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.

In this essay, I engage with the methodological contributions and original readings of Fanon and Rousseau contained in Jane Anna Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory. I build upon one insight in particular––Gordon’s illuminating joint reading of Rousseau’s general will and Fanon’s national consciousness—in order to reflect on Fanon’s ambivalence about Pan-Africanism. In this task, I engage with W.E.B. Du Bois’s transnational thinking in order to parse out the tensions as well as the reciprocal relation between national consciousness and transnational or cosmopolitan engagements.

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.

Over the course of the past few decades, comparative political theory has acquired a measure of institutional legitimacy and intellectual recognition as part of the ongoing, interdisciplinary challenge to prevailing academic categories, coordinates, and borders. This arrival has been accompanied by a conspicuous focus on methodology both by those who claim the mantle of comparative political theory and those who reject it. The following reflections read this focus symptomatically, as revealing intellectual, institutional, and professional exigencies rather than as distinct to any particular scholar, argument, or publication. Neither a “state of the field” nor a proprietary defense of what comparative political theory is or should be, these observations toggle back and forth between reflections on my own engagement and disengagement with the topic of comparative political theory on the one hand and, on the other, concerns about how this preoccupation with method simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the displacement of politics in the very field that aims to understand it. Among the questions I raise are: What might be driving this disproportionate focus on methodological arguments in and about comparative political theory? What are the stakes of such a focus, particularly for younger scholars in political science departments decreasingly hospitable to political theory? Finally, what does this augur for the future of the study of politics broadly understood within disciplines dedicated to the scientific study of human behavior?

Usually, during any form of communication in an institutional classroom and beyond, the phenomenon of “silence” is regarded as a form of epistemological and ontological absence. To elaborate further, the act of remaining silent is usually equated with incapability and nothingness. The authenticity and relevance of building and sharing knowledge with one another are mostly judged on the basis of one’s capability to verbally express. But silence as a form of communication and knowledge dissemination has been an integral part of several native indigenous communities across the planet. It was with the emergence of European colonization, that such silent systems of knowledge production were disbanded as mysterious and invalid. The exercise of disbanding the phenomenon of silence continues to take place through the colonial/modern vocal-centric pedagogical practices in the contemporary era. With respect to these arguments, this essay attempts to explore the possible ways through which silence, along with vocal pedagogical practices, can be performed in an intersectional manner as a habitual pedagogical practice in educational institutions today. To justify the possibilities contextually, the author shares pedagogical instances mostly from India. This essay is the third part of the three-part pedagogy series. The other two essays are “Pedagogy of the Stupid” and “Pedagogy of Common Sense.”

Louis Dupré’s death marks the passing of a philosopher who made a profound contribution to the study of Marx, Hegel, and the wider tradition, and who needs to be reread today. This memoriam acknowledges his importance through placing him in conversation with the great Marxist humanist Raya Dunayevskaya.

This article addresses two related questions: how do we read He-Yin Zhen’s political writing in relation to her broader political life and how should her political ideas be introduced to the English-speaking academy? I first concur with recent translators of He-Yin, Lydia Liu, Dorothy Ko, and Rebecca Karl, that He-Yin’s anarcho-feminism marks a significant moment in the modern Chinese history of political ideas and can potentially contribute to transnational feminist theories. Following this, I revisit and reconstruct He-Yin and her life partner Liu Shipei’s (刘师培) life trajectories as documented in Chinese sources by at least two generations of Chinese historians of the late Qing dynasty revolution. I argue that, when introducing her to English-speaking audiences as part of “the birth of Chinese feminism,” her translators have provided a diluted picture of He-Yin’s political world that could easily give rise to a reductionistically heroic reading of her politics. He-Yin’s political participation includes but is by no means limited to her one-year career as the prolific anarcho-feminist theorist for the journal (Tianyi Bao, 天义报).

This article explores the claim that how we talk can inspire how we reason and act. Contemporary research suggests that the words militant Christian leaders in the Philippines use shape how they rationalize President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Describing drug users as “sinners,” a trope in religious language, is particularly lethal. Using work on pragmatism and philosophy of language by Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and Lynne Tirrell, the author examines how the term “sinner” generates pernicious claims in the drug war. It explores how the use of the term inspires hermeneutic uptake, redirects discursive focus, and engenders certain social and political actions in the Philippines.

This introduction frames the special issue titled “Mystical Solidarities: Ali Shariati and the Act of Translation.” Drawing from insights across the collection’s essays, it foregrounds a notion of translation as a transformative act, anchored in Shariati’s mystical ontology, that fosters and sustains anticolonial solidarities. To illustrate, we explore differences and affinities between Shariati and Frantz Fanon with regard to truth-telling, translation, alienation, and subjectivity. The comparison reveals a generative distinction in Shariati’s thought between cultural and existential alienation, “translated intellectuals” and the act of translation. The distinction creates grounds for a vision of anticolonial solidarity responsive to circumstances in postrevolutionary Iran, a vision that reaches beyond the postcolonial state

Known as a revolutionary ideologue and a religious reformer, Ali Shariati’s activities as a translator have not garnered substantial scholarly attention. We reconstruct a history of Shariati’s translations, situating these endeavors at the center of his intellectual project. Shariati’s thought itself, we show, is a form of translation in the service of decolonization. This history reveals a nascent theory of decolonization as open-ended and indeterminate. We advance this claim by staging a conversation between Shariati’s reflections on decolonization and Morad Farhadpour’s evolving concept of thought/translation, a dissident theory of translation influential in contemporary Iran that bears resemblance to Shariati’s performative works. More than an abstruse debate in Iranian intellectual history, these continuities raise questions of pressing concern for postcolonial states, in particular the specificity of local situations as they relate to ongoing global hierarchies.

Ali Shariati is typically understood as a theorist of “political Islam.” Yet his theological innovations within what is called “mystical thought” are also worthy of attention. Shariati does not consider mystical thought as an escapist, transcendent paradigm, but as a means to interpret and navigate the socio-political world. Of particular relevance to Shariati is an idea ubiquitous across Islamic mysticism: the transformation of the self. Within Islamic mysticism, there are various iterations of the idea that to become closer to God, one must enact a radical transfiguration of the self, one that occurs simultaneously at the divine and existential registers. For Shariati, this transformation of the self is tied not only to one’s relationship with God, but also to the desire to alter the social realm. This is an ethos that, for Shariati, should infiltrate all aspects of life, material and immaterial, cerebral and social. If one wishes to overturn the status quo, one must cultivate not only a revolutionary subjectivity but a mystically-oriented subjectivity as well, or one that is characterized by constant change and growth.

Though Ali Shariati is well-known as the “ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, this essay considers Shariati conversely as a student of revolution. It begins by posing a distinction between the apprentice and the autodidact through reference to Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and introduces a third term, the collaborator, that is crucial to Shariati’s account of counter-pedagogy. The essay then reconstructs Shariati’s critique of the pedagogical state. There, he recalls resisting interpellation by learning from other pasts, refusing instruction, and learning from others. Finally, I show changes in how Shariati conceptualized self-transformation, from an autodidactic process of soul-searching to a collaborative process that gives soul to a collective. On becoming immersed in the sounds of his compatriots grieving the martyrs of struggle, Shariati attests to being a student of history: the curriculum of a people becoming, the history of struggle, and its instructors, those who modeled it, pivoted around a refusal to be instructed. Overall, this essay develops an account of media environments as informal pedagogical spaces.

Critical investigations of Ali Shariati (1933–1977) reveal a body of work formed upon a contradictory synthesis of Islamic and modern Western thought. This combination reflects the historical milieu to which Shariati belonged, interpretation of which requires mapping his work onto iterations of global thought that respond to the conditions of modernity. The present inquiry examines Shariati’s understanding of art as an idealistic effort to appease human alienation vis-à-vis the question of human existence, which, I argue, elucidates his interpretations of Islamic and Western terrains of modern thought.

At the time of his premature death at the age of forty-three, the written output of Ali Shariati was remarkable. He wrote in a variety of styles and forms and read extensively from vastly distinct literary traditions. While in recent years, Anglophone scholarship on his work has situated him rightfully among critical anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, his contribution to a worldly reimagining of comparative literature has not received the same attention. This essay offers a framing of his work within the field of comparative literature, with a particular focus on his adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. By studying his mode of engagement with this canonical text, this essay provides an introductory analysis to the comparative literary practice of a towering Iranian intellectual. It can also serve as a model for a comparative literature practicum that privileges the work of a writer from the Global South.

This essay engages with Ali Shariati’s lecture “Some of the Vanguard of the Return to Self in the Third World” to explore his conception of the “Third World” as a cultural, psychic, and politico-economic project of which Iran would be an integral part, and his relationship to the intellectual contributions of Frantz Fanon, whose translation and critical reception proved to be of considerable importance to the ideological development of a popular-nationalist and avowedly religious section of Iran’s anti-Pahlavi opposition during the 1960s and 1970s. The essay explores several elements of Shariati’s anti-capitalism in the context of his advocacy of a Third World politico-economic bloc and some of the potential difficulties, tensions, and contradictions this vision would, and ultimately, did encounter. Finally, the essay concludes by examining how Shariati’s prescriptions for breaking the chains of “dependency” might have been further developed and complicated, given the immense obstacles the promise of Third World solidarity has historically faced.

“Surfacing” is the process of rediscovering one’s sense of self-determination from within a context of enduring domination, including systems of enduring domination, such as racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. “Enduring domination” is the afterlife of domination that carries on into the conditions and mentality of anyone affected by domination, even indirectly. This article riggs together a concept from the Capability Approach to human development, a process from intersectional, epistemic justice work, and some broad possibilities within social practice art around norm play and subversion to fill out a practice of wondering that helps its participants surface. It serves as a contribution to broadly decolonial work.

This essay juxtaposes the South Asian system of social hierarchies, conceptualized by Babasaheb Ambedkar as “graded inequality” with “serial relations” as conceptualized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Collective action against casteism faces internal problems. The complex psychological dynamics preserved over millennia through caste systems prevent solidarities across castes. The notion of “seriality” helps us to understand the material limitations placed by scripted functional roles on collective action. Internal divisions arising from prioritizing a caste or class perspective can be resolved with a better understanding of how “exigencies of sociality” create an ambiguous unity. A key lesson from Sartre is that it is only through praxis that consciousness remains open to the attractions of solidarity. Cultural otherness disconnected from the materiality of class (or gender) is a distortion. Conceiving of classes as historically determined while ignoring caste-being makes any analysis of revolutionary action incomplete. Reading Ambedkar and Sartre together opens the way for a genuinely historical materialist account of collective action against graded inequality.

To highlight the interdependencies of persons, cultures, social, ecological, and artistic entities as a precondition for a planetary thinking or a world philosophy, this essay offers a short reconstruction of the coinage and transfer of the term “culture” in the European-African-Antillean context. It underlines that a world philosophy can no longer be executed on ideas of individual entities and corresponding opposites such as “European vs. African” and so forth. The author cites cultural understandings of different authors of the Global South as examples of affirmed cultural mixtures and of their mutual participations to bring about a philosophy of relation and dis-individuation. The argument is this: the world of today needs new terms to be conceived adequately in its cultural, social, eco­logical, and artistic interdependencies. The old term, “the individual,” must be replaced by the new term, “dividual” or “dividuation,” thereby underlining the processuality and intermixing of all sorts of entities, helping to move toward a decolonized philosophy of the world.

This article draws out the politics of value by exploring the language used by the Black Lives Matter movement. It argues that this movement’s value claims, evident in the language of “mattering,” mobilize tensions between mate­rial and aspirational systems of human interdependence. To this end, this article examines Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (2018) as a text that articulates the political vision of this movement. It also draws extensively from Alicia Garza’s “A Herstory of the Black Lives Matter Move­ment” (2014) and the platform of the Movement for Black Lives. It argues that the tension between value and values enables a choice between different imaginations of our relationship to the material world as well as a choice among diverse means of self-representation in struggles for inclusion. Value claims, such as those made by the Black Lives Matter movement embrace political contestation in a way that is deeply intersectional. Moreover, this movement’s claims about prioritization and distinction are paradoxically offered as a way of achieving equality.

This article explores Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and María Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender. While Wynter’s and Lugones’s work offer consequential insights for queer, trans, and intersex studies and activism, they have deliberately engaged these particular discourses and histories of struggle in limited ways. Wynter analyzes the contradictions of Western feminists’ organizing against female genital cutting in Africa, but she does not link her conclusions to their ramifications for activism against genital cutting on children deemed intersex. Lugones uses the existence of intersex people as a turning point in her critique of Aníbal Quijano when developing her concept of the coloniality of gender, but she does not go further to connect global intersex activism and decolonial feminist struggles. This article explores the work of Wynter and Lugones for their compatibility with trans and intersex studies and activism, and the places where their work can be furthered through insights from trans and intersex studies. It concludes that to move beyond the coloniality of gender requires trans and intersex liberation and that trans and intersex liberation must be understood in a broader decolonial feminist framework.