Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122655 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Derefe Kimarley Chevannes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Derefe Kimarley |
| FAMILY NAME | Chevannes |
| SIGNATURE | CHEVANNES D K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7033-1583 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sound Reason
Phonomodernity conceptualizes a racial-ableist formation of modernity that naturalizes “sound reason,” that is, the capacity to hear and speak politically, as the epistemic and ontological basis of the human. Deafness is constructed within this order as “unsound” and therefore exiled from the domains of reason and politics. By linking reason to speech and audition, classical political thought, from Aristotle to Hobbes, naturalizes this phonocentr…
Against American Ethnic Democracy: White Rule and Black Rebellion
Since the inception of the United States, religion has long permeated its politics, so much so that racial construction cannot be fully understood without first dissecting America’s cosmological underpinnings. This article maps the founding of ethnic democracy within European modernity and its centrality to the development of the American nation-state. I contend that American ethnic democracy emerges when ethno-racial tyranny expresses itself as …
Beyond Hetero-Modernity: Queering Universal Emancipation for Sexual Liberation
This article theorizes hetero-modernity as generating the heterosexualization of modernity, enacting a colonial sexual order that attempts a queer-death project through the dialectics of (re)integration and elimination. It is, in essence, the colonization of sexual existence. The emergence of the hetero-modern world pursues queer death via multiple sites of violence—political, economic, and ontological—culminating in the systemic dehumanizing of …
Decolonizing Caribbean Modernity: Universal Emancipation, Democratic Revolution and Self-Determination
The Caribbean is an undertheorized region within canonical political theory. This paper critically uncovers the West Indies as the inaugural site of modernity within the Americas. If it is European modernity that introduces into human existence fundamental markers of social identity, such as the historical nexus between race and class with devastating effects, then contemporary racial problems, including anti-black racism in the postcolonial worl…
Claudia Jones & the Critique of Self-Determination: Toward Human Liberation
This essay explores a distinctly Caribbeanist imagination of human liberation. It argues Claudia Jones, a journalist and activist born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, offers a uniquel
Africana Political Theory as Decolonial Critique
This article illuminates a fundamental problem at the core of canonical political theory: the racialization of knowledge. It contends that the history of canonical thought as being necessarily Western and, therefore, European American, means the emergence of epistemic racism produces enormous consequences for the practice of philosophical thought—namely, Africana political theory (APT). Thus, this article raises important questions such as the co…
Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World
This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effect…
Criminalizing Black Reason: A Critique of Carceral Methodologies in the Study of Race
This paper critically examines the nexus between the scientific method and the study of race in the contemporary world. It begins by historicizing the emergence of the scientific method as indispensable to the advent of European modernity. The development of modernity collapsed into the racialization of black subjects as subhuman and criminal. This criminalization of blackness occurs at two critical junctures: the arrest of blacks via plantation …
Black Liberation and Political Education: The Valorizing of Afro-Ecuadorian Thought
Moving beyond the nominal recognition of Black lives toward a struggle for Black liberation raises several challenges, one of which is the critical role of political education. For this reason, this article explores Euromodernity’s constructions and sustenance of apolitical educational arrangements that constrain political speech fundamental to a democratic education. It argues, among other things, that the primacy of capitalist logics in educati…
The Haitian Revolution and Afromodernity: Political Speech, Euromodernity & Black Universalism
The Haitian Revolution introduced a seismic shift in political constellations, leading to the constitution of the first free Black republic within the New World. Revolutionary Haiti communicated the content of that freedom as it embarked along the path of revolutionary liberation. This article examines the nature of that communication by demonstrating how political speech is implicated at the formative levels of Black selfhood and statehood throu…
Statelessness And Contemporary Enslavement
The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Meditations on Claudia Jones
This article examines the role of labor as a political concept within the work of Caribbean thinker and activist, Claudia Jones. It argues for a reformulation of black labor politics. Specifically, it contends Jones’ formulation of labor requires moving beyond its conventionally economic articulations, to consider, in tandem, labor’s expressly political, existential (racial), and epistemic dimensions to actualize a coherent project of transnation…
Creolizing political speech: Toward Black existential articulations
In the writings of Jane Anna Gordon, there is a thoroughgoing responsiveness to political projects and their racial and pedagogical dimensions. Of the former, Gordon theorizes domains of creolizati
Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World
This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effect…
Beyond Hetero-Modernity: Queering Universal Emancipation for Sexual Liberation
This article theorizes hetero-modernity as generating the heterosexualization of modernity, enacting a colonial sexual order that attempts a queer-death project through the dialectics of (re)integration and elimination. It is, in essence, the colonization of sexual existence. The emergence of the hetero-modern world pursues queer death via multiple sites of violence—political, economic, and ontological—culminating in the systemic dehumanizing of …
Creolizing political speech: Toward Black existential articulations
In the writings of Jane Anna Gordon, there is a thoroughgoing responsiveness to political projects and their racial and pedagogical dimensions. Of the former, Gordon theorizes domains of creolizati
The Laboring of Black Politics: Decolonial Meditations on Claudia Jones
This article examines the role of labor as a political concept within the work of Caribbean thinker and activist, Claudia Jones. It argues for a reformulation of black labor politics. Specifically, it contends Jones’ formulation of labor requires moving beyond its conventionally economic articulations, to consider, in tandem, labor’s expressly political, existential (racial), and epistemic dimensions to actualize a coherent project of transnation…
Statelessness And Contemporary Enslavement
Criminalizing Black Reason: A Critique of Carceral Methodologies in the Study of Race
This paper critically examines the nexus between the scientific method and the study of race in the contemporary world. It begins by historicizing the emergence of the scientific method as indispensable to the advent of European modernity. The development of modernity collapsed into the racialization of black subjects as subhuman and criminal. This criminalization of blackness occurs at two critical junctures: the arrest of blacks via plantation …
Black Liberation and Political Education: The Valorizing of Afro-Ecuadorian Thought
Moving beyond the nominal recognition of Black lives toward a struggle for Black liberation raises several challenges, one of which is the critical role of political education. For this reason, this article explores Euromodernity’s constructions and sustenance of apolitical educational arrangements that constrain political speech fundamental to a democratic education. It argues, among other things, that the primacy of capitalist logics in educati…
The Haitian Revolution and Afromodernity: Political Speech, Euromodernity & Black Universalism
The Haitian Revolution introduced a seismic shift in political constellations, leading to the constitution of the first free Black republic within the New World. Revolutionary Haiti communicated the content of that freedom as it embarked along the path of revolutionary liberation. This article examines the nature of that communication by demonstrating how political speech is implicated at the formative levels of Black selfhood and statehood throu…
Decolonizing Caribbean Modernity: Universal Emancipation, Democratic Revolution and Self-Determination
The Caribbean is an undertheorized region within canonical political theory. This paper critically uncovers the West Indies as the inaugural site of modernity within the Americas. If it is European modernity that introduces into human existence fundamental markers of social identity, such as the historical nexus between race and class with devastating effects, then contemporary racial problems, including anti-black racism in the postcolonial worl…
Claudia Jones & the Critique of Self-Determination: Toward Human Liberation
This essay explores a distinctly Caribbeanist imagination of human liberation. It argues Claudia Jones, a journalist and activist born in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, offers a uniquel
Africana Political Theory as Decolonial Critique
This article illuminates a fundamental problem at the core of canonical political theory: the racialization of knowledge. It contends that the history of canonical thought as being necessarily Western and, therefore, European American, means the emergence of epistemic racism produces enormous consequences for the practice of philosophical thought—namely, Africana political theory (APT). Thus, this article raises important questions such as the co…
Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World
This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effect…
Against American Ethnic Democracy: White Rule and Black Rebellion
Since the inception of the United States, religion has long permeated its politics, so much so that racial construction cannot be fully understood without first dissecting America’s cosmological underpinnings. This article maps the founding of ethnic democracy within European modernity and its centrality to the development of the American nation-state. I contend that American ethnic democracy emerges when ethno-racial tyranny expresses itself as …
Beyond Hetero-Modernity: Queering Universal Emancipation for Sexual Liberation
This article theorizes hetero-modernity as generating the heterosexualization of modernity, enacting a colonial sexual order that attempts a queer-death project through the dialectics of (re)integration and elimination. It is, in essence, the colonization of sexual existence. The emergence of the hetero-modern world pursues queer death via multiple sites of violence—political, economic, and ontological—culminating in the systemic dehumanizing of …
Sound Reason
Phonomodernity conceptualizes a racial-ableist formation of modernity that naturalizes “sound reason,” that is, the capacity to hear and speak politically, as the epistemic and ontological basis of the human. Deafness is constructed within this order as “unsound” and therefore exiled from the domains of reason and politics. By linking reason to speech and audition, classical political thought, from Aristotle to Hobbes, naturalizes this phonocentr…
Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Race, History, and American Society (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (4 works) · Modernity (3 works)