Jane Anna Gordon

Neil Roberts

Advancing a creolizing reading of the eighteenth-century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this volume explores Rousseau’s strong resonances in Caribbean thought and politics.

Creolizing Rousseau

Lewis R. Gordon

This book offers a theory of disaster in modern and contemporary society and its impact on the construction of social and political life. The theory is premised upon what the authors call "the sign continuum," where disaster spreads across society through efforts to evade social responsibility for its causes and consequences. Phenomena generated by such efforts include the social manifestation of monstrosity (disastrous people and other forms of living things) and an emerging antipolitics in an effort to assert rule and order. A crucial development is the attack on speech, a fundamental feature of political life, as manifested by the increased expectations of categories of people whose containment calls for shunning and silence.

Disaster in a Modern Age

Of Divine Warning

Drucilla Cornell

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg brings together a global community of writers to revisit key aspects of Luxemburg’s thought, from the accumulation of capital, to the mass strike, to her debate with Vladimir Lenin on the meaning of socialism, and her searing critiques of colonialism as inherent to capitalist accumulation.

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg

Examining the infamous conflict between a predominantly black community and a predominantly Jewish teachers' union, Gordon takes a new look at this historically rich and racially diverse community.

A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967-1971

Why They Couldn't Wait

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh

A pillar of African American literature, Richard Wright is one of the most celebrated and controversial authors in American history. His work championed intellectual freedom amid social and political chaos. Despite the popular and critical success of books such as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Black Boy (1945), and Native Son (1941), Wright faced staunch criticism and even censorship throughout his career for the graphic sexuality, intense violence, and communist themes in his work. Yet, many political theorists have ignored his radical ideas. In The Politics of Richard Wright, an interdisciplinary group of scholars embraces the controversies surrounding Wright as a public intellectual and author. Several contributors explore how the writer mixed fact and fiction to capture the empirical and emotional reality of living as a black person in a racist world. Others examine the role of gender in Wright's canonical and lesser-known writing and the implications of black male vulnerability. They also discuss the topics of black subjectivity, internationalism and diaspora, and the legacy of and responses to slavery in America. Wright's contributions to American political thought remain vital and relevant today. The Politics of Richard Wright is an indispensable resource for students of American literature, culture, and politics who strive to interpret this influential writer's life and legacy.

Perspectives on Resistance

The Politics of Richard Wright

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call “home.” Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Creolizing Political Theory

Not Only the Master's Tools brings together new essays on African American studies. It is ideal for students and scholars of African studies, philosophy, literary theory, educational theory, social and political thought, and postcolonial studies.

African American Studies in Theory and Practice

Not Only the Master's Tools

Lewis Gordon

A Companion to African-American Studies is an exciting andcomprehensive re-appraisal of the history and future of AfricanAmerican studies. Contains original essays by expert contributors in the field ofAfrican-American Studies Creates a groundbreaking re-appraisal of the history and futureof the field Includes a series of reflections from those who establishedAfrican American Studies as a bona fide academic discipline Captures the dynamic interaction of African American Studieswith other fields of inquiry.

Jane Anna Gordon

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