Creolizing Critical Theory

Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant intervention that takes the concept to a new and unwonted place. Brilliantly edited by Kris Sealey and Benjamin Davis, this germinal collection of essays—with the Frankfurt School firmly in its sights, as well as the formidable canon of Continental philosophical texts that subtend it—opens the way to an astonishing idea: by methodologically focusing on Caribbean intellectual resources and its fertile thinkers, a creolized critical theory aims ‘to demonstrate the critical interventions from modes of thinking for which Black and Native death is not a side issue, but rather what is most urgent for critically re-imagining the category of the human.’ This powerful turn toward demarks another shift in the geography of reason, but it also lays claim to the rejected insight of a critical European blindness. -- Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future. -- Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam, professor of philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin