John E. 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.

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.

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.

This essay examines the possibility of developing an ethical politics out of the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas' own work does not accomplish this kind of politics. He opts instead for a politics of peace, which, as this essay argues, falls short of the demands of the ethical. Thus, this essay both provides an account of Levinas' own politics and develops resources from within Levinas' own work for thinking beyond that politics. An alternative, liturgical politics is sketched out. In a liturgical politics, law must be thought on a redistributive model. Redistribution, it is argued, responds more adequately to the extravagant generosity of ethics than the neutral 'droits de l'homme' developed in Levinas' political philosophy. Key Words: ethics • law • Levinas • liturgy • peace • politics • redistribution.

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory, tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”

In Levinas’ hands, the problematic of transcendence challenges phenomenological description by positing, as primary, that which is outside intentionality. How, then, to think about this transcendence outside intentionality? This essay explores the possibilities of a description of transcendence through Levinas’ and Marion’s readings of the Cartesian idea of the Infinite. What emerges from these readings of Descartes’ idea of the Infinite is a sense of indication that is fundamentally elliptical, pointing beyond what it can render to presence, but pointing nonetheless. Thinking through this problem of elliptical indication, I argue, is central to generating a phenomenological account of transcendence.

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas.&nbsp