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opening poem
1. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Sarita Cornell On High
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articles
2. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Maureen MacGrogan Drucilla as Author
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A narrative of what it was like to work with Drucilla Cornell as an author, written by her first book editor. It describes a series of conversations at their lunch meetings in New York City and offers informal comments on Drucilla’s style of working overall.
3. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Seyla Benhabib Re-Reading Drucilla Cornell: In Memoriam for a Dear Friend
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Drucilla Cornell was a brilliant and original thinker whose work spanned feminist theory, psychoanalysis, legal philosophy, cultural studies, and South African legal and political thought—the doctrine and practice of ubuntu. This essay highlights some crucial junctures in the close to forty-year intellectual career of a co-author and close friend.
4. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Wendy Brown A Wild and Pragmatic Feminist Jurisprudence
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Drucilla Cornell’s singular approach to feminist jurisprudence braided together psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and liberal legalism to formulate a simultaneously radical and practical remedy for women’s sexual subjection. Crossing epistemological and methodological divides in a disciplined and creative way, her brilliant work charted a path through the Scylla and Charybdis of over-regulation sacrificing freedom and libertarianism sacrificing equality.
5. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Anwar Uhuru Beyond Corporeal Constructs: The Imaginary Domain as Philosophical Intervention
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The article is a brief analysis of Cornell’s Imaginary Domain (1995) as an intervention into decolonizing intersecting systems of oppression. Cornell’s Imaginary Domain forces us to think of the intersecting factors that retain systems of power. It isn’t just about one form of oppression but all systems of oppression that separate us. However, creating a shared struggle to find and embody wholeness in response to the historical traumas of slavery, segregation, and systems of anti-Black oppression is fraught with tensions.
6. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Wairimu Njoya Constitutional Generation: Recollecting Histories and Writing the Feminine with Drucilla Cornell
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The potential of emancipatory social movements to generate new legal norms is a source of hope for feminist activists. Yet there are also serious doubts as to the impact that marginalized women can have on legal institutions and constitution-making. This tribute to Drucilla Cornell foregrounds her contributions to theorizing women’s movements as a source of social-cultural values that could spark constitutional transformation. While Cornell’s concept of “global apartheid,” which exposes the linkages among legalized racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, and anti-immigrant politics, might seem to reinforce doubts concerning women’s capabilities, the overall legacy of her legal philosophy is hopeful. Building on social movement practices of intergenerational storytelling, ethical witnessing, historical recollection, and respect for the dignity of women brutalized by apartheid systems, Cornell envisioned a revolutionary constitutionalism powerful enough to dismantle global apartheid. Out of women’s movement spaces, she showed us, dignitarian norms emerge with momentum to transform constitutional law.
7. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
John Comaroff Of Ethics, Epistemology, and Humanity: Reflections on Drucilla Cornell and Ubuntu in South Africa, in Memoriam
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This essay offers a critical reading of Drucilla Cornell’s writings on the concept of ubuntu in South Africa, a country with which she had a deeply committed, complicated, ambivalent relationship. It explores her arguments for the contemporary relevance of this deeply rooted cultural concept—despite its appropriation and commodification at the hands of global market forces—not merely to the everyday life of Black South Africans but also for a transformative constitutionalism; a progressive jurisprudence, that is, addressed to the accomplishment of a more equal and ethical post-apartheid society. In so doing, it analyzes how Cornell, a playwright and philosopher committed to estranging the familiar, turned the skepticism of ubuntu redolent among white South African scholars and public intellectuals back on itself by rooting her argument for its continued significance in a combination of ethnographic discovery and the legal history of the present.
8. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Annette Lansink Drucilla Cornell and the Meaning of Ubuntu in South African Jurisprudence: A Tribute
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This article pays homage to Drucilla Cornell through examining her writings on ubuntu not only as a jurisprudential concept, but also as a philosophical and ethical concept. Cornell’s incisive ability to synthesize Kant’s idealism of the realm of ends and the African philosophy of ubuntu, combined with her revolutionary spirit, deepened understanding of the South African constitutional values and principles. Exploring the interpretation of ubuntu by the South African Constitutional Court, it shows how Cornell advanced an ubuntu-inspired ethical ideal that informs and shapes dignity as the Grundnorm of the South African Constitution. For Cornell, as a transformative ethic, ubuntu imposes obligations upon us to live up to ideals in our relationships with each other and to ideals of the new democracy. Cornell championed the idea of a substantive revolution brought about by the Constitution and argued for a reading of the South African Constitution against these aspirational ideals.
9. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Nyoko Muvangua, Nick Friedman A Revolutionary Scholar: Drucilla Cornell in South Africa
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Drucilla Cornell engaged in scholarship and activism in South Africa for over a decade, and indeed she moved home from New York to Cape Town to participate more fully in the life and politics of the newly democratic country. This was not only a prolific period of scholarship and activism in her life, but also an inflection point in the country’s nascent constitutional jurisprudence. In this article, we memorialize Drucilla’s extraordinary contributions to the development of South Africa’s constitutional order and of its legal academy. We situate these contributions in the broader set of concerns—about dignity and freedom, socialism and democracy, non-Western ideals, feminism, modernity, and the constitution of community—with which she had been engaged since the earliest days of her career. We include relevant anecdotes from her life in South Africa; not only her life as a scholar but also as a teacher, mentor, friend, and above all, a revolutionary activist.
10. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Gregory E. Doukas Three Routes Beyond the Dead Ends of Man: A Tribute to the Legacy of Drucilla Cornell
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In this article I reflect on meeting Professor Drucilla Cornell as a bachelor’s student at Rutgers University, working as her assistant, and the irreversible impact she had on my life. I argue that Cornell was a thinker of profound courage and that this virtue was crucial to her developing several ways beyond the philosophical anthropology of Euro-modern man. Cornell envisioned three main ways beyond what she called the “dead ends of man”: feminism, critical philosophy (including dialectics and Marxism), and African humanism. These three traditions combine in an explosive, revolutionary way in Cornell’s writings; each are essential pillars of her thought. I also identify a dialectical or “productive” tension in her thinking between tendencies toward both idealist and materialist metaphysics. I conclude by recounting personal experiences with Cornell, exploring the consequences of her ethical philosophy, and posing questions that I think she could help us answer in the tumultuous times we are currently living through.
11. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Peter Hudis The Theoretical Practice and Practical Theory of Drucilla Cornell
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One of the many vantage points from which to appreciate the multidimensional contributions of Drucilla Cornell is her life-long attachment to the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, who inspired her from the time she was a young labor activist to her very last work, Today’s Struggles, Tomorrow’s Revolution (2022).
12. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Paget Henry In the Mirrors of Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt: Remembering Drucilla Cornell
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This remembrance of the life and work of our friend and colleague, Drucilla Cornell, is a view of her through the lenses of Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and through her lively participation in the Caribbean Philosophical Association. As a result, it focuses on her as a philosopher who had mastered the Western tradition of transcendental philosophy. From that base, she engaged the traditions of Western Marxism and Feminism, and was deeply engaged in mastering the traditions of Caribbean Marxism and creolizing theory.
13. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Jane Anna Gordon A Twenty-first Century Revolutionary in the U.S.?: Reflections on Drucilla Cornell’s Modalities
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A short reflection on Drucilla Cornell’s distinctive modes of doing political theory, inhabiting academic spaces, communicating important ideas, loving, and enacting fierce loyalty in the face of political bullying.
14. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Michiel Bot Comrade-Thinkers: On Drucilla Cornell’s Critical Theory
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This article analyzes Drucilla Cornell’s critical theory as a practice of engaging with radical thinking and radical politics in the interest of revolutionary transformation. Arguing that Walter Benjamin’s imperative to wrest tradition away from conformism is at the heart of Cornell’s work, the article shows how Cornell applies this imperative both to the tradition of resistance against oppression and to critical theory itself. The article follows Cornell’s call to decolonize the critical theoretical project by bringing Surinamese anticolonial activist and writer Anton de Kom, various collectives that participated in the 2022 German art festival documenta 15, and the disobedience of six young Palestinian “Freedom Riders” into conversation with Cornell’s writings on the South African Revolution and on Afro-Caribbean liberatory thought.
15. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera Interlocution Not Conclusion: Farewell Letter to a Dead Philosopher
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Written in the shape of a letter to a friend and long-time collaborator, this piece focuses on Drucilla Cornell’s most crucial lessons on a critical theory for the future: the intertwinement of aesthetics and politics; the need to figure and reconfigure techniques of liberation; the clarification that the decolonial turn is an ontological turn; the relationship between justice and negotiations; the reformulation of the feminine within sexual difference; and the impact of temporal naturalism. Together, they help us move beyond received views in phenomenology and existentialism, toward gravitational thinking and the priority of imaging over the understanding if we are to rekindle the revolutionary spirit of public imagination.
16. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Lewis R. Gordon A Girl in Black, a Woman in the African Diaspora
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This memoriam essay begins with a reflection on the author’s relationship to Drucilla Cornell, the famed activist, revolutionary legal theorist, social and political philosopher, playwright, and biographer. It then proceeds to examine her contributions to Africana existential revolutionary thought and the Caribbean-inspired project of shifting the geography of reason.
book reviews
17. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Altan Atamer Jeanne Morefield. Unsettling the World: Edward Said and Political Theory
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18. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Sudip Bhattacharya George Fourlas. Anti-Colonial Solidarity: Race, Reconciliation, and MENA Liberation
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19. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Gregory E. Doukas Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn, editor. Post Rosa: Letters Against Barbarism
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20. Philosophy and Global Affairs: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Mary Gregg Raúl Pérez. The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy
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