Caribbean Philosophical Association
Biographic Data
| ID | 9951427 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caribbean Philosophical Association |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caribbean Philosophical |
| FAMILY NAME | Association |
| SIGNATURE | ASSOCIATION C P |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Notes Toward a Practice of Bleeding
In this speculative essay, I assess the creative and scholarly practices of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, paying particular attention to the disciplinary investments informing their assessment of black religions as either helpful or harmful to the task of black revolt. I begin by analyzing each writer's early experimentations with the script form in relation to the absurd, a crisis emerging at the existential crossroads formed by a meaningless …
Tolerance Beyond Tolerance
The question of tolerance has been extensively debated in the West, offering various interpretations that lean in two major directions, universalist or relativist, neither of which offer a satisfying response. Souleymane Bachir Diagne addresses this problem by challenging both directions, expressing how both universalism and relativism define themselves negatively on the basis of otherness or difference. The Senegalese philosopher offers a viable…
Neville McMorris, Stephon Alexander and the Caribbean Philosophy of Science
The subfield of a Caribbean philosophy of science has been a rather neglected one. This paper is a contribution to making this subfield more visible and its major claims more explicit. This focus on the Caribbean philosophy of science is undertaken through a close examination of the works of two Caribbean physicists and their relationship to the broader Caribbean ontology of creative realism. These two physicists are Neville McMorris and Stephon …
China, Deng Xiaoping and Arthur Lewis
The institutional and ideological complexities coupled with the regulatory ambiguities and inconsistences in Chinese post-socialism do not remain only political and other practical concerns to both outside actors and Chinese citizens, but have caused continuingly baffling experiences to social scientists, particularly from liberal traditions, in systematically theorizing, analyzing, and predicting various realities of the supergiant nation in its…
World-Making in Sylvia Wynter and Bernard Stiegler
The goal of this paper is to lay the foundation for a strategic encounter between the respective critical and philosophical work of Sylvia Wynter and Bernard Stiegler. Each of these thinkers problematizes a process by which the lived world is shaped—the former through the history of colonizing narratives and the latter through the evolution of technology. Each attunes us to distinct movements by which world-making processes become a problem that …
A Tale of Two Regions
This paper offers reflections on Between Caribbean and Chinese Economic Development: Third World Solidarity, Arthur Lewis, Primitive Accumulation and the Belt and Road Initiative, an essay by Yue Qiu and Paget Henry which presents the economic thought of W. A. Lewis as a lens through which the divergent development paths of China and the Caribbean in the early twenty-first century can be understood. The paper identifies three gaps in Qiu and Henr…
Beyond Code Switching
Songs of Jamaica by Claude McKay reflects the writer adept at both Jamaican patois, the language of his rural people, as well as standard English, the language of the British colonizers. Adding to the cultural complexities of a colonized Jamaica as a foundation for his output, McKay also was influenced by a wellborn white editor for this and a subsequent collection of work, Walter Jekyll, whose voice appears in McKay’s poetry both indirectly and …
Online Gambling and Industrial Learning in Antigua and Barbuda
This paper examines Antigua and Barbuda’s effort to use the online gambling industry to achieve economic diversification. The theoretical justification for doing so is that online gambling is a high-tech industry. Its employees and managers must master advanced communications and computational technology. With that the case, online gambling possesses the potential to become a source of “externalities”—the transferring of the knowledge of how to w…
“My Poor Soul”
The following essay engages with the assimilationist proto-theodicy articulated by Magdalena Beulah Brockden, an enslaved African woman in the eighteenth century, as recounted in Seth Moglen’s article, “Enslaved in the City on a Hill: The Archive of Moravian Slavery and the Practical Past.” While Moglen’s analysis foregrounds narrative as a genre within the corpus of slave literature, my inquiry centers on interpreting Brockden’s Lebenslauf, her …
AI and Psychology
This paper examines the profound psychological and socioeconomic implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to psychology’s contributions and complicity as well as through the lens of the Caribbean peoples and the Black diaspora. The author makes the point that while AI is marketed as a harbinger of universal abundance, it is currently on a trajectory that risks automating historical racial inequities as well as socioeconomic ones. …
The National and Colonial Questions Revisited
This paper takes as its point of departure the possibility that Frantz Fanon may have read Vladimir Lenin and M. N. Roy’s debate at the Second World Congress of the Communist International in 1920. I revisit the stakes of this earlier debate alongside Fanon’s later interventions and explore affinities and differences in how Fanon and Roy approach the class politics of anticolonial revolution. The paper also compares their critiques of nationalism…
Between Caribbean and Chinese Economic Development
This paper compares the very different results of the use of the theories of Arthur Lewis in constructing the mixed economies of China and the Caribbean, the widely diverging paths these economies took in the era of neoliberal globalization, and how the two can cooperate now that China has entered its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) phase. We argue that in response to the great depression of the 1930s, both China and the Caribbean embarked on soci…
Unsettling the Plantation “Babylon” System
By imperial design, the Caribbean region was created as uneven yet interconnected archipelagos of Black dispossession, devaluation and dehumanisation. On this basis, Caribbean leaders have initiated calls for reparatory justice, demanding restitution for longstanding systemic inequalities stemming largely from plantation slavery, colonialism and native genocide. This paper interrogates the Caribbean program for reparatory justice drawing out its …
Sabotage
This essay returns to John Brown’s so-called Raid on Harpers Ferry and his plan to build a mountain guerilla wing of the Underground Railroad through the Appalachian Mountains in order to theorize a concept of sabotage. Learning from the Haitians and other militant and enslaved rebellions, Brown seems to have interpreted American chattel slavery infrastructurally, which meant the key to abolition was the militant sabotage of the infrastructural r…
Rabindranath Tagore, a Hindu Mystic Writer, on Love and Sufism
The article primarily grounded in the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s notion of Humanitarian identity and universal love. It shows furthermore how this theory of love as embodied in his books The Religion of Man and Gitanjali connect human beings through love which one can attain through the Hindu Mystic philosophical concepts of Brahman and ego-transcendence. The article further discusses the notion of love by drawing connection betw…
Science and Epistemic Injustice
This article argues that the reception of the work of Cheikh Anta Diop by French historians and Egyptologists is a case of epistemic injustice as this concept has been defined by the British philosopher Miranda Fricker. I first explain the concept of epistemic injustice and then show, using Popper’s demarcation criterion, that it is impossible to objectively reject Diop’s work as lacking in scientificity. I thus analyze the heterogeneity of Diop’…
George Padmore, Global Historian of Contemporary Africa avant la lettre
Padmore’s contributions to historical knowledge and history writing are stored in eight topical books, published between 1931 and 1956. After providing a cursory survey, this paper’s focus is on two of Padmore’s early books—How Britain Rules Africa (1936) and Africa and World Peace (1937)—arguing for his originality as a pioneering practitioner of global history of contemporary Africa. Padmore treats the various colonial situations in the British…
On Artificial Intelligence in Black and White
With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Anthropocene, we are faced with “humanizing AI before it dehumanizes us.” Before the advent of the “posthuman,” will our technologies help develop a better world, or enable us to more efficiently destroy it? This essay is an appeal to Black philosophers to contribute to the critique and value theory of AI. OpenAI’s GPT-4 has opened new ethical questions. This examination of AI’s history, a…
An Audacious Review
Taking a critical book review of Eric Williams’s 1964 survey of British West Indian historiography, British Historians and the West Indies, as its point of analysis, this article looks at how the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia pushed back against Williams’s vision for the orientation of West Indian Studies in an age of independence. It suggests that Goveia’s review symbolizes the transition of West Indian scholarship from the anti-colonial perio…
Traditional Methods
The UWI system of universities celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2023 and as part of reflecting on this milestone the following study will examine the role of Caribbean traditional music in the UWI system and explore traditional Caribbean methods of teaching and learning music as well as the ways in which Caribbean traditional music and its associated culture have connected UWI students with local communities in Jamaica and Trinidad. Finally, th…
History and histories
In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon seemingly rejects the role that the past can play in the creation of decolonized futurities, famously writing: “I am not a prisoner of History (l’Histoire). I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.” On this basis, Fanon’s thought has often been read as opposed to the more prophetic vision of the past offered by Édouard Glissant, which emphasizes the contrapuntal po…
Beyond a Boundary, Beyond the Pale
This paper draws on C. L. R. James’s theory of a colonial education and W. E. B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness to analyse the contradictory implications of an anglicised model of prep school education in Ireland. In particular, it pays close attention to two features of this education. First is its inflating and over-valuing of just about all things British with the corresponding de-valuing of things from the colonised territory, in thi…
Looking for a Good Human Being
Kiros’ Self-Definition aims to be a reader’s guide to the literature on the subject. It is such, as it provides an outline and summarizes the literature on the topic of the Self and philosophy. By exploring different ideas, philosophies, thinkers, and literature over time, through different eras, and through the lenses of gender, sex, and race, it is also intended to be a philosophical bridge between the Global South and the Global North. Under…
Fanon and Soap Advertising
This paper critically examines the pervasive colonial myth that associates whiteness with cleanliness and blackness with dirtiness, a myth often perpetuated through media, especially soap advertisements. Through an analysis of Frantz Fanon’s contributions to psychoanalysis and phenomenology, the paper elucidates how racial constructs are sociogenically constructed and internalized, shaping the collective unconscious. Focusing on Fanon’s phenomeno…
A Forgotten Revolutionary Solidarity
Though a few scholars have discussed the transnational engagement of Caribbean thinkers with China, hitherto unknown is the imaginative alliance Left-wing Chinese writers crafted with the Caribbean via their works on the Haitian Revolution. This paper explores writings by four Chinese Marxists—Li Chunhui, Wang Chunliang, Lu Guojun, and Mao Xianglin—who engaged with Caribbean intellectuals, like Eric Williams, and used the history of the first ant…
Wilson Harris And Caribbean Philosophical Anthropology
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
The Future of a System that Characterizes the Past An Exploration of Decolonial Ethics
Beyond Liberal and Marxist Leninist Feminisms
Annie John
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 womanhoo…
Uneasy Landscapes
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 an…
A Poetics of Reimagining
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 ep…
The Red and the Black
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 …
Language and Being(s)
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 f…
René Ménil’s Myths of Origin and Labor Activism in the French Antilles
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 …
Centralism is a Dangerous Tool
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 t…
“Double Consciousness,” Cultural Identity and Literary Style in the Work of René Ménil
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 a…
Peril and Possibility
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 a…
René Ménil
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 th…
Reinventing Humor
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 contemplati…
The Tracées of René Ménil
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 t…
Kusch en el Trópico
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 secon…
Frantz Fanon and the Creolization of Hegel
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 th…
Gregson Davis and the Katabasis of Translation
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 transla…
The Metaphysics of Decolonization
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 …
Decolonialism’s Reframing of French Existentialism in Fanon’s The Drowning Eye
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 i…
René Ménil’s Aesthetic Marxism and the Caribbean Philosophical Tradition
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 in…
The Modalities of American Whiteness
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 politi…
Reshaping Spirituality
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…
Earth Politics of the Spiritual Ground
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” wit…
Philosophy (45 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · History (21 works) · Art (20 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (16 works)