This essay illuminates and expands upon Gordon’s pathbreaking understanding of creolization as a normatively and geographically fluid process. I begin by highlighting Gordon’s understanding of “progressive” creolization as that which occurs when marginalized groups syncretize distinct, sometimes antagonistic, practices and representations in ways that foster anti-colonial resistance. I use the remainder of the essay to detail how my own research, on self-defined black ladies in Jamaica and the United States, builds upon Gordon’s crucial insight that some forms of creolization are better than others. I do so by demonstrating that gendered hierarchies of power inform how and why creolization is a simultaneously local and transnational phenomenon that engenders anti-racist as well as patriarchal politics.

The paper uses insights from Jane Anna Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory to come up with a different way to read the work of Frantz Fanon in general and his discussion of gender and sexuality in particular. The paper argues against a hermetic reading of Fanon, one which reads him outside of context and influences. Instead of this close, or primary reading of Fanon, I offer a “conversation” between Fanon and the early work of Angela Y. Davis. The paper shows that reading these two texts together allows us to see that the “perverse desire” of the neurotic, as illustrated by Fanon, is in fact heavily informed by the gendered traumas of slavery as outlined in Davis’s Women, Race, and Class.

This paper outlines a cursory argument for creolizing development studies in postcolonial Africa and why Gordon’s call to creolize the human sciences should go as far as this. I argue that a concept like creolization offers a crucial analysis of the implied heterogeneity and static notion of “Africaness” and a supposed fluidity in what it means to “develop.” When, in fact, it is the inverse that rings true: “Africaness” is the product of various cultural symbols and historical experiences, which are in constant flux; while development, in its current hegemonic state, does not allow for genuine dynamism and variation.

Through the theory of creolization, Jane Anna Gordon offers a platform to revisit a wide variety of scholarship from a decolonial lens. This contribution answers her call and examines Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s work as simultaneously creolize-able, creolizing, and even inviting further creolization of the original theory. While painfully understudied, Bâ offers a methodology of the Living Tradition that informs and complements the theory of creolization. Sourced from the local knowledge of Fulani and Bamana metaphysics and based on three archetypes, the World, the Word, and the Person, the Living Tradition offers mystical insight into the connection between material and spiritual realities within the universe. Through the mystical paradigm, the Living Tradition informs and develops creolization in two specific ways: through a mystical understanding of human mixture and a critique of rationality.

Using Juliet Hooker’s explicit criticisms as a frame, this essay first explores creolizing as a method and then creolizing as a politics, drawing on the contributions of Bernal, Bose, Lindsay, and Valdez to address questions including whether creolizing offers any advances for non-European and non-canonical figures whose worlds and thought are already understood and embraced as creolized; whether creolizing methods are of any use in the project of epistemic decolonization; and whether we can assume a prori that political or philosophical projects defined by an open orientation to mixture are necessarily normatively superior to others. It concludes by considering how Monika Brodnicka and T.D. Harper-Shipman’s essays focused on Africa put the methodological and political questions into productive relationship with one another.

The social sciences were founded at the height of the Euromodern era when the belief in infinite expansion coexisted with the willingness to enclose, categorize, and lock up a large part of humanity. The invention of the social sciences was closely linked to this enterprise of disciplinarization of spaces and of populations which accompanied the expansion of capitalism and colonial conquest. Stigmatized, dominated, and colonized groups were constituted as objects by social scientists who considered themselves as pure subjects, and concealed the conditions under which they undertook their research and prohibited the colonized from expressing their own subjectivity. Colonization also imposed a binary cartography of the world and a geography of reason with obligatory references and strict disciplinary divisions. There are many ways to decolonize knowledge, but they remain marginal in a world where white male supremacy is also epistemological. The rejection of disciplinary decadence implies not only a critical but a metacritical gesture, and the refusal of the imperative of objectivation and non-engagement.

This article elaborates, through decolonial phenomenological analysis, the author’s concept of pedagogy of the stupid, a metacritical idea that offers a critique of the colonial practice of constructing colonized people as intellectually, politically, and ethically incapable of self-governance, cultural growth, and epistemic pursuits.  Drawing upon the author’s experiences and concepts from the constellation of countries and people that constitute postcolonial India and the country of Bhutan, the author issues a critique of colonial constructions of knowledge through which the aim of producing colonized subjects depended on miseducation.  The article concludes with a discussion of Bhutan’s “Green School System” of education as an effort to cultivate a form of decolonial practice and a phenomenology of the precolonial traditions of pedagogy in India.

As a postcolonial scholar and professor from more than one postcolony, the author knows the British colonizers’ “Divide and Rule” policies and their use of colonial binaries disseminated through the English education system continue to haunt the postcolonies and the diaspora even today. Therefore, awareness that decolonization has been successful only to an extent, as we continue to have internalized racism and oppression, and knowing that pandemics, like the COVID-19, will continue to decimate humanity while the former colonizers, in the form of globalism, will continue to exploit and destroy humans, nonhumans and the earth, the author argues that we need to redefine knowledge so we may learn to speak in altered ways to create change. She shares her stories of struggles and attempts at resistance to colonialism, ideas of modernity, and globalism to speak to generations to come, so that humanity may become interconnected and compassionate in our love for each other and work together toward justice for all through new decolonial epistemologies and ontologies.

This reflective essay brings to light the career and thought of nuclear chemist Jinzaburo Takagi (1938–2000), who devoted his whole career to the critique of nuclear power generation and the promotion of citizen-centered science. Looking at his life history, one recognizes some clear turning points. However, Takagi’s true engagement with the nuclear question began when he came face-to-face with the ubiquitous contamination of the earth by human-made radiation. It was a deep, revelatory astonishment that shook Takagi into radical questioning of his vocation as a scientist. It was, so to speak, an experience of “thaumazein at the nuclear anthropocene,” involving his whole person as a human being. In 1975 Takagi co-founded Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo, and he became a catalytic “citizen scientist” in the anti-nuclear power movements through his nation-wide and international activities spanning over a quarter-century. Takagi was a prolific and engaged writer, and he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1997. Soon after, however, he was diagnosed with a variety of last-stage cancers. He penned books entitled To Live as a Citizen-Scientist, Liberation from Nuclear Power: Nine Spells that Would Annihilate Japan, and Why Are Nuclear Accidents Repeated? These books would be read widely, though quite belatedly and with deep regret, after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. This essay is a look at the warning messages Takagi emphasized in the books he left as his testaments not to repeat the disaster.

This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the “decolonial reduction” as an instrument of phenomenology and ideological critique. Comparing the decolonial reduction to Edmund Husserl’s notion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction or epoché, I argue that working through the demands of rigor for either mode of reduction points to areas of overlap: the work of transcendental phenomenology is incomplete without the performance of the decolonial reduction and vice versa. I then assess Maldonado-Torres’s anchoring of the decolonial reduction in the spirit of the “decolonial attitude” and criticism of the Husserlian theoretical attitude. I conclude that foreclosing the theoretical attitude as a framework from which to perform the decolonial reduction implies significant limitations and pitfalls for the decolonial project.

Vezub and De Oto parse out the double discourses present in anthropological photography in twentieth-century Argentine nationhood. Ethnography thus becomes a powerful tool to create the national archive, reaffirming the coloniality of power, by way of representation and through the placement of indigenous bodies in relation to ethnographers who, engaged in processes of internal colonialism, behaved like earlier colonial explorers. This article presents a rupture in the dominant narrative as it interrupts myths of nationhood and integration of the Tehuelches people with a counternarrative that presents decolonial possibilities within the photographic archive. Maintaining the ambiguity in the discourse of Peronism itself, the authors emphasize that, while financing these ethnographic campaigns, Peronist leaders also supported emancipatory policies for the racialized working class. Los descamisados, a shirtless working-class and subaltern figure, emerges with Peronism, as a positive alternative to suit-wearing oligarchs in discourses of nationhood and nation-building.

This article offers an interpretation of anti-feminicide maternal activism as political in northern Mexico by analyzing it alongside Hannah Arendt’s concepts of freedom, natality, and the child in The Human Condition. While feminist theorists often debate whether maternalism strengthens or undermines women’s political participation, the author offers an unconventional interpretation of Arendt’s categories to illustrate that the meaning and practice of maternalism radically changes through the public performance of motherhood. While Arendt does not seem the best candidate to navigate this debate, her concepts of freedom and the child provide a productive perspective to rethink the relationship between maternalism and citizenship. In making this claim, this article challenges feminist political theories that depict motherhood as the chief source of women’s subordination. In the case of northern Mexico, anti-feminicide maternal activism illustrates how the political is also a personal endeavor, thereby complementing the famous feminist motto.