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.
Jina Fast is the SHIFT Associate Professor of Applied Ethics and the Common Good and Director of the Learning Collaboratives at Hampshire College, USA. As a feminist epistemologist, queer theorist, and critical philosopher of race, her work centers theories produced by and through the experiences and work of marginalized folks across disciplines. Dr. Fast's work has been published in the
Journal of Critical Race Inquiry,
Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, & Social Justice,
Philosophy and Global Affairs, The Journal of Education, and Hypatia, among others. Her first book, entitled
Decolonizing Existentialism and Phenomenology: The Liberation of Philosophies of Freedom and Identity, was published in December 2023 by Rowman and Littlefield International. She previously edited a volume of essays on Herbert Marcuse entitled
The Marcusean Mind as part of Routledge's Philosophical Minds series in 2024. She is currently at work on a book on creolizing 20th-century post-war aesthetics.
Jane Anna Gordon is Professor of Political Science and Social and Critical Inquiry (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) at the University of Connecticut, USA. She is author of
Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement,
Creolizing Political Theory, and
Why They Couldn't Wait, co-author of
Of Divine Warning, and, most recently, co-editor of
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg and
The Politics of Richard Wright. President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) from 2014-2017, Gordon continues to direct the CPA Summer School and to co-edit the organization's two book series,
Creolizing the Canon and
Global Critical Caribbean Studies. With Lewis R. Gordon, she is Executive Editor of the open access journal,
Philosophy and Global Affairs.
Nicole K. Mayberry is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, USA. She is a cultural geographer and political theorist whose work examines the spatial and institutional production of anti-Blackness across the United States and the Americas. Dr. Mayberry's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the scholarly journals
Somatechnics, Gender, Place & Culture, Journal of Classical Sociology, and Azimuth, and her public-facing writing has appeared in
Scientific American and
Issues in Science and Technology, among other venues. Previously, she co-edited
The Marcusean Mind as part of Routledge's Philosophical Minds series, alongside Jina Fast and Sid Simpson. Her book,
I, Slave: Robot Stories and the Shrouded Cartographies of Anti-Blackness, is forthcoming with the University of Georgia Press, USA.
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.
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.
