REP Workshop with Jane Anna Gordon

DateFebruary 19, 2015

Time12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

Contact
Contact Information
Belinda SunnuPhone bsunnu@polisci.ucla.edu

Presenter:Jane Anna Gordon, University of ConnecticutTitle: “Creolizing Political Theory”About the Speaker:Jane Gordon (Ph.D. 2005, Univ. of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of Political Science (Political Theory) as well as of African American Studies at UConn.  She previously taught at Temple University. Her focus is on modern and contemporary political theory, Africana political thought, theories of enslavement, political theories of education, methodologies in the social sciences, and political theory in film and literature.  Most recently, she is the author of the like-titled book Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (2014) from Fordham University PressCo-sponsored by the Political Theory WorkshopAbstract:Asking whether it is possible to develop an approach to studying political life that fully reflects its heterogeneity, [the author] offers the creolization of political theory as a viable response. Creolization describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. In so doing, they provide a useful way of understanding similar processes that continue today, namely of one potential outcome when people who were previously strangers find themselves as unequal co-occupants of new political locations they seek to call “home.”  In demonstrating a path that is different from the one usually associated with multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately and the aim is for each to tolerate the other by letting it remain in relative isolation, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another to create forms of belonging that are familiar but also distinctive and new. These are useful models both for reconsidering how contemporary political solidarities could be constructed and how we might envisage the relationships that may be forged among what have become radically separate fields for studying a shared world.

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