Creolizing Rousseau (Creolizing the Canon) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 178348280X ISBN 13: 9781783482801

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014

Synopsis

In 1967, C.L.R. James, the much-celebrated Afro-Trinidadian Marxist, stated that he knew of no figure in history who had “such tremendous influence on such widely separated spheres of humanity” within a few years of his death as the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While this impact was most pronounced in revolutionary politics inspired by political theories that rejected basing political authority in monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church, it extended to European literature, to philosophies of education, and the articulation of the social sciences. But what particularly struck James about Rousseau was the strong resonance of his work in Caribbean thought and politics.

This volume illuminates these resonances by advancing a creolizing method of reading Rousseau that couples figures not typically engaged together, to create conversations among people of seemingly divided worlds in fact entangled by colonizing projects and histories. Doing this enables us to grapple with the meaning of creolization and the full range of Rousseau’s legacies not only in contemporary Western Europe and the United States, but in the Francophone colonies, territories, and larger Global South.

About this title

About the Authors

Jane Anna Gordon is Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut and President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her books include Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (2001), Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (2010) and Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (2014).

Neil Roberts is John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College, where he also serves as associate dean of the faculty. He has published widely on modern and contemporary political theory, politics in literature, and theories of freedom. His books include Freedom as Marronage and A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass. How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism is his next monograph.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creolizing Rousseau

By Jane Anna Gordon, Neil Roberts

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Jane Anna Gordon, Neil Roberts and contributors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-280-1

Contents

Introduction: The Project of Creolizing Rousseau Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts, 
1 Comparative Political Theory, Creolization, and Reading Rousseau through Fanon Jane Anna Gordon, 
2 Between Mestiçagem and Cosmopolitanism: Towards a New Social Arithmetic Alexis Nouss, 
3 Beyond Négritude and Créolité: On Creolizing the Citizenship Contract Mickaella L. Perina, 
4 Anténor Firmin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Racial Inequality Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, 
5 Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 
6 C. L. R. James, Political Philosophy, and the Creolizing of Rousseau and Marx Paget Henry, 
7 Rousseau, the Master's Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism Charles W. Mills, 
8 Rousseau, Flight, and the Fall into Slavery Neil Roberts, 
9 Pacha Mama, Rousseau, and the Femini: How Nature Can Revive Politics Nalini Persram, 
10 Virtuous Bacchanalia: Creolizing Rousseau's Festival Chiji Akoma and Sally J. Scholz, 
Bibliography, 
About the Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Comparative Political Theory, Creolization, and Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Jane Anna Gordon

The awareness of mixed origins does not mean that individuals can spontaneously retrace the flows that contributed to shaping their current practices and environment. Indeed, the long-term impact of cultural imports is often proportional to the capacity to forget that they were once acquired or imposed ... How many Italians today do not see the tomato as an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage? How many Native American leaders would dare to reject the horse as culturally foreign? ... [W]e could prolong the list interminably in a number of directions: Latin America without Christianity, India without English, Argentina without Germans, Texas without cattle, the Caribbean without blacks or rum, England without tea ... Culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global flows that started in the late fifteenth century and continue to affect human populations today. Yet the history of the world is rarely told in these terms. Indeed, the particularity of the dominant narratives of globalization is a massive silencing of the past on a world scale, the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history throughout the globe.

— Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003: 34)

I offer, in what follows, a discussion and critique of comparative political theory, an outline of what it means to creolize political theory, and present an example of this alternative approach through bringing together the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon.

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY AND DISAVOWAL

The terrain within the U.S. academy for creolizing political theory was significantly prepared by recent developments in the subfield of comparative political theory. Informed fundamentally by hermeneutics and postcolonial thought, comparative political theory has, from the outset, aimed to expand what is designated thought, in the words of Roxanne Euben, to ensure that "'political theory' is about human and not merely Western dilemmas ... [making] room for the possibility that there is humanly significant knowledge outside the confines of the Western canon" (1999: 9 — 10). For Fred Dallmayr (2004), echoing the challenge of Leo Straus

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178348280X
• ISBN 13: 9781783482801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 316
• Editor: Gordon Jane Anna, Roberts Neil