In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocles’ classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh’s Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I trace back to the settler colonial logic of elimination whereby settlers claim nativity to the territory by means of erasing its prior inhabitants.

In this essay, I read Stuart Hall’s idea of “politics without guarantees” as meaning that all concepts are saturated with history and that no use of a concept can prevent it from being co-opted. The contribution of this reading is that it shifts the task of critical theory: if all concepts carry limitations and can be used to advance domination, then critical theorists need not search for pure concepts or worry about how to prevent our concepts from being captured. Instead, our task is to strategically leverage always already imperfect concepts with a view toward shared political goals. For an example of this kind of critical theory, I look to W. E. B. Du Bois’s uses of “human,” “humanity,” and “human rights” in Black Reconstruction, which I suggest were informed by how he came to understand “humanity” in John Brown.

This article offers a model of collective responsibility that arises out of group implication in the persistent injustices of racism and colonialism. It engages with a case study of Jewish refugees who arrived in the Americas in the aftermath of the 1492 Spanish Edict of Expulsion. There, it identifies a strategy of survival grounded in identification with white Christians at the top of the colonial hierarchy and disidentification with Black and Native peoples at the bottom. This identification yielded benefits for colonial Jews and those (the author included) who inherit their place in the colonial racial hierarchy. These benefits were at the expense of Black and Native peoples in the Americas. The article highlights the relational harms—to others and themselves—inherent in group complicity with white supremacy. It concludes by outlining the forms of collective responsibility that could counteract these harms and create relationality beyond white supremacy.

The first part of this memoriam essay focuses on the author’s relationship with the famed Bajan intellectual George Lamming during his years at Brown University. The second part explores Lamming’s most famous work, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), which offers important tropes in Black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Peau noir, masques blancs (1952), but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through Lamming’s portrait of the phenomenon of slime and its correlate, the slimy individual. The author also discusses Lamming’s treatment of the Fanonian motif of colonizing notions of normative development.

The following describes the concept of apoliticism, distinguishing it from indifference, which is also considered a negative attitude toward politics. Whereas apoliticism is the rejection of the official political institutions, possibly with the plan of an alternative system, the indifferent rejects politics altogether and is politically disinterested. If reflective negativism rejects politics as mechanism, the indifferent rejects it as a pursuit. I also distinguish between the extra-political, as the condition of being outside of any environment in which free deliberation and public engagement is possible, and the supra-political condition, as blurring the line between public political activities and rites prescribed by the state on the one hand and the private sphere of the individual on the other hand. If different, both are forms of political poverty. These concepts may serve as means for a more nuanced understanding of the structure of apolitical attitudes.

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Abdias Nascimento, and Lélia Gonzalez are presented in this essay as Afro-Brazilian existentialist thinkers, whose global significance lies in their outlining philosophical interpretations of Brazil that center racial relations in the formation of the nation. By combining accounts of the lives and intellectual contributions of these thinkers, one can understand the core of each of their projects, whether in philosophical literature, sociological study of ethnic-racial relations, or philosophical anthropology. Part of a line of thought in which the terms “black” and “existence” are put together, Jesus, Nascimento, and Gonzalez exemplarily proposed practices of decolonial knowledge production based on the notion that it is possible with the struggle for freedom and justice to reverse power structures that hierarchize human beings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.