Glissant And The Middle Passage

A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism. In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma—including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies—Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production. Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

In Narrating the Slave Trade, Theorizing Community, Raphaël Lambert applies contemporary theories of community to works of fiction about the slave trade in order to both shed new light on slave trade studies and rethink the very notion of community.

Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyse the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to post-Kantian Critical Theory. The book argues that the singular project of these thinkers has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing tools from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, was from the start marked indelibly by the experiential imperatives of the Middle Passage, slavery and imperialism. Individual chapters address thinkers such as Toussaint Louverture, Victor Schoelcher, Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Rene Menil, Frantz Fanon & Maryse Conde.

Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

A major work by this prominent Caribbean author and philosopher, available for the first time in English

The ubiquitous presence of food and hunger in Caribbean writing—from folktales, fiction, and poetry to political and historical treatises—signals the traumas that have marked the Caribbean from the Middle Passage to the present day. The Tropics Bite Back traces the evolution of the Caribbean response to the colonial gaze (or rather the colonial mouth) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Unlike previous scholars, Valérie Loichot does not read food simply as a cultural trope. Instead, she is interested in literary cannibalism, which she interprets in parallel with theories of relation and creolization. For Loichot, “the culinary” is an abstract mode of resistance and cultural production. The Francophone and Anglophone authors whose works she interrogates—including Patrick Chamoiseau, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, Lafcadio Hearn, and Dany Laferrière—“bite back” at the controlling images of the cannibal, the starved and starving, the cunning cook, and the sexualized octoroon with the ultimate goal of constructing humanity through structural, literal, or allegorical acts of ingesting, cooking, and eating. The Tropics Bite Back employs cross-disciplinary methods to rethink notions of race and literary influence by providing a fresh perspective on forms of consumption both metaphorical and material.

A study of representations of the French Atlantic slave trade in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Winner, 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities. Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood. Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance, and their ongoing negotiations with power should be understood as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but rather can support new possibilities for liberation and justice.