Special Issue: Creolizing Rousseau
Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2009

 

Introduction:
The Project of Creolizing Rousseau
Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts

            In a lecture presented in Montréal in 1967, C.L.R. James criticized the superficial ways in which the person and thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were often summarily dismissed.  This was particularly lamentable, James argued, given the genuine uniqueness of Rousseau, the way in which “every single thing he touched he brought into existence something new which we are using up to today.”1  James stated clearly, “I know no figure in history of whom you can say had within a few years of his death such tremendous influence on such widely separated spheres of humanity.” James outlined first the tremendous influence that Rousseau’s thinking had on the writing of Immanuel Kant and, second, the inspiration of Rousseau to the revolutionary action at the core of the French Revolution—the efforts of Parisian masses to destroy feudal society, suggests James, was an affirmation of Rousseau’s doctrine that it was they who were legitimately sovereign.  James also emphasized the affinities between Rousseau’s political thought and some brands of Caribbean, specifically Trinidadian, politics. He recalled the “bursts of jeering laughter” of students in Trinidad when he explained to them Rousseau’s warnings that the representatives in representative governments easily moved away from the responsibilities with which they were charged to pursuing only their own narrow interests with the implements and powers of state in their grasp.  Such laughter revealed, joked James, “that all of them were followers of Rousseau.” James also singled out Rousseau’s idea of the general will, arguing that he saw it at work in Trinidad twice in the leadership of Captain Arthur Andrew Cipriani between 1920 and 1932 and of Dr. Eric E. Williams between 1957 and 1960.  In both instances, these men were not thinking only of wages or education but of “lifting the entire population to a higher stage.” Finally, in passing, James mentioned that Rousseau “remind[ed him] very much of Frantz Fanon.”  He cautioned his audience, however, “Don’t compare the two please, but I want you to get something in mind.” In what follows, having brought this connection to mind, we will engage in precisely such comparisons.
            The impetus for this special issue of The C.L.R. James Journal emerged out of an effort to describe in theoretical terms a growing body of work that has emerged over the last few years.  Inspired by the organizing mission of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA)—to “shift the geography of reason” —and by Lewis Gordon’s observation that living thought, genuine philosophy rather than its narrow professional or academic study, emerges out of its teleological suspension, we had each been exploring themes—of legitimation and the general will; of marronage and lines of flight; of agency and political freedom; of the meaning of education in dark times—that required the coupling of figures that have not typically been engaged substantially together.  We found Frederick Douglass to be the most challenging imagined interlocutor to Hannah Arendt on the relationship between liberation and the founding conditions of freedom. Frantz Fanon’s distinction between national consciousness and nationalism as the basis for an actually postcolonial or no longer colonial moment made him a kindred spirit of the Rousseau of both the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Of the Social Contract. Furthermore, the Haitian Revolution as an event and the subsequent emergence of Rastafari as a theological and social movement each respectively seemed to reopen questions concerning the relationship between notions of sovereignty and states of exception.  In so doing, they suggested a hitherto unlikely but even larger conversation, including but not limited to such figures as Anténor Firmin, Immanuel Kant, Anna Julia Cooper, G.W.F. Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carl Schmitt, and C.L.R. James.
            Lest such a cast of characters elicit concerns over methods of selection, over the confounding of the dictates of historicist approaches to doing political theory, our answers are two:  First, although Schmitt is right to warn against the ways in which many readers of political and legal theory minimize or ignore the highly particular conflicts that gave rise to the concepts that they take up, this can be read as much as an invitation to explore the substantive resemblance of diverse political battles as it is a case for the radical untranslatability of historically and culturally specific worlds.  Second, historicist approaches often fail sufficiently to consider the ways in which their periodizing may create fissures between worlds that were in fact intimately linked, that were part of precisely the same cultural and historical moments.  As Sibylle Fischer insisted in her path-breaking Modernity Disavowed, the frequent publication of books about the modern world, including those of a notable Marxist scholar like Eric Hobsbawm, that make no reference to slaves, masters, or the role of the Caribbean in the forging of Western modernity is reason for this caution.2  Perhaps, in other words, a more creolized conversation will unearth questions the answering of which can make one’s historicism more rigorous, even in its own terms.
            Political theory as a mode of inquiry is currently divided into two very different but related camps: the first is devoted to the intellectual-historical study of central canonical texts and figures.  The second, normative theory, aims to be history-transcending.  The gap between these two models is a feature of modernity that the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz diagnosed some five decades ago as the seemingly insurmountable gap between historicism and scientism that he thought phenomenology alone could bridge. A reflection of this bifurcation in thought today is evident in the gulf between the work of Cambridge School historians such as Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and Demetrius Eudell, on the one hand, and contemporary normative theorists who eschew historicism including Seyla Benhabib, Amy Gutmann, and the late Iris Marion Young.  Underlying the presumed necessity of this epistemological divide are disputes over the fixed nature of categories, identities, and cultures either within specific historical epochs or across time.
            Postmodernism arose, among many other things, as an attempt to offer criticisms of the aforementioned battle lines. Although questioning the adequacy of claims to transhistorical grand narratives, it also splintered what had been any prior consensus about the legitimate focus of and resources for historical scholarship.  Postmodernism indeed has been an ally of those struggling for the decolonization of knowledge but one that has been unable to help to dislodge the historicist-normative gulf due to its commitment to reifying fissures of difference against the homogenization required by any shared, unifying identities or projects, any aspirations as broad as societies themselves.
            What we advance here, both in our actual arguments and in the creation of a collection of essays of this sort, is that creolization offers a very fruitful alternative approach, one that underscores the tenacious fact of difference while simultaneously presupposing that cultural mixing and métissage—whether embraced or disavowed—is always already underway.  Rather than viewing disciplines or cultures (as with U.S. brands of multiculturalism) as discrete purities that coexist and occasionally meet or collide, the relations between and among these are instead framed as mutually constituting; they are in constant relationships of indebtedness, incorporation, and imitation, of simultaneous rejection and adoption. What emerges out of such combinations, however, is not a blend that subordinates differences to one standard or that creates unity through taking the bite out of each distinctive piece.
            Recent debates surrounding creolization from writers aligned with the Créolité movement in the Francophone world to figures in Anglophone thought have disputed what categories at the individual and collective level—which groups in racial, ethnic, and class terms—can enter into negotiations and mediations to create new forms of identification and difference.3  Particularly acute in these debates is the status of past identities as they join with those of prior antagonists in the formation of something unique.  Embracing creolization need not mean an a priori retreat to blandly arguing that deliberate and widespread racial mixing will spell the end of the coherence of the notion of race, the conflating of the specificity of identities forged through processes of racialization with imprecise invocations of the culture, or the assumption that it is a discourse limited to the meeting of European and African peoples and cultures to the exclusion of Asian, Native American, and Middle Eastern elements.  Creolization, as Édouard Glissant reminds us, is an awareness of constantly evolving rhizomic identifications—identifications with multiple, rather than singular, roots and foundations that, when taken as a whole, aim at the dual objectives of liberation and of setting foundations for freedom beyond the trappings of the dialectics of asymmetrical recognition.4
            The idea of creolization has received much attention from thinkers of the French, English, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean shifting the ways in which we understand indigenous thought, discourse, and culture in the advent of Caribbean modernity, located arguably in 1492, and the subsequent reordering of the world system following conquest, slavery, and indenture.  As Sylvia Wynter notes, 1492 ushered in a “New World View,” a political, epistemological, and ontological global realignment of the normative subject and the heretical condemned of the earth—Fanon’s damnés—the effects of which are still with us today in the forms of creolized modes of double-consciousness and second sight.5 Many such thinkers have raised questions about modernity itself, echoing the insights of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from his early and often overlooked 1741 tragedy, “The Discovery of the New World,” through his later reflections in the Confessions. Although an engagement with Rousseau’s ideas has been ongoing, we believe that many of the questions raised by him continue to be of particular relevance to theorizing what the Latin American philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel has called “the underside of modernity,” from the Age of Revolution to the present in the Caribbean and elsewhere.6  These ideas have not received as rich a treatment as they invite.  We hope that this symposium might begin to outline some of the central problematics born of the intersection of creolization with the living ideas of Rousseau.
            Of all of political theory’s canonical figures, Rousseau is the most deservedly known as modernity’s radical critic, as the thinker who introduced what it was to undertake a dialectical treatment of the project of modern life.  And yet, while Rousseau spoke across the ages, he was also, in important and potentially illuminating ways, a man of his times.  It is in this spirit that Tunde Bewaji, Bernard Boxill, and Louis Sala-Molins have reconsidered Rousseau, asking whether he, as so many other central figures of the second Enlightenment, articulated ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity while offering argumentative foundations for precluding large sections of the globe from their reach.7 Bewaji is most positive as he emphasizes Rousseau’s willingness to recognize  Egyptian civilization as a precursor to that of Greece and Rome, as one of a litany of places that through imperial enrichment developed arts and sciences at the price of their moral ruin.  Yet uncharacteristically, Rousseau was able to recognize the scale of Egyptian achievement (even if ultimately criticizing the conditions and consequences of such innovation) without treating it as evidence that the civilization was not African.
            Bernard Boxill’s considerations are more qualified.  Asking whether Rousseau’s theories though not explicitly antiblack could be drawn on to support such projects, he concludes that although it is clear that Rousseau considered the Caribs and Native North Americans to be at an earlier, less corrupted stage of collective development than European man—they still relied on their considerable physical endowments in ways that minimized their need for more subtle intellectual skills and did not live primarily in the vain obsessions with tomorrow—Boxill stresses that Rousseau made clear that the innate abilities of human beings are the same the world over and that it is accidents of local history that led some faculties to be more quickly or further realized in some places than in others.  What is more, although the faculties in evidence in the Europeans were those associated with progress, civilization, and modernity, for Rousseau they were most marked by their corresponding fall away from collective virtue.  If the rationalization of antiblack racism, enslavement, and colonization turned on conceptions of innate inferiority, that suggested that entire races of people were incapable of the dispositions and habits of Europeans, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality offered no endorsement.  It did not affirm that black and brown peoples were a missing lower link in a chain of being in which whites were the culmination.  Neither did it provide fodder for those who would insist that physical and mental strength must be mutually exclusive or that to live and do work in ways that required bodily vigor meant that one could only be corporeal.  Boxill concludes that Rousseau was capable, in spite of his criticisms of any effort to diminish the freedom of others, of arguing that the subordination of women was acceptable, begging the question of whether this readiness might be extended, but ultimately contends that in stressing environmental factors and contingency as responsible for the divergent characters of people in different parts of the globe Rousseau was not an ally of colonial theories or practices.
            Still, Louis Sala-Molins is not so forgiving:  while he does not see in Rousseau the endorsement of any such theories, he does see his silence, his failure directly to address raging battles concerning the slavery of his own day, as worthy of condemnation.  Rousseau, contends Sala-Molins, convincingly rejected all of Grotius’s efforts to legitimate slavery and mocked the hubris of European kings laying claim to swaths of land on continents where they had never set foot, but he wrote nothing objecting to the sale of Africans to Europeans and Americans or the sale of Europeans within Europe or the treatment of black slaves and their descendants in France when, in Sala-Molins view, Rousseau’s political theory should have made such a muted response or non-response impossible.
            The project of creolizing Rousseau, although informed by efforts to understand his own positions and actions on questions of relevance to Africa and the Caribbean, need not stop there.  We may lament Rousseau’s failures to intervene as his work suggested he should or to make unfolding political projects in freedom throughout the colonized world a resource for the formulation of his central arguments, but more fruitful, in our view, is to undertake this work ourselves.  We may make Rousseau’s arguments more rigorous. It is our project to create conversations that should have but rarely did exist between the interrelated, contradictory faces of modernity.  It is in that spirit that we imagine that the project of creolizing political theory—of spelling out what it means to undertake a deliberate project of creolization and of the actual task of doing creolized work—begins.
            The issue opens with Jane Gordon’s situating the work of creolizing political theory between the emergent subfield of comparative political theory as inaugurated by Fred Dallmayr and Roxanne Euben and what Gordon terms the “disavowal” school represented by the work of Susan Buck-Morss and Sibylle Fischer.  She suggests that creolization takes up the impetus to enlarge the range of relevant interlocutors studied in political theory but aims not to continue the mirroring of imperial histories that make East and South Asia and the Middle East readier conversation partners than thinkers emerging from Latin American, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.  To do this, Gordon borrows from the insights of Fischer and Buck-Morss, who aim to read the work of the French philosophes against the record of political activity of colonized people.  She suggests that while a step forward, this emergent alternative still relies on outsiders to interpret the meaning of black and brown action, to do the work of theorizing on their behalf.  Gordon proceeds from these metatheoretical explorations to an example of what is meant by creolization through reading the work of Rousseau, particularly on questions of method and their relationship to the project of legitimate political governance, through that of Fanon.  She focuses on the ways in which Fanon’s concept of national consciousness profitably reworks Rousseau’s idea of the general will as articulated in his classical theoretical works and in his efforts to assist Corsica’s emergence as a postcolonial nation.
            The issue continues on this Francophone terrain with the essays of Alexis Nouss and Mickaella Perina, both first presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association meeting held in Jamaica in 2007.  Nouss opens by reflecting that the concept of metisaje, which originated in the Lusophone world and was adopted in both the French and Spanish colonies, has no English equivalent.  He argues that this is worthy of note since English has emerged as the de facto language of globalization. In spite of its imperial uses, Nouss argues that mestisaje is a considerable advance over efforts to deal with challenges presented by immigration of formerly colonized people to colonial metropoles that center almost entirely on uncreative forms of citizenship that can never themselves give meaningful public recognition to the plural and multiple identities of newer migrants.  In contrast, metissage or creolization suggests a different, less orthodox approach to social arithmetic: Nouss illustrates that the prototypical Caribbean person is not accurately described by the language and mathematics that would suggest that he or she is partially African, perhaps 50%, partially indigenous, perhaps 10%, and partially, 40%, European.  Instead this person is wholly, 100%, each.  The implications of this, argues Nouss, is that the processes of subject formation that mestissage describe themselves suggest channels for a postmodern cosmopolitan consciousness.
            Mickaella Perina critically examines the effort of writers of the Créolité movement in Martinique to depict their own intellectual and cultural movement as a radical rupture from its predecessor, Négritude, as quintessentially represented by Aimé Césaire and his Discourse on Colonialism.  Perina revisits the five central contradictions with which Césaire is charged—of failing to recognize the racial diversity, particularly the presence of East Indian Tamils, among the non-white Martinican population; Césaire’s regular use of the French, rather than the Creole language, both in his writing and delivery of political speeches to audiences who would not have mastered the colonial language as he had; Césaire’s ignoring of the racial mixture commonly said to characterize every black Martinican, including the darker-skinned; Césaire’s advocating for Martinique to choose to become an overseas department of France after having devoted decades of work to arguing for rejecting the cultural predominance of Europe in order to emphasize membership in an international African Diaspora; and the widespread sense that Césaire was insufficiently or inauthentically black while he claimed to be “a fundamental Negro.”  Perina argues that the radical openness and harmonious diversity on which creolization turns may accurately describe some of what has transpired biologically, linguistically, and culturally in the Caribbean, but it is not what Créolité achieves and may not be politically useful for moving beyond colonial conditions.  Creolization, she suggests, is not right or wrong; it is amoral.  To this extent, if decolonization aims to abolish previous ways of understanding identity, power, and order, creolization may be the ideal paradigm.  If, by contrast, one wants to focus on literal territory and on particular historical experiences and to articulate the legitimacy of some political claims and the illegitimacy of others, creolization’s lack of a defined telos may be a real shortcoming.  It is to this end that Créolité’s failure to be sufficiently creolized and creolizing—its essentialist centering of certain brands of racial mixture and particular cultural genealogies—may not be a political liability, even if it is not the self-image the movement prefers.
            Charles W. Mills focuses the invitation to creolize Rousseau on the models that he suggests Rousseau can provide for challenging existing bodies of Western thought.  He reminds the reader that the inspiration for Carol Pateman’s “sexual contract” (1988) and his own “racial contract” (1997) was what he calls the “class contract” of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men.  Mills insists that while rejecting existing contracts as concealing the class oppression that they in fact solidified, Rousseau did not reject contractarianism as such. Indeed through demystifying the contrarianism of his own day, he demonstrated how one could articulate a positive, reconstructive, emancipatory contract.  Mills here takes up Audre Lorde’s oft-repeated maxim, recently engaged by Jane and Lewis Gordon, that the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.  The aim of Mills’s racial contract was to reveal historical and theoretical white racial domination in liberal political theory generally and in the hegemonic place given to the work of John Rawls who, in mapping out a perfectly just society, explained that, from the outset, his normative framework and factual assumptions would not be concerned with questions of compensatory justice, the primary mode, argues Mills, for achieving racial justice.  Mills concludes that liberalism and liberals come in many varieties and can be the resource for advancing struggles for black and brown emancipation.  The master’s tool of the contract, in other words, observes Mills, can both dismantle the master’s house and be used to construct new houses of freedom.
            Nelson Maldonado-Torres affirms the usefulness of exploring links between European canonical figures and third world radical intellectuals of color, suggesting that it is difficult fully to understand the latter without exploring the ways in which they take up and reconstruct the ideas of European thinkers, creating new areas of inquiry.  He frames his own essay as exploring how Caliban reemploys the insights of one of Prospero’s best internal critics.  While Rousseau and Fanon both offer a description of the philosophical grounding of the human sciences and Rousseau did offer a radical critique of Enlightenment society, despotic government, imperialism, and slavery, Fanon transforms Rousseau’s project in a way that can be likened to Aimé Césaire’s relationship to René Descartes.  Maldonado-Torres argues that while rejecting “civilization” as a standard legitimating basis for European colonization, Rousseau still saw in the people of the Caribbean “savages,” however noble, rather than colonized people.  In so doing, he failed to recognize that modern colonialism introduced new and unique forms of inequality, based as much in the creation of property as they were in the creation of categories of people-property. Although denaturalizing inequality is the starting point for considering human beings and human sciences, Rousseau remained committed to depicting Caribbean man as closer to the state of nature, lacking the very dimensions of human capacity that while corrupting their European counterparts also enabled them to act with agency. In other words, suggests Maldonado-Torres, Rousseau’s remains an anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism that problematizes European civilization while affirming that it is there that the capacity for free agency is most developed. Fanon therefore offers a corrective in the fundamental categories of his analysis: introducing the colonizer and colonized, the white and the black; racist dehumanization in lieu of despotism; sociogenesis rather than phylogenesis; a telos not only of self-knowledge but of the kind of understanding that can only emerge through political liberation that aims to restore genuinely human social life.  Rather than “a Black Rousseau,” Fanon creates new directions for innovation and for further creolization in large part through outlining what Maldonado-Torres calls a decolonial ethics.
            Tommy Curry explores challenges to the widespread notion of fundamental and natural racial inequality in Rousseau’s Second Discourse and in the little known classic The Equality of the Human Races by Haitian lawyer, anthropologist, and philosopher, Anténor Firmin. While the centrality of naturalistic theory might have made poignant Rousseau’s claim that nature does not author inequality, it was of limited usefulness, argues Curry, in challenging the solidification of inequalities in society and through history. Rousseau did argue that degrees of proximity of different cultures to civilization were historically contingent, but turning to the fact of ontological sameness, Firmin argues, has limited utility.  He suggests that the fact of differences among human races is not the reason for the creation of racial hierarchies.  The origin of the idea of black inferiority instead is rooted squarely in a white colonial imagination that sought to usurp the definition of civilization in order to turn elsewhere only in relations of potential self-aggrandizement. Firmin concurs with Rousseau concerning the inability of European philosophers to think beyond their historical contexts, but he rejects the romanticizing of natural man.  Firmin emphasizes that it is political institutions that can create equality or exacerbate its absence and distinguishes between those that emerge from within communities and those imposed from outside in order to stress that the equality of the races will be an achievement within history that will undo the inequalities that are the products of ongoing, brutal violence.  Equality, concludes Curry, can exist within history if blacks learn to command tools used by whites to transcend overly narrow conceptualizations of the horizons of collective possibility.
            George Carew offers a defense of the social justice-focused democratic theory of Rousseau, insisting that with some revisions it is highly useful for addressing political crises racking African states today.  Even if readers do not agree with Rousseau’s criticisms of representative government and his other reservations about institutionalized politics, argues Carew, scholars of democratic theory are heavily indebted to his reformulation of democratic ideals that enabled us to make a distinction between democracy that aims first and foremost at meeting material needs and interests of some citizens and those that aim at the collective good. Given that the social pathologies of colonialism are direct consequences of social formations designed to limit autonomy and freedom of the colonized, Rousseau would, argues Carew, insist on the need to establish a vibrant public sphere through a reeducation process that would require considerable time.  This would emphasize dignity and integrity of citizens in ways that nurture trust and moral reciprocity. Carew concludes that the cultivation of democracy and of a market economy need not be incompatible goals.  The problem instead is an ascendant, reductionistic capitalist thinking that gives priority only to the satisfaction of individualistic wants and needs.  Genuine decolonization must create social cohesion and political integration that is not possible if priority is placed on the further indulging of what have been very profitable tribal cleavages and destructive ethnic competition.
            Paget Henry explores the ways in which the namesake of this journal, C.L.R. James, brought Caribbean concerns to his reading of both Rousseau and Marx and in so doing rethought and transformed their theories of the general will and the revolutionary proletariat.  With the former, what Henry describes as “the agency or desiring faculty of the public self,” James sought radically to historicize it in order to imagine its post-bourgeois form.  He did so by revealing that previous “public selves” had been nothing more than projections of elite minorities. These would need to be supplanted by a more rigorously realized general will that actually could embody the creative self-movements of the majority of people.  With the idea of the revolutionary proletariat, James suggested that what would define the historical processes of his own day would be the push of the blocked potential of the repressed subjectivity of the working masses to find more meaningful forms of realization beginning by refusing to continue to be hemmed in by exploitative social orders.  Although, Henry argues, European culture maintained greater discursive and expressive space in the political theory of James than did African and East and West Indian religious discourses, it is still, writes Henry, “reasonable to conclude that his political discourse is one of the few calypsos that Caribbean political philosophy has produced.”  Henry closes by considering the way in which James would have interpreted new crisis tendencies of this state capitalist period and the clear demonstration in the symbiotic relationship that has developed between China and the United States, of James’s claim that in the absence of a transition to socialism in proto-socialist countries they would “take on to a greater degree the contradictions that are rending capitalism” (see Henry in this issue).
            Finally, Sally Scholz and Chiji Akoma juxtapose Rousseau’s comparison of the relative merits of theater and festival with the meaning and practice of carnival in the Caribbean today. For Rousseau, artistic expression could either nurture virtue or depravity. He actively discouraged the creation of theaters that he thought relied on the sequestering of a small group that could pay for idle luxury through the creation of a class of actors whose sustenance depended on cultivating sympathy for those lacking commendable character.  By contrast, he valorized semi-spontaneous open air festivals that celebrated the equality and worth of all members of the community, encouraging and rewarding hard work, and enabling the informal supervision of the mingling of young men and women. In the Caribbean, Scholz and Akoma argue, many do see carnival as the highpoint of city or state cohesion, but unlike Rousseau’s depiction of the virtuous and homogenous citizenry, the credo of carnival is the celebration of new themes and of difference.  What is more, local festivals are replete with symbols and folk characters drawn from the cultural and mythic history of the community that are not politically neutral.  At the center of carnival is the idea of “j’ouvert” of what is usually dark or hidden emerging into the light.  This often turns on role reversal and transgression and complete abandon.  This would also have been true of the European celebrations to which Rousseau ascribes what the authors call “a virtuous clarity.”   Although in the Caribbean context, the emergence of popular theater blurs the distinction that Rousseau draws between theater and festival, since much regional theater is rooted in African performance traditions that do not rigidly separate the audience from the stage, carnival does seem temporarily to create the kind of social harmony for which Rousseau advocated but in ways that reflect the unique character and history of the Caribbean rather than the idyllic republic of Rousseau’s imagination.
            Rounding out this issue of The C.L.R. James Journal are three review essays, a letter from the distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, Wilson Harris, on his receiving the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Philosophical Literature, and a book forum.  The first review essay, by Emily Nacol, critically examines Leo Damrosch’s 2005 biography of Rousseau.  This first single-volume English language treatment of the theorist’s entire life places particular emphasis on connecting Rousseau’s personality with his intellectual achievements.  Nacol suggests that although Damrosch frames Rousseau as a brilliant critic of social life rather than as a builder of new systems—a claim that might undercut the subtitle’s ascription of genius to Rousseau—he does so through making a case for the emancipatory potential of criticism.  Lewis R. Gordon engages Carol Pateman and Charles W. Mills’s recent, coauthored Contract and Domination, drawing particular attention to the theoretical fruitfulness of Pateman’s formulation of the settler contract in the colonial contexts of the United States, Australia, and South Africa and challenging Mills to consider whether arguments made in the name of political efficacy or pragmatism do not themselves cede the very ground that political theorizing must cultivate and expand.  In the third review essay, Gertrude James González de Allen contextualizes the case made for the political and social centrality of geography in Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds by demonstrating the centrality of spatial metaphors in the feminist theoretical work of women of color. Gonzalez de Allen draws particular attention to McKittrick’s rejection of the depiction of women of color as peripheral to New World geographies and to her innovative discussions of Canada’s official disavowal of its history of slavery in spite of the enduring presence of black people within its population. The final book forum section was added after the original conceptualization of this special issue and yet its contributors develop their own implicit creolization of contemporary debates in political theology and gender in Mesoamerica through a close engagement with Sylvia Marcos’s important work, Taken from the Lips.  Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Karen Torjesen, Madina Tlostanova, and María Lugones offer commentary on the text, followed by Marcos’s reply to critics.
            At the beginning of a critique and subsequent creolization of Hannah Arendt’s ideas, C.L.R. James remarked in Modern Politics: “One does not say everything every time one speaks or writes.  To begin with, it is impossible, and there is no reason to argue further than that.”8  We view the guiding telos of creolizing Rousseau to be the illumination of urgent political questions and the imagining of an array of alternative concepts and vocabularies between past and future. Thus, we hope that what might emerge from this humble beginning is a terrain for some living thought.

Works Cited

Austin, David, editor. 2009. You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montréal Lectures of 
C.L.R. James. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Balutansky, Kathleen M. and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, editors. 1998. Caribbean Creolization:
Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Gainesville: 
University Press of Florida.

Bewaji, John Oyatunde (Tunde) Isola. 2003. Beauty and Culture: Perspectives in Black 
Aesthetics. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books.

Boxill, Bernard. 2005. “Rousseau, Natural Man, and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern 
Philosophy, edited by Andrew Valls. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 150–168.

Cornell, Drucilla.  2008.  Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory. Lanham: 
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Dallmayr, Fred.  2004. “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory,” 
Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 249–257. 

Dussel, Enrique. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the 
Philosophy of Liberation>, edited and translated by Eduardo Mendieta. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

_____. 2003. Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, edited 
by Eduardo Mendieta.  Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Fischer, Sibylle. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of 
Revolution.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Les Editions du Seuil.
______. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
______. 1997a. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
______. 1997b. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard.

James, C.L.R.  1973/1960. Modern Politics: A Series of Lectures on the Subject Given at the
Trinidad Public Library, in Its Adult Education Program. Detroit: be/wicked.

Mehta, Brinda. 2004. Diasporic (Dis)locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the 
Kala Pani. Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

Miller, Christopher L. 2008. The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave 
Trade.  Durham: Duke University Press.

Muthu, Sankar.  2003.  Enlightenment against Empire.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Praeger, Michèle. 2003. The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary.  Lincoln: University 
of Nebraska Press.

Puri, Shalini. 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural 
Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sala-Molins, Louis. 2006. Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment, translated 
with an introduction by John Conteh-Morgan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2004. “The Discovery of the New World.” In The Collected Writings of 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Letter to D’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, (Vol. 10), edited by Allan 
Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly.  Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England.

Todorov, Tzvetan. 2001. Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, translated by John T. Scott and 
Robert D. Zaretsky.  University Park:Pennsylvania State University Press.

Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 2006. An Intellectual History of the Caribbean.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vergès, Françoise. 1999. Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage. 
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1995. “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: 
A New World View, edited by V. Hyatt and R. Nettleford. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Notes
1This lecture is available in print for the first time in David Austin’s forthcoming volume, You Don’t Play 
With Revolution: The Montréal Lectures of C.L.R. James.  All of the quotations in this opening paragraph 
can be found there. We would like to express our special thanks to David Austin for making us aware of this 
lecture, for sharing it with us in manuscript form, and for so encouraging the direction of this project.

2 See Sibylle Fischer (2004:7).

3 On this point, see Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau (1998), Françoise Vergès (1999), 
Michèle Praeger (2003), Brinda Mehta (2004), Shalini Puri (2004), and Christopher L. Miller (2008).

4 Édouard Glissant (1981), (1989), (1997a), and (1997b).

5 See Sylvia Wynter (1995: 5-57).

6 Enrique Dussel (1996), (2003).

7 See John Oyatunde (Tunde) Isola Bewaji (2003: chapters 1 and 2), Bernard Boxill (2005:150–168), and 
Louis Sala-Molins (2006: 29, 49, 67–68, 73, 80–81,
106–107).

8 C.L.R. James (1973/1960:157).

Jane Anna Gordon teaches in the Department of Political Science at Temple University. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967–1971 (Routledge, 2001), which was listed by The Gotham Gazette as one of the four best books recently published on Civil Rights, and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell’s, 2006) and Not Only the Master’s Tools (Paradigm Publishers, 2006).  She is also coauthor of the forthcoming Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (Paradigm Publishers) and is completing her next book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (Fordham University Press, forthcoming).

Neil Roberts is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Political Science at Williams College.  Roberts’s work has appeared in Caribbean Studies, New Political Science, Philosophia Africana, Political Theory, Sartre Studies International, Shibboleths, and Souls.  He is currently working on two book projects. The first is entitled Freedom as Marronage: The Dialectic of Slavery and Freedom in Arendt, Pettit, Rousseau, Douglass, and the Haitian Revolution, and the second is a comparative study of the Rastafari and Carl Schmitt.