Creolizing Sartre

T Storm Heter, Kris F. Sealey

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9798216280927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Jean-Paul Sartre's work has been taken up by writers outside of Europe, particularly in the Global South, who have developed phenomenological and existential analyses of racism, colonialism, and other structures of domination. Sartre's philosophical concepts are fundamentally open, for instance his notions of humanism, bad-faith, and freedom.

As a situational, committed thinker, Sartre worked to illuminate the urgent questions of his time at the concrete and the abstract level. The creolization of Sartrean thinking is consistent with the existential projects of engagement, authenticity, political commitment, and liberation from oppression. This volume asks how his European model of phenomenology was (and can be) transformed when it is taken up by thinkers who have lived experience with colonialism. They book also engages Sartre in his relation to key interlocutors (especially Beauvoir and Fanon) who were influenced by him and who influenced him in turn. The book demonstrates how Sartrean philosophy is productively related to Africana philosophy, Africana phenomenology, and Africana existentialism.

This volume treats creolization not as a discrete topic, but as an interdisciplinary, global approach to reading and thinking. Each author's contribution embodies an aspect of creolizing thinking, understood as the articulation of cultural and conceptual hybridity under conditions of eurocentrism, epistemic colonialism and the legacies of slavery. Creolizing Sartre re-reads Sartrean texts to recast existential themes through the lens of Caribbean philosophies and the broader philosophies of the Global South.
Contributors: Lawrence Bamikole, Sybil Newton Cooksey, James Haile III, Paget Henry, T Storm Heter, Thomas Meagher, Michael J. Monahan, Anthony Sean Neal, Nathalie Nya, Kris F. Sealey, Hiroaki Seki, Jonathan Webber.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Sartre’s Existentialism and the Communitarian Thesis in Afro-Caribbean Existential Philosophy
• Chapter 2: Miles’s Smiles: Mid-Century Portraits of Fugitive Improvisation
• Chapter 3: The Being of Becoming, the Becoming of Being: Sartre and Jazz Improvisation: Some Preliminary Thoughts
• Chapter 4: Wilson Harris, Existential Philosophy, and the Creolizing of Jean-Paul Sartre
• Chapter 5: The Global South and Sartre: Echoes of Existential Thought
• Chapter 6: Creolized Reflection
• Chapter 7: Racial Praxis: Black Liberation and the Movement from Series to Group
• Chapter 8: Race and Functional Ultimacy: Choosing Freedom: An Exposition of the Humanocentric Existentialism of William R. Jones
• Chapter 9: Reversing the Gaze, Sartre’s Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
• Chapter 10: Ōe Kenzaburō and Pursuit of Authenticity through the Imagination: Creolizing Sartre in Japan?
• Chapter 11: Transcendental Phenomenology Meets Negritude Poetry
• Index
• About the Contributors