3) a critical poeticist/Martinican communist phase. The passage through these three phases was marked by an increasing and more fixed centering of the aesthetic that created very real tensions with its politico-economic base. The paper explores these tensions through a comparative analysis with other Caribbean aesthetic Marxists or aesthetic historicists such as CLR James, Nicolás Guillén, and Kamau Brathwaite.

This paper explores the concept of virtual diaspora, a concept through which I hope to establish another bridge between East and West. Virtual diaspora is a distinct and fluid location somewhere between postcoloniality and globalization, which allows the immigrant to address the pain of leaving home by moving back and forth mentally and thus being at home and abroad at the same time. I illustrate this subjective location with the aid of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, “Kabuliwallah.” The state of mind of virtual diaspora I link systematically to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of immanence as a transcendental field that is without subject or object. As such it is without the material constraints of objects or the identity-based constraints of subjects, such as national and cultural boundaries. Living from this plane of pure immanence opens up the possibilities for the immigrant to move mentally back and forth, thus virtualizing his/her diaspora. I also link this concept of virtual diaspora to the concept of “the religion of man” in Tagore, and also to that of “the religion of humanity” in the Indian philosopher, Sri Aurobindo. In these ways, I hope to establish the concept of a virtual diaspora and at the same time a bridge between East and West.

As individuals and social activists, Bob Marley and Frantz Fanon appear to stand in paradoxical relations with one another. In some ways, they were kindred, coming from the same physical and social spaces—Marley from Jamaica and Fanon from Martinique. As social activists, they spoke the same language of liberation that transcends their local and regional realities—specifically; both were globalists as the theory of liberation is concerned. However, Marley and Fanon, to certain extents, differed in relation to the means of liberation. While Marley sometimes vacillated on the use of violence for liberation, Fanon was emphatic that violence is a veritable means of liberation. While Marley looked back for the ingredients of the liberation process, Fanon believed that moving forward to the future is the tool kit of liberation. The paper places Marley’s and Fanon’s notions of liberation within the context of the existential issues raised by the twin phenomena of slavery and colonialism. The paper situates Marley and Fanon along the poeticist and historicist analytical framework enunciated by Paget Henry (2000). While Marley could be identified with the poeticist school which advocates for a reconstruction of the past as a means of liberation, Fanon’s historicism projects an alternative reality to replace the past in order to liberate the oppressed. The paper argues that both positions can be reconciled to achieve a coherent theory of liberation, which is the mitigation of the situation of the oppressed and the powerless in Caribbean society and the world in general.

Frantz Fanon’s posthumously published one act play, The Drowning Eye (2018, 81–112), reframes French existentialism in a postcolonial context by examining both the absurd and racial identity. Divided into three parts, this article first discusses the many parallels between The Drowning Eye and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1989), both one act plays set in one room with the entire action of the play consisting of a dialogue among three individuals in a love triangle. The second part explores the role of the absurd in existentialism by looking at character and thematic similarities between The Drowning Eye and Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1982), both of which reject religion as a source of meaning in life and embrace acceptance of the absurd as a liberating force. Fanon’s echoes of French existentialist themes situated in the context of decolonialism are explored in the third part. Fanon diverges from the apolitical alienation of The Stranger by instead interrogating racial binaries of former colonial subjects who either embrace or reject black consciousness. The Drowning Eye foreshadows Fanon’s later work, Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 2008) and lays the foundation for the analysis of decolonialism and national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2004).

This article examines how multiculturalism has overflowed from its governmental and policy articulations into Canadian society and culture more broadly. In doing so, it brings together three fields of research that are often separated and disarticulated from each other. Firstly, it draws on oft-overlooked archival material from agencies, departments and ministries of anti-racism, heritage, human rights, immigration, labour, multiculturalism, race relations, settlement and the status of women between 1971 and 2001. Secondly, it engages with the political and academic careers of “immigrant women” who navigated the credentialism, anti-intellectualism and “shy elitism” that courses through official and corporate forms of multiculturalism, and were recognized by prize-giving institutions for their contributions to Canadian society. Finally, it thinks with and through Black Atlantic intellectuals and an “anti-hierarchical tradition of thought that probably culminates in C.L.R. James’s idea that ordinary people do not need an intellectual vanguard to help them to speak or to tell them what to say” (Gilroy 1993, 79).

In this article, I discuss Frantz Fanon’s position regarding Hegelian dialectics. Dialektik von Herr und Knecht (Master-Servant/Servitude Dialectic) is one of the most important analytical keys of Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit), published by G.W.F. Hegel in Jena in 1807. However, in his Peau Noire, Masque Blancs (Black Skins, White Masks), written when he was 25 years old and published in 1952, Fanon argues that under the colonial yoke, reciprocity, a fundamental characteristic of dialectics, is not effective. The question I seek to answer in this study is: does the argument presented by the author represent a rupture, reaffirmation or transfiguration of the Hegelian dialectic? Faced with this challenge, I place some excerpts from Phenomenology, and from Black Skins, White Masks, as well as other later writings by Fanon, in dialogue, to then problematize the closeness, tensions and ruptures between both. The argument I present here will revolve around Fanon’s defense of the existence of a transfigured (calibanized) appropriation of the dialectic, based on three interdependent elements: 1. Fanon shares the Hegelian assumption that identity is produced in the reciprocal relationship with its otherness. 2. Colonial estrangement interdicts this reciprocity by promoting a decay of political domination to the level of objectifying and bestialized denial; 3. Colonial negation is not ontological, but historical and, therefore, can be overcome by a practical-sensitive negation, carried out by the colonized themselves. Throughout this paper, I discuss some implications of the argument defended here in the context of the specialized literature on the thinking of both authors.

Philosophers tend to conceive of whiteness as having only one modality, treating it as a single social, political, and historical phenomenon. Philosophers ought to abandon this habit and instead recognize that there are many whitenesses, that whiteness has a plurality of modalities. Drawing upon Charles Mills’ non-ideal theory, Michael James’s political ontology, and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s cultural history, this study develops a non-ideal political ontology of whiteness that demonstrates various modes of whiteness and the roles they play in the different political claims of various groups of Europeans-descended people in the United States. While an exhaustive account of whiteness’ various modalities is beyond the scope of one essay, this article presents a case study of multimodal whiteness the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing out four modalities of American whiteness: Anglo-Saxon whiteness, Plantation whiteness, Frontier whiteness, and Urban whiteness. By freeing philosophy of race from monolithic conceptions of whiteness, we can better understand and diagnose how reigns of white supremacy are passed from one group of whites to another, and we can see how prevailing political ontologies of whiteness at specific historical times and places shape the resulting white supremacist structures.

Amid the coloniality of power, earth politics is a political spirituality. It fosters decolonizing practices that create what Colombian anthropologist Albán Achinte terms “re-existence”—a “redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity.” Earth politics’ spirituality can be read across the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Drucilla Cornell/Stephen Seely, and Paget Henry. Earth politics, in Henry’s words, is a “drama of consciousness” with a “spiritual ground,” a consciousness that is both “vertical” and “horizontal”—better, a spherical and ambient consciousness “grounding” an earthy awareness that is historical and poetic, local and planetary. Earth politics infused with such consciousness can become a force against even imperio-colonial practices of torture against colonized peoples. U.S. activist Sister Dianna Ortiz, embodies this counter-force of earth politics in her “life after torture,” in her collective struggle against the neo-imperialist torture-state that is the United States.

In this essay, we revisit the concept of “political spirituality” that we developed in our book The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man (2016) in light of the profound political upheavals that have happened since its publication. We begin with theories about the breakdown of neoliberalism and the “return of politics” with the rise of so-called populist movements. We argue that notions of the “demos” and the “people” miss the dimension of transindividuality central to our thinking of political spirituality. The second aspect of political spirituality missing from current critical theory is transcendence, or the desire to go beyond the limits of who and what we are. We capture both these dimensions through a notion of “relational finitude,” demonstrating both the poverty of European philosophy in this respect, and celebrating the contribution of feminism, decolonial theory, and African philosophy toward a new praxis of being human.

Decolonization is synonymous with liberation. It is invoked in multiple overlapping geopolitical projects that demand both the undoing of imperial-colonial structures and the amelioration of their effects. In his essay “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/ Building Decolonial Options,” Walter Mignolo describes decoloniality as a double-faced concept. Decolonization is a geopolitical project while decoloniality is an epistemological, political, and ethical process that enables decolonial futures (Mignolo 2011, 20). In this way, decoloniality is an analytical that critiques coloniality but also a generative utopian project that relies on decolonial epistemologies to materialize these futures. Like settler colonialism, coloniality is a structure that exceeds colonization and capitalism, expressing itself as modernity. It is the epistemic and hermeneutical processes of decoloniality that reveal ways of living and being—what Mignolo calls “living in harmony and reciprocity”—that ultimately build a nonimperial, noncapitalist world (Mignolo 2011, 25). In this article I put decolonial theory in conversation with Indigenous articulations of decolonization and religious life to illustrate what Indigenous decolonial futures may look like. I argue that reclamations of Indigenous metaphysical life regenerate Indigenous ontologies (intersubjective personhood) in ways that not only secure decolonial futures but also heal historical trauma, which can be understood as ontological dispossession.

Departing from Christian spiritualities, even those emerging from feminist theologians and Latin American eco feminist liberation theologies, the indigenous women´s movements started to propose their own “indigenous spirituality.” In some key meetings like the “First Summit of Indigenous Women of the Americas” and at other later meetings, their basic documents, final declarations, collective proposals have a spiritual component that departs from the influences of the largely Christian Catholic background of the country. Their discourses, demands, and live presentations have also expressed this religious background. Through several years of interactions and sharing with women in the indigenous worlds of Mexico, the author has systematized a series of characteristics that emanate from a particular cosmovision and cosmogony. These religious references to an indigenous spirituality are inspired on ancestral references re-created today as the women struggle for social justice. The inspiration for their social justice fight is often anchored in these beliefs and practices. It is a reference to worlds of ritual, liturgy, and collective worship that—although being often attired in Catholic and Christian imagery—reveal a deep disjuncture with Christianity and affirm their epistemic particularity. Working from these “cracks of epistemic differences” (Mignolo 2006) the author presents them as a de-colonial effort. Women are actively proposing to recapture ancestral spiritualities to decolonize both the religious universes they were forced to adopt during the historical colonial invasion as well as from the influences of a neo-colonial feminist frame for gender equality.

James H. Cone is without question the most important Black Theologian of the last century in U.S. theology. This essay is an engagement with his work, focusing in particular on the shifts from European theology, in his Black Theology & Black Power, to Black Aesthetic Religious production, in The Spirituals & The Blues, to The Cross and the Lynching Tree. The core theme of this essay is the entanglement of spiritual/religious colonization with production/invention of racial hierarchies that then became the crucibles for the forging of racist imaginaries that entailed, authorized, enshrined, and sacralized white supremacy. The Janus face of this alchemy, however, was the production of a black religion of liberation that entailed decolonizing the “blackness” invented by the modern project of religious racist colonization. The essay considers how Cone’s works empowers us to think through the analogies between the process of the colonization of the indigenous peoples of the so-called “New World” and the “enslavement” of African peoples. The similarities have to do with the coupling of the colonization of imaginaries with the imposition of racial imaginaries, i.e. religious conquest is also a racial conquest, and conversely, racial conquest is also a religious conquest.

This article stages the imaginary “travel” of the ideas of the Argentine philosopher/anthropologist Rodolfo Kusch (1922–1979) to the Caribbean, in the service of sketching the work of feminist cultural producers in generational knowledge transmission. The first part elaborates a dialogue between Kusch’s concept of “fagocitación” (phagocytosis) with “transculturación” (transculturation), developed by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969). The second part of the article focuses on how Dominican diasporic composer, singer, and healer Irka Mateo enters this itinerary as a field researcher, an intellectual and expressive cultural producer. I suggest that Mateo’s notion that the “field” might inhabit her music captures a key dimension of her work as expressive and embodied cultural praxis, and that this inhabitation subtends how the artist envisions the preservation of cultural memory and links her work to Kusch and Ortiz. The final section of the article looks at the implications of forgetting to the transmission of ancestral knowledges to illustrate how Mateo’s work offers some clues that can help us better discern what re-membering means, which might be distinct and enrich how we remember.

On the eve of 1945, after the retreat of Admiral Robert but before the end of the war, René Ménil wrote an essay extolling humor as a quintessential literary mode of resistance and predicting that colonial authors would go on to contribute significantly to a literature of humor. This article seeks to clarify what humor means to Ménil by illuminating his engagement with Dada, the surrealist movement, Freud, and the concept of irony. In contemplating both the essay’s poetics and politics, this article suggests that Ménil’s vision not only anticipated the Antillean literature to come, but also offered a precocious illustration of it.

The dynamic mother-daughter relationship can be loving and supportive at best as well as contentious and tragic. It is a relationship predicated on maternal instinct which can provide direction and support for deep insight into notions of womanhood, personal and political philosophies. However, in providing this guidance, ironically this same maternal guidance can act to stifle the growth of an adolescent daughter as she transitions into womanhood. Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Annie John’ can be seen as an exemplar of this transition. Annie has to contend with not only her mother’s maternal pressure on her to conform, but she must also adhere to cultural expectations of a creolized culture predicated on both Africana and British understandings of femininity, social expectations, womanhood, and etiquette. This challenges Annie’s own emerging philosophy and desire for independence and self-definition. As discussed in this paper, success can be achieved outside and beyond the mother-daughter dynamic once a daughter has had the opportunity to consider, realize, (and if necessary) defy the hypocrisy of being encouraged to be independent whilst being forced to follow one’s mother’s notion of womanhood. In a valiant attempt to avoid the tragedy of replicating her mother’s own flaws, Annie John’s personal growth was no easy feat and created at times a contentious dynamic. However, this journey not only facilitated her success and independence so that she could travel beyond the shores of Antigua, it demonstrated an independence of thought that African Caribbean creolized women must experience in order to realize their own success.

Sylvia Wynter and Édouard Glissant are twentieth-century cultural theorists from Jamaica and Martinique, respectively. Their literary work critiques western knowledge production and the ways in which colonial modes of thinking have negatively impacted Caribbean subjectivity. This essay explores the counter-hegemonic poetics of Wynter’s essay “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” and Glissant’s book “Poetics of Relation,” comparing their epistemologies and methods of literary production. To understand the philosophical resonances of these texts, they are situated in a framework of western critical theory and analyzed alongside the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss and the poststructuralist theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This essay aims to illustrate how Wynter and Glissant conceptualize historic, social, and epistemic relationality, and in doing so point us towards a decolonial future.

In the mid-twentieth century, many philosophers took up as their aim the destruction of Western metaphysics. Martinican philosopher, novelist, poet, and playwright Édouard Glissant and German philosopher Martin Heidegger were two such authors. Driven by a profound dissatisfaction with the logocentrism of Western metaphysics and concerns over what the tradition excluded—for Glissant, the experience of the creolized and post-colonial subject, and for Heidegger, the “Question of Being”—both advocated for more creative engagement with language and advanced particular views about the link between language and Being. Through a comparative examination of the two authors’ poetics, I aim to “unconceal” an implicit dialogue between their views. I conclude by considering the implications of a key exchange in this proposed dialogue: Glissant’s substitution of Relation for Heideggerean Being. I suggest that this exchange and Glissant’s substitution make plain the problematic tendency in Western philosophy to promote an exclusionary view under the guise of universal truth, that it provides Caribbean philosophy with a greater vocabulary through which to further “produce” itself, and that it is better suited to allow for a process of unceasing transformation and creolization, in contrast to a Western philosophical emphasis on fixity.

The figure of the tracée is significant for Ménil’s understanding of spatio-temporality, an understanding upon which rest, so this essay argues, his concepts of critique, poetic knowledge, and literary form. The argument takes as its starting point the work Ménil did to conceptualize history as the poesis of recuperation. In doing so, the essay argues for a renewed understanding of Ménil’s contribution to Caribbean philosophy as a whole. One of the most important components of this contribution, the essay claims, is the manner in which Ménil shifts the focus from how linguistic and cultural identity forms in the Antilles to how history appears. What this means is that Ménil works to displace the centrality of folklore and orality to the construction of Antillean identity in order to imagine how Antillean culture comes also to be expressed non-discursively. In Ménil’s work, this displacement occurs primarily by his re-thinking the relationship of architecture to literature. Re-thinking this relationship entails for Ménil recuperating the traces of an Antillean “past passed over,” which unexpectedly appear in both architectural structures and literary works. Paying attention to this particular and peculiar intellectual focus in Ménil’s work, this essay ultimately reconsiders the roles played by both discursive and non-discursive arts in the constitution of a decolonized aesthetics in the Antilles.

This article offers an unprecedented close reading of the poetic texts created by the Martinican author René Ménil, whose poetry has been almost entirely neglected by scholars to date and who is better known for his philosophical and political writings than for his verse. I pay particular attention to Ménil’s treatment of geographical and cultural spaces in his published poetry from 1932 to 1950, and place that verse in dialogue with a text by another Martinican author at work around this period: Edouard Glissant, and his first poetry collection, Un champ d’îles (1952). Despite their otherwise dissimilar literary approaches, I show how both Ménil and Glissant created verse in these years where landscapes shift unpredictably, where human subjects are often overwhelmed, and where bewildering, vertiginous contact between Europe and the Caribbean is emphasized. This stands in contrast to more descriptive or directly political depictions of local nature created by other Afro-Caribbean poets during the period, and, I argue, underscores the complexities of the unsettling encounters between places and peoples occurring with increasing frequency in these years of rapid change around the Second World War.

Between January and February 2009, the longest general strike in French history took place in Guadeloupe and Martinique. The labor movement had far reaching implications for the relationship between France and its overseas departments. In particular, they brought to the fore France’s colonial history in the Antilles, with attendant questions of race, citizenship and sovereignty that highlighted once again the cracks in the image of Antilleans as full French citizens. René Ménil’s essays provide a unique lens through which to read the philosophical underpinnings of the 2009 labor movements in the Antilles. Ménil’s articulation of “a non-mythological elsewhere” posits a three-fold process of excavating history in order to articulate a myth of origin that in turn allows for the possibility of reclaiming a non-colonized identity.

This paper seeks to situate the idea and intellectual narrative of “world revolution” in its modern historical context, tracing it back to the age of democratic revolution in the late eighteenth century, and then developed by great revolutionary thinkers like Marx and Engels. It examines the possible limitations of Marx and Engels’s vision of world revolution with respect to the Third World as a result of their European intellectual formation in the tradition of the Enlightenment, and examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” advanced by post-colonialist theorists among others against classical Marxism. It then explores the inspiration of the Russian Revolution for those fighting racism and imperialism, and how black radicals brought their revolutionary narratives of black liberation into communist narratives for the first time in its aftermath. The essay then discusses C.L.R. James’s pioneering 1937 history of the Comintern, World Revolution, among other things a theoretical intervention into the debates raging among socialist black radicals during the 1930s, and critically examines the charge of “Eurocentrism” often levelled at World Revolution.

In a 2012 review article, Anthony P. Maingot made a case for each generation rewriting history according to its own needs and preoccupations. Everyone, he suggested, has their own C.L.R. James. Everyone, perhaps, except students of international relations (IR) and international history, where references to James’s copious and critical body of work are less common. In the spirit of finding one’s own James, this article employs The Black Jacobins and James’s other magnum opus, World Revolution,1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International, to think historically about two interrelated processes of the twentieth century: the rise of the state, and the relationship between nationalisms and internationalisms. Along with encounters with revolutionary Marxism and pan-Africanism, James bore witness to the challenges of the state, and the tensions between nationalism and internationalism that were so central to understanding the twentieth century.

This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. Once these points are made clear, several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear. First, James’s claim that the slaves of San Domingo were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” follows from his organic concept of the proletariat. Second, James’s revision of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades does not signify a move in the direction of “history from below” but a changed estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s inordinate interest in the individual leader, finally, is more properly understood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations.

René Ménil (1907–2004) was a renowned Martinican essayist, critic, and philosopher who, along with Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant, left an indelible mark on the Franco-Caribbean world of letters and intellectual thought. Ménil saw in surrealism a critical framework, a means to the specific end of exploring and expressing the specificities of the Martinican condition. Ménil assessed Martinique’s pre-war psychological condition through the telling metaphor of relative exoticism, pointing clearly to the typically unacknowledged fact that the exotic is a slippery signifier, dependent on perspective, distance and location. If the core of these conditions were to be recognized and contested, it would have to be addressed at its root, and here, there was no question for him but that colonialism was ultimately enabled by capitalism and its corollaries of avarice and accumulation. His editorship of the journal Tropiquesconstituted cultural combat. Ménil’s thought and writing were arguably aimed at achieving universality out of particularity, and so he eventually broke with Césaire—and more specifically with Senghor—over several key tenets in the Negritude platform, arguing for the actual existence of a Martinican culture. Marxism for Ménil offers a corrective to the perceived shortcomings of Negritude’s political aesthetics, namely its historical blind spots and its foregrounding of mythologized black unity at the expense of class struggle.

The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and ambiguity in literature, against the simple naturalism favoured by the Communist Party but which he insists is not a truly Marxist position, is thus linked to his view of the necessary “doubleness” of Antillean consciousness. Conversely, the simplicity of folklore can offer a basis for cultural identity, but not for good literature. Although Ménil emphasizes the importance of Antilleans reclaiming their history, this is less about discovering one’s roots than providing a dynamic grasp of one’s ever-changing place in a social reality governed by the Marxist dialectic. “Double consciousness” precludes the comforts of fixed identities, but it is a dialectical, not a tragic condition.

This paper explores the concept of “livity,” the ground of Rastafari subjectivity. In its multifaceted nuances, “livity” represents the Rastafari invention of a religious tradition and discourse, whose ethos was fundamentally sacred, signified the immanence of the Absolute in dialectic with the Rastafari worldview and life world. Innovatively, the Rastafari coined the term “livity” to a discourse to combat despair, damnation, social death, and the existential chaos-monde they referred to as Babylon. In the process, the Rastafari reclaimed their power to name their world. The Rastafari neologism “livity” articulated a mysticism, alternative spatial visions, and a positive technology of the self that revalorized blackness, explored, and interrogated profound dimensions of the human condition, from within the Jamaican context, that inevitably brought them into conflict with the local colonial authorities and implicitly shifted the model of social relations between the master and slave.

This article challenges scholarly understanding of an 1837 mutiny in the First West India Regiment. In the Anglo-Trinidadian narrative, African-born soldiers acted out of blind rage, failing in their rebellion because they lacked skill with rifles and bayonets and did not understand either the terrain of Trinidad or its location in the Atlantic littoral. This article’s counterargument is that the rebels, led by a former slave-trader, Dâaga, who had been kidnaped by Portuguese traders at either Grand-Popo or Little Popo, was, with other African-born soldiers, well familiar with military weapons and, after time in the Caribbean, the ecosystem, society, and topography of Trinidad. Dâaga aimed at escape from eastern Trinidad for either Tobago or nearby South America, but was thwarted after English officers captured some mutineers, while the soldiers who remained on the run clashed with a mixed-race Spanish-speaking militia on the only road to an east-coast point of escape.

This paper explores the ways in which Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake reshapes the genre of the historical novel to pose philosophical questions of being, and to interrogate the concept of freedom within the matrix of Caribbean emancipatory discourse. This chosen novelistic form examines history as that of human consciousness as well as expands the conception of time as a spiritual category. Brodber’s work poses and responds to philosophical questions regarding black ontology and existence, offering through the intricate and complex plot structure and phenomenological exploration that she deploys in the historical narratives an in-depth treatment of themes of redemption and liberation of the human.

This paper outlines a code-theoretic approach to the substantive and pedagogical challenges created by the distinct interdisciplinary nature of the field of Africana Studies. It identifies some of the key discourse-constitutive codes and some strategies for suspending disciplinary boundaries created by these necessary codes, which should help us to navigate better the spaces between the disciplines engaged by Africana Studies. After examining these codes and methods for transcending them, the paper concludes with some pedagogical strategies for teaching these interdisciplinary aspects of the field.

In the Caribbean, we cannot stop the misconduct of irresponsible global actors who agitate the winds beyond their natural cycles and push the sea over our shores, but now, we should refuse to leave our destiny in the hands of those for whom nature’s only beauty is its monetary value. Humanity is reading on its earlier footprints before nature has had time to erase them. That undermines sustainability, the backbone of continuity, survival and development, which goes beyond the pleonasm of sustainable development invented by the dominant system in order to maintain its predatory economy rather than a sustainable ecology. Forced to live from reconstruction to reconstruction, the Caribbean has the moral authority to speak out and take command of our destiny along with other vulnerable states, in a fusion of local and global action.

The central claim of this essay is that Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity” is most fruitfully understood not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment. That is, opacity is not a given but an achievement. Taken up in this way, opacity is relevant for ongoing decolonial work today.

This article summarizes the Afro-centric ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Cheikh Anta Diop between 1960 and 1974, the dates on which he defended his thesis on the African identity of Egypt (Kemet and Nubia) and argued his thesis, with Théophile Obenga, before the UNESCO Cairo Conference on the “General History of Africa.” I discuss both the unhappy reception, by European Egyptologists and others, of Diop’s ground-breaking, multidisciplinary research, as well as its gradual spread, among others, to Diasporic thinkers. One such thinker, Marimba Ani (who expressly acknowledges her debt to Diop’s revolutionary demonstrations) took a further step by rethinking, in Africanist terms, the philosophical bases underlying the unfolding of what she probatively shows is the European (or western) Asili (Kiswahili for an overarching way of living or cultural source), as exemplified in its patterns of thought and affective-ideological patterns. I attempt to show, here, how Ani inherits and prolongs Diop’s “Copernican” displacement.

Harold Sonny Ladoo’s 1972 novel No Pain Like This Body has been analyzed for its seminal representation of the traumas experienced by a formerly indentured Indo-Trinidadian family in the early twentieth century. However, relatively little attention has been given to Ladoo’s experimentation with multiple languages, particularly English, Trinidadian Creole, and Hindi. This article argues that Ladoo’s multilingualism offers a guide for approaching the traumatic experiences he represents. While some aspects of the novel, such as its glossary, make the characters’ language more comprehensible, others, such as the orthography Ladoo chooses to represent Creole speech, deliberately distance the reader. Using decolonial theorists of language, particularly Édouard Glissant's writing on multi­lingualism and opacity, this article considers Ladoo’s use of multilingualism both as a limit to readers’ understanding as well as an invitation to continued engagement with those aspects of the text that are resistant to easy comprehension. This article contrasts opacity as a reading methodology with some of the dominant paradigms for understanding linguistic difference in the field of comparative literature, which rely on linguistic and textual mastery. Ultimately, the article proposes reading multilingual texts through opacity as a model for decolonial reading in which creative, active engagement with the text can produce solidarity without requiring complete transparency.

This paper attempts to outline an autonomous feminism; a feminism with its own voice, and one that will transcend the binaries in which Marxism and liberalism are still caught. Its first step is to make clear the semio-linguistic foundations of all human social systems. These foundations consist of an open-ended set of social imaginary signifiers embedded in complex abduction or analogy-producing schemas, the creative conjugating of which makes possible the establishing of social orders such as families, monarchies or patriarchies. The second is to show that the semiotics of these orders require dominant or central signifiers, such as father or king, that must be supported by subordinate or peripheral ones. Third, the paper shows that women have consistently functioned as subordinate signifiers in these order-producing semio-linguistic codes. Fourth and finally, the paper details the semiotic difficulties of overthrowing this underlying governing code and thus breaking women out of their assigned subordinate positions.

This paper argues for the concept of a decolonial humanism at the heart of C.L.R. James’s theoretical and political engagements. In exploring the concept of decolonial humanism, the paper moves through three major sections dealing with some of the definitive epistemic and political aspects of James’s work: (i) a critique of Enlightenment Humanism and European Marxism without disavowing the aspirations of universal human emancipation; (ii) James’s work with the Johnson-Forest Tendency, the Pan-Africanist movement, and his attempts at labor organizing in Trinidad first alongside Eric Williams in the People’s National Movement (PNM) and later in his own Workers and Farmer’s Party (WFP); and (iii) the practicality of decolonial humanism in terms of its adoption by Tim Hector and the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM).

This paper attempts to deepen the already rich exchange between Caribbean scholars and the distinguished African scholar Samir Amin. In particular, it attempts to expand the exchanges on the relations between philosophy, economics and culture. The expansion uncovers hidden but significant complementary relations between the contributions of Caribbean scholars, such as C.L.R. James, Lloyd Best, and Sylvia Wynter, and the work of Amin on philosophy economics and culture.

This essay focuses on the spatial organization of the genre of ‘Man.’ In particular, I investigate the spatial attitudes through which the genre of Man emerges as a racialized, geographically determined, and gendered category. There are two main arcs of analysis provided: the first arc follows the relation between the space of exploration and the space of totalization. The second arc focuses on the role of boundary markers such as the ‘Other’ and the ‘Outside,’ in the spatial organization of Man. I argue, overall, that the totalitarian spatial attitude of the Modern State is formed on the basis of the transformation of the cosmogeny of Man from a spatially limited earth to one open to exploration. The racialized ladder of the State rests on such production of a spatial attitude that is at once open and totalitarian.

The Afro-Pessimist contends the impossibility of building a movement from “absolutely nothing.” This assumption comes from a misreading of Franz Fanon’s proposition in Black Skin, White Masks, “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” This paper analyzes the structure of Fanon’s proposition by considering ‘not’ as an operator while challenging and setting limits to the function of Identity utilized by the Pessimist. The way in which Fanon puts to use the elements of his proposition functions as that statement’s meaning, rather than assuming a dictionary definition for each word whose sum presupposes a definition of the sentence. Where the Afro-Pessimist treats the period in Fanon’s assertion as a full stop, intending Black Identity’s interchangeability with “absolutely nothing,” I take the logical structure of Fanon’s assertion as a conditional, illustrating the fallacy inherent to the Pessimist position. In all, the structure of a proposition begets its expressive capacity.

The literature on race/racism and modern Euro-American philosophy obscures a category of continental African thinkers who not only embraced modernity and its core tenets but used them as the metric for judging their societies and self-making. Their embrace of modernity led them to share certain assumptions about their societies’ past like those that ground the racism of modern Euro-American philosophy. The literature has not attended to their ideas. The obscuring arises from racializing the discourse of philosophy and race/racism within a black-white/white-nonwhite schema. We, instead, historicize the discourse and show how, in embracing modernity, Africans managed, simultaneously, to repudiate modern philosophy’s racism. African thinkers never saw modernity as white or quintessentially European: it is the latest iteration of the human march to a better life for the species; they historicized it. The paper concludes with an exegesis of one such thinker from nineteenth century West Africa, James Africanus Beale Horton.

While Sylvia Wynter emphasizes the written word’s capacity to transform our systems of organizing knowledge, she repeatedly questions the extent to which novels can have this transformative capacity. Both her theoretical writing and the plot of her 1962 novel The Hills of Hebron emphasize the novel’s limitations. However, Wynter does not totally reject the form. Instead, she reimagines the novel through the idea of the “counter-novel,” developed in conjunction with her close reading of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. This essay considers The Hills of Hebron as a counter-novel by analyzing the connections between novel’s two artist characters, The Hills of Hebron, and Wynter’s reading of The Invisible Man. Through this analysis, I argue that Wynter’s novel can be read as a substantial contribution to her theoretical corpus that has continued relevance to her challenge to transform dominant systems of knowledge production.

This paper examines the discourse of white supremacy in the intellectual history and socio-historical development in the nation of Colombia. In particular, it focuses on the period after the gaining of political independence from Spain in 1819. Further, the paper focuses on the texts of two writers who spanned late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These writers are Miguel Jiménez López and Luis López de Mesa. The paper develops in detail the white supremacist discourses of these two writers, along with their views of the indigenous people of Colombia, the mestizos, and the Africans who were imported as slaves and racialized as Blacks. Finally, the paper examines the pro-white immigration policies of the authors, which they believed would improve the intelligence, the entrepreneurial capability and beauty of Colombia, and thus its prospects for development.

We are living in a period where the balanced interdependence of fear and hope seems to have collapsed as a result of the growing polarization between the world of hopeless fear (great majority of the population) and the world of fearless hope (a strictly small but all powerful minority). It is a world where uncertainties tend to become abysmal ones which, for the poor and powerless, ultimately translate into unjust fate and, for the rich and powerful, a reckless mission to appropriate the world. Under the present circumstances, the revolt and the struggle against the injustice must be waged in such a way as to bring about a new social redistribution of fear and hope to put an end to the hopelessness of the oppressed and the fearlessness of the oppressors. The struggle will be more successful if people come to realize that the hopeless fate of the powerless majorities stems from the fearless hope of the powerful minorities.

Is it possible to ground universal ineluctable principles related to social reality? How should these principles be formulated from a Latin-American perspective of critical thought? What do they consist of? This paper focuses on answering these questions. The theoretical framework presented here is taken from the arguments and philosophical perspectives of two Latin-American critical thinkers: Enrique Dussel and Franz Hinkelammert. In this context, the arguments which are relevant are those linked to life as presupposition of human action. The purpose here is to provide an alternative strategy for grounding and formulating the material principle of life.

All politics (i.e. a collective organised thought-practice), if it is to be emancipatory, must exhibit a dialectic of expressive and excessive thought. The absence of the dialectic implies the absence of a politics. The same point can be made by stressing that, in emancipatory politics, thought and practice are indistinguishable. The dialectic here concerns an emancipatory politics latent in excluded popular African traditions. Such latency means that a potentiality for dialectical thought often already exists within African traditions. Yet it can only be activated in struggle. I show through three examples separated by long periods of time, that Africans – or more accurately some Africans – have successfully activated existing potentials into emancipatory politics by thinking against and beyond the oppressive particularities of interests, place and identity embedded in dominant cultures (such as those typical of civil society today) and have thus emphasised the centrality of universal humanity in the politics of emancipation.

This article argues that the work of Ottobah Cugoano provides readers with a robust anti-imperial analysis of European modernity. For Cugoano, slavery and colonialism are coeval and mutually constitutive processes. I argue that Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery which has been accepted as a tract of radical abolitionism should also be interpreted as an anti-imperial text. I contend that we must attend to the global scope of Cugoano’s anti-imperialism which includes critiques of European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as provides recommendations for radical changes in the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world. Through an analysis of Cugoano’s historiography of modern slavery and colonialism, I argue that Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery provides one of the most thorough criticisms of slavery and empire in the eighteenth century.

Western intellectuals since the Enlightenment have tended to push non-Western forms of knowing to the margins of intellectual discourse and into the realm of myth and folklore. Although postcolonial criticism within and outside of the Americas challenges binary thinking and hegemonic political structures, it frequently does so within the framework of Western scholarly practice. The writings of Wilson Harris and Gloria Anzaldúa, while originating in different “American” contexts, are rooted in an indigenous-inflected episteme and address new ways of producing theory and critical writing through the creative arts. Contemporary literary studies and academic practice are far from the kind of imaginative participation that characterizes the work of Harris and particularly Anzaldúa, who was a scholar as well as an activist. Yet, the notion of art as thought or theory has the potential to expand our understanding of what constitutes knowledge and to enrich the kind of work we do as scholars in the academy.

Paget Henry’s (1997; 2000) narratives about the domains of existence in relation to human/social agency raise interesting issues about the theory and praxis of Afro-Caribbean existential discourse. In it, even when the relationships between agency and the material, social and spiritual domains of existence were thematized differently according to the different phases of Afro-Caribbean philosophical thought, the problematic of agency among the three domains raises similar questions across the different phases of Afro-Caribbean philosophy in relation to the theory and praxis of Afro-Caribbean existential discourse. The problem here relates to the charge whether enslaved and colonized people could be credited with cognitive, ethical and social agency in the face of a structure that presents different existential challenges to the ability of the Caribbean people to realise their personhood and live a worthwhile life. This paper argues that the existential issues raised by causal determinism—whether scientific, social or spiritual, rear their ugly heads across the three domains of existence and also through the historical and analytical phases of Afro-Caribbean philosophical thought. The thesis supported in this paper is that, contrary to western scholarship, the Caribbean people have always possessed agency and have used this to overcome existential challenges at different phases of their history. The question whether they have always succeeded in doing this is a different question.

Anna Julia Cooper has gained wider recognition in philosophy, thanks to the work of black feminist scholars, generating increased interest in Cooper’s ideas on race, gender, education, and social problems in the United States. However, the global scope of Cooper’s political theory has not yet received sufficient attention. Cooper’s 1925 dissertation is an analysis of slavery and the Haitian revolution, which demonstrates the fundamental contradictions within French enlightenment discourses of liberty. Cooper shows how European discourses of liberty were hampered by the realities of enslavement, predating arguments that would become more widely known in later works, such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (written in 1938) and Eric Williams’s Columbus to Castro (written in 1970). As Cooper demonstrates how ideologies of racial inequality undermined the stated ideals of the French revolution, she argues from a natural law position to not only maintain that slavery is “a supreme crime against humanity,” in her words, but also that “it is natural and just that it contains its punishment within itself.”

Readers of C.L.R. James are familiar with the thinker’s careful reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick in his text Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. In that work James proposes that Melville exposes the foundations of societal level fascism as exemplified by the monomaniacal purpose of Ahab. The purpose of this effort is to push further into the concept of societal division as exemplified by Moby-Dick by proposing that Melville is taking on the discourse of color (black vs. white) and its relationship to ontological value (bad vs. good) by imploding the internal logic of Plato’s Phaedrus. What concerns this project is the relationship between the phenotypic “blackness” of the characters of African descent in Moby-Dick and ways in which Melville endeavors to destabilize skin color in the western imaginary as a means to correct the negative consequences of this flattening of the hierarchical nature of society on the part of Ahab.

The present essay examines three apparent contradictions to arise in Fanon’s work regarding his operative critique of religion, ontology, and theory of truth. I review some of the prevailing evaluations of these apparent contradictions, and then argue that said interpretations of Fanon do not stand up to close textual and historical scrutiny. I then dissolve the aforementioned apparent contradictions and provide more adequate approaches to interpreting their theoretical significance in such a way as to highlight the internal coherence and force of Fanon’s philosophical vision.

The New Beginning Movement (NBM) (1971–1978) in Trinidad functioned as a voice of direct democracy and workers self-management through popular assemblies, and as a global coordinating council of a Pan-Caribbean International with linkages across the region, in Britain, the United States, and Canada. A crucial philosophical and strategic leaven in the 1970 Black Power Revolt led by Geddes Granger’s and Dave Darbeau’s National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and the 1975 United Labour Front (ULF) in Trinidad, NBM aspired to interpret Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians equally, and on their own autonomous terms, toward self-directed emancipation. Led by Bukka Rennie, Wally Look Lai, and Franklyn Harvey, NBM was inspired by C.L.R. James’s intellectual legacies. Through publications such as New Beginning, Caribbean Dialogue, and The Vanguard, these partisans advocated labor’s self-emancipation and critical perspectives on capitalism and state power, and exposed the limits of elite party politics and representative government.

This piece argues that Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks inscribes the social and psychological experience of the African Diaspora within the conceptual purview of the western sciences by the means of psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts. The upshots of Fanon’s goal are twofold. Its first implication is that in employing psychoanalytical and philosophical lingo, Fanon commits to delineating a distinct tenet of self-determination for the African Diaspora. Such tenet of self-determination consists in a set of norms, beliefs, socio-cultural, and political practices. Secondly, besides the stated goal in the Introduction, namely to ‘liberate the black individual from herself,’ Fanon is attempting to alter the European perception of black communities as sexual and biological threats. Accordingly, this piece concludes that Fanon’s successful inscription of the psychological and lived experiences of the African Diaspora in the western sciences, via his psychoanalytical and philosophical rendition, is hampered by the European perception of black bodies which prevents their complete scientific conceptualization.

While there has been significant literature concerning the relationship between Frantz Fanon and European philosophy; particularly, Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and existentialism, there has been little work addressing the influence of Aimé Césaire to Fanon’s work. In this essay we argue that Césaire’s ethical sensibility concerning freedom and transformation had a major role in shaping Fanon’s thought. We suggest that Césaire’s work cannot be reduced to an essentialist reading of blackness, or a retrograde form of African nativism. Rather, we argue his anti-colonial philosophy can be understood as an “ethics of acceptance” that seeks to journey to the inward of human consciousness in order to transcend the black’s negative self-concept under colonialism. Contrasting Césaire’s ethics of acceptance, we trace Fanon’s external ethics of confrontation through his reading of Césaire, and also the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In doing so, we argue that Fanon departs from Césaire not based on the latter’s conception of blackness, or négritude, but rather his ethics of acceptance.

This essay surveys the writings of Walter Rodney, the late Guyanese scholar-activist, in an effort to elicit a distinctive way of thinking politically about underdevelopment. Focusing on a range of primary sources, including a series of unpublished notes and lectures on Marxism and development theory, I consider how Rodney’s engagement with the concrete struggles of Black people informed his appropriation of historical materialism. An avowed “Black Marxist” working at the onset of the neocolonial order, Rodney suggested that collective human development, the historical expansion of productive and social capacity, had become routinely delimited by racially charged political blockages, the effects of a kind of zero-sum game in which development for some was secured only through the active underdevelopment of others. Ultimately I suggest that Rodney’s work invites serious reconsideration of the enduring explanatory power of the Black radical and Marxist legacies, in this case by providing a rich theoretical framework that can help to orient and sustain critical engagement with the elusive racial politics of persistent underdevelopment.