John E. Drabinski

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

Much of the work on Levinas and political philosophy is content to note two things: the resistance of the ethical to politics and the messianic dimension of Levinas’s thought. The task, then, has largely been to identify (usually formal) points of resistance and/or to trace out the figures of messianism in the various functions of the prophetic word. Themes of singularity and eschatology therefore dominate the discussion. While both of these aspects of his work are important and can pay interesting dividends, one cannot but note another result: a lack of materiality in developing a Levinasian politics. This need not be the case. Indeed, much of my concern in what follows is to open up the possibility of thinking about Levinas and politics in a manner that reintroduces an element of concreteness.

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. - from the publisher.