Creolizing Political Theory by Gordon Jane Anna;

Author:Gordon, Jane Anna; [Gordon, Jane Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2014-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

5

Thinking Through Creolization

The awareness of mixed origins does not mean that individuals can spontaneously retrace the flows that contributed to shaping their current practices and environment. Indeed, the long-term impact of cultural imports is often proportional to the capacity to forget that they were once acquired or imposed. . . . How many Italians today do not see the tomato as an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage? How many Native American leaders would dare to reject the horse as culturally foreign? . . . [W]e could prolong the list interminably in a number of directions: Latin America without Christianity, India without English, Argentina without Germans, Texas without cattle, the Caribbean without blacks or rum, England without tea. . . . Culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global flows that started in the late fifteenth century and continue to affect human populations today. Yet the history of the world is rarely told in these terms. Indeed, the particularity of the dominant narratives of globalization is a massive silencing of the past on a world scale, the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history throughout the globe.

—MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT1

Thus far, I have argued that Rousseau’s challenging reflections on questions of human inquiry, political illegitimacy and its alternatives remain highly relevant to the present and are considerably enriched and extended in the work of Frantz Fanon. In other words, the central ideas produced through Rousseau’s efforts to make sense of his shifting world are taken up by Fanon and altered to grapple with the continuous and distinctive predicaments of Martinique and then Algeria. One thereby witnesses a radical critique of the ways in which the project of European modernity implicated everything in its orbit, including what could function as authoritative scholarship, move from an at times desperate longing for that which was gone to deliberate efforts to forge a modernism from below, in which aspirations of popular sovereignty, collective self-determination, or willing for all, even within imperfect and constrained conditions, are embraced in pursuit of living models of what could be a more humane world. While a conversation between Rousseau and Fanon might appear to a particular brand of historian as an undisciplined fusion of disparate genealogies, such a conception of rigor would obscure the vital ways that each might fruitfully illuminate the other, recentering the political concerns that informed both.

Having offered this example of creolization—of the repositing of ideas in Rousseau to think through and make sense of the political situation in the Caribbean and then North Africa in a blend that produces something simultaneously recognizable and wholly new—I now turn to a discussion of creolization more generally as a potentially fruitful approach to theorizing today.

Against a postmodern ethos that has overtaken many communities framing inevitable repression in all efforts to construct collectivities, I aim, in the spirit of Sheldon Wolin (1960), who defined the task of political theory as articulating interests as general as political society itself, to reenvision the conditions for just this task.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.