John Drabinski

What does Édouard Glissant have to contribute to theorizing decolonization and a philosophy of difference? And how is this contribution tied to rethinking place (from Caribbean to Caribbeanness) and world (comprised of creolized culture and identity)? This essay takes up Glissant’s work in the context of questions of history and memory, with particular focus on how historical experience grounds philosophical work on place and world through articulations of identity, language, cultural production, and thinking after catastrophe. Drawing from a contrast with Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this essay shows how Glissant’s critical concept “creolization” works as an expression of what I call “the afropostmodern,” and also as an important contribution to decolonial theories of world, culture, memory, language, and subjectivity after the Middle Passage.

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.

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.

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home.

This work presents a reading of the development of the heretofore neglected problem of intentionality in the texts of Emmanuel Levinas. It is my contention that through such a reading one uncovers the method of justification operative in Levinas enigmatic notion of ethics. This legitimation aims at both demystifying the paradoxical language of Levinas writing and rendering accessible his notion of ethics. In addition to providing a point of access to Levinas own thought, the dissertation helps to situate his work within the general guiding themes of both the phenomenological movement and the group of thinkers often referred to as "post-structuralist." ;The task of the dissertation is both philological and philosophical in its structure. The philological aspect lies in documenting the Husserlian theme of intentionality throughout Levinas philosophical itinerary, from his 1930 book on Husserl to his most recent essays. The philosophical aspect lies in revealing the alteration of the structure of intentionality that Levinas articulates through the problem of transcendence. To this end, the dissertation focuses on the problem of difference and the constitution of sense and the way in which that problem underpins the language of the "Other"--which in turn underpins his notion of ethics. By studying not only the text of Totality and Infinity--which marks the fruition of Levinas's "first period"--but also the essays on Husserl that lead up to that text, I locate the development of the issue of sense and difference in Husserl's conception of axiological intentionality and the problem of a "transcendental sensualism." The "second period" of Levinas work, which culminates in the publication of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, is shown to introduce the problem of time into the problem of sensibility. I identify this problem of time through the essays on Husserl in the 1960's, which proves to be an indispensable aid in reading the notoriously difficult text of Otherwise than Being. The dissertation contends throughout that Levinas conception of sense and his alteration of the structure of intentionality comprises his profoundly original contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy