Creolizing Marcuse

Addresses the pressing need for a liberatory critical theory that is responsive to contemporary challenges, exploring the intersections between Herbert Marcuse's critical theory and Africana and Caribbean theory.

This collection challenges the academic domestication of critical theory and revitalizes Marcuse, employing creolization as a method to disrupt and reconfigure the Western canon.

This is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the role that critical theory should play in today's world. With a focus on Marcuse, the essays collected here engage the with Global South to radically refigure European critical theory. Creolization, taken as a deliberate and strategic blending of differing systems of thought and practice, is deployed to interrogate the vestiges of racism and coloniality in European critical theory.

With incisive analyses offered from Black, feminist, and queer critical theorists and theories, and rooted in the Global South, these essays offer perspectives that put philosophy into concrete, political, public, and lived practices.

Sid Simpson is Associate Professor of Politics at Sewanee: the University of the South, USA. He is Director of Sewanee's Environmental Arts & Humanities Program, and is affiliated faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies as well as in the Sewanee Integrated Program in the Environment (SIPE). Previously, he was a Perry-Williams Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy and Political Science at the College of Wooster, a position facilitated by the Consortium for Faculty Diversity. He received his PhD in political theory from the University of Notre Dame (2019) and his BA from the Honors College at the University of Houston (2014). Dr. Simpson's original research has appeared or is forthcoming in the scholarly journals Antipode, Constelaciones: Revista de Theoría Crítica, Constellations, Contemporary Political Theory, European Journal of Political Theory, International Relations, Philosophy & Literature, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Theory & Event. Additionally, he has reviewed academic books in History of Political Thought, Political Theology, Review of Politics, and Thesis Eleven, as well as written on the intersection of pop culture and philosophy in Black Mirror and Philosophy and The Expanse and Philosophy. He previously edited a volume of critical essays on Herbert Marcuse entitled The Marcusean Mind for part of Routledge's Philosophical Minds series, with his co-editors for this text Jina Fast and Nicole K. Mayberry.