Atlantic Theory - (Incitements) by John E Drabinski (Hardcover)

About the Book

Asks how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world, and how that history has created a set of critical theory issues distinctive to the Atlantic world.

Book Synopsis

This largely new collection of essays explores how the history of empire has impacted the intellectual life of the Atlantic world through treatments of key figures in Atlantic theory, including Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Léopold Senghor and Édouard Glissant. Out of these critical and comparative readings emerges a portrait of Atlantic theory as a distinct orientation toward complex relations of colonial power, memory of atrocity, negotiation of the aftermath of empire, and the creativity of the oppressed living under impossible conditions of violence.

Review Quotes

With extraordinary range and ethical clarity, John Drabinski's Atlantic Theory reframes critical theory through the lens of relation, dislocation, and reconciliation. He takes seriously the Middle Passage as philosophical event and charts a decolonial project attentive to memory, violence, and vernacular life. This is a necessary and essential book--restless, rigorous, and deeply moving.--Michael E. Sawyer, University of Pittsburgh

Sustained intellectual engagement with a thinker has a fecund residual effect. Because of such a longstanding tarrying with a figure, it becomes impossible to free oneself from the thinker and the thinker's ideas. John Drabinski has for decades now taken up figures such as Baldwin, Glissant, Levinas and Wright. InAtlantic Theory: On the Vicissitudes of Relation, Drabinski situates himself once more in the milieu of his old companions, and in so doing Drabinski reveals to us how there is always something more to be thought, how new and often surprising lines of inquiry open up when the critic dedicates himself to the work of the thinker.--Grant Farred, Cornell University

In Atlantic Theory, Drabinski follows in the footsteps of the great Aimé Césaire by asking what kind of contact colonialism produced. What did this relation (or non-relation) yield on the level of thought? And what future world does it render either possible or impossible? The questions he asks are as urgent as the answers are invigorating.--Geo Maher, W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction