Decolonizing Dialectics
George Ciccariello-Maher is Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University and the author of We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, also published by Duke University Press.
Spirals
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Published:January 2017
Decolonized dialectics does not begin or end with the thinkers considered in this book, and so the conclusion sets out from Frederick Douglass. Despite not having read Hegel’s Phenomenology, Douglass himself enacted—in his fight against the slave breaker Covey—something both akin to Hegel’s formulation, but in notably decolonized form. Gesturing toward this broader tradition of decolonized dialectics, the conclusion works through a series of unanswered questions, suggesting that a decolonized dialectics bears a specific relation to questions of positivity, tradition, and space. In particular, Angela Davis provides a powerful theorization of the importance of distance and space, in which...
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