Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Just Ideas)

Gordon, Jane Anna

ISBN 10: 082325481X / ISBN 13: 9780823254811

Published by Fordham University Press, 2014

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Just Ideas)
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082325481X
• ISBN 13: 9780823254811
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.”

Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

About the Author

Jane Anna Gordon teaches Political Science and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.