Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Political Theory

John Drabinski (University of Maryland) will discuss his latest work on Édouard Glissant, centering the question of memory and Glissant's contributions to political thought. This will also be an occasion to discuss Glissant's Caribbean critical theory with the thinking of a "break in tradition" in the work of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.

 

On Édouard Glissant and the Middle Passage, University of Minnesota Press 2019: "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 history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism.

 

Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Édouard Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage."

 

This event is part of the mini-series Breaks in Tradition: Shifting Geographies of Political Thought, organized by Niklas Plaetzer (University of Chicago) and co-sponsored by the Political Theory group at HU Berlin (Prof. Volk) and the Centre Marc Bloch.