Description
Book SynopsisCaribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of 'Caribbean Critique.'
Trade Review'This is a very important and exciting book. Extending to the whole of the French Caribbean his previous work on the philosophical bases of the Haitian Revolution, Nesbitt has produced the first ever account of the region’s writing from a consistently philosophical, as distinct from literary or historical, standpoint.'
Celia Britton
'… the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. … latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique.'
French Studies'Nesbitt’s book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today…'
Contemporary French Civilization'Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates.'
New West Indian Guide Reviews 'A prodigiously researched and compelling conceptualisation of francophone Caribbean critical thought.'
Gabriella Rodriguez,
SX SalonTable of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: The Caribbean Critical Imperative
- I. Tropical Equality: The Politics of Principle
- . 1 Foundations of Caribbean Critique: From Jacobinism to Black Jacobinism
- . 2 Victor Schoelcher, Tocqueville, and the Abolition of Slavery
- . 3 Aimé Césaire and the Logic of Decolonization
- . 4 ‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle’: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé
- . 5 Édouard Glissant: From the Destitution of the Political to Antillean Ultra-leftism
- II. Critique of Caribbean Violence
- . 6 Jacobinism, Black Jacobinism, and the Foundations of Political Violence
- . 7 The Baron de Vastey and the Contradictions of Scribal Critique
- . 8 Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence
- . 9 Aristide and the Politics of Democratization
- III. Critique of Caribbean Relation
- . 10 Édouard Glissant: From the Poétique de la relation to the Transcendental Analytic of Relation
- . 11 Césaire and Sartre: Totalization, Relation, Responsibility
- . 12 Militant Universality: Absolutely Postcolonial
- . Conclusion: Aimé Césaire: The Incandescent I, Destroyer of Worlds
- Appendix: Letter of Jean-François, Belair, and Biassou/ Toussaint, July 1792
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
