This review essay engages with Aaron Kamugisha’s 2019 Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition by focusing on its methodological commitment to seeking Caribbean answers to Caribbean political and social problems. The author argues that Kamugisha powerfully offers something other than a methodology through which the circulation of Caribbean geographies, politics, epistemologies, and its people’s lived experiences moves outward to provide analytical and conceptual service for metropolitan centers, even if for ostensibly decolonial purposes. The essay demonstrates how by turning to two of the Caribbean’s major thinkers, C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and their far-less-studied Caribbean writings, Kamugisha takes seriously the centering of Caribbean thinkers in their own histories of political becoming. The essay ends with sustained focus on Kamugisha’s elaboration of two of Wynter’s conceptualizations: indigenization as an alternative to creolization and abduction as a kind of theorizing out from Caribbean reasonings.
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Book Review|
July 01 2021
Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning
Raj Chetty
Raj Chetty
Raj Chetty is associate professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University, specializing in Caribbean literature across the English, Spanish, and French languages. His published work focuses on blackness in Dominican literature and culture, anticolonial Caribbean theater, and C. L. R. James’s Haitian Revolution plays.
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Small Axe (2021) 25 (2 (65)): 182–189.
Citation
Raj Chetty; Abduction and the Grounds of Caribbean Reasoning. Small Axe 1 July 2021; 25 (2 (65)): 182–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9384388
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