Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss

Description

A reevaluation of Edouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe's traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a hi

John E. Drabinski is Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College. He is author of Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other; Godard between Identity and Difference; and Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas.

"Glissant and the Middle Passage is an ingeniously cast light on Glissant's remarkable philosophical proposition to the world from the Caribbean geography of reason. It critically shows how the singularity of a Caribbean mode of thought strikingly disrupts admitted stances on crucial philosophical precepts to fruitfully expand and broaden the realm of a philosophy that ordinarily centered its concerns and frames of reference around an established European worldview."-Hanetha Vete-Congolo, Bowdoin College "Glissant and the Middle Passage is the single most comprehensive and compelling treatment to date of the philosophical dimension of Edouard Glissant's non-fiction. John E. Drabinski maps Glissant's geography of reason in the mode of a postcolonial 'intensification of qualities,' summoning a philosophy of post-traumatic relationality that tracks the philosophical valences and aftershocks of the Middle Passage. Essential reading."-Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University