Mapping Afro-Caribbean Political Thought

Drawing on Paget Henry’s field-defining Caliban’s Reason and Lewis R. Gordon’s Introduction to Africana Philosophy, this chapter maps the historical terrain of Caribbean political thought written primarily in English and in French. Beginning with explicitly antislavery writings, it then turns to the range of intellectual efforts to forge an independent, no longer colonial, Caribbean future. It concludes by emphasizing the irony of Caribbean political writings teeming with philosophical insights in a tradition that has not until very recently explicitly cultivated philosophical endeavor and by arguing that, in exemplifying a creolizing orientation, Caribbean thought shares an affinity with some, but not all, models of comparative political theorizing.