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.

Franz Boas in Africana Philosophy

This chapter discusses how Franz Boas's contributions to Africana thought make him an Africana thinker. Boas's arguments ultimately showed the error in making whites the standard for all other groups. While European societies produced their standards of how to live as a human being, the error is to conclude that theirs were and continue to be the standards or, worse, the only ones. In stream with many Africana thinkers, Boas addressed the question of whether people rendered homeless in the world that created them “belong,” so to speak, to the story of humankind. Although they were rejected by European modernity, there was no legitimate reason for them to be denied their membership in the human community. Boas's historicism was, in other words, a form of redemptive history, one linked to a conception of freedom as also a portrait of belonging.