Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Notes

221 Notes introduction 1. This is no. 62 from If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Carson (2003). 2. This phrase appeared in one of Paula Wilson’s (2010) woodblock prints titled “First Story.” 3. The project first began as an exploration of the debates surrounding Rousseau ’s general will that culminated in a discussion of Fanonian reflections concerning violence when I realized that although most scholars of Fanon focus on his other immediate, named influences (Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, in particular ), that many of his most central concerns and significant contributions revisited and reworked central dimensions of Rousseau’s political writings. I began to wonder why this would be considered an unconventional conclusion and whether the disciplinary norms that pointed in that direction might in fact be obstacles to constructive contemporary thought. This led me in a more systematic way to conclude that what I was doing was an instance of creolization with broader implications. 4. For further discussion of the politics of survival, see V. F. Cordova (2007). She writes, “The value of survival is being able to recognize yourself after you’ve managed to survive” (45). 5. For discussion of the concept of decreolization in the context of linguistics , see Mufwene (1994). 6. Susan Buck-Morss (2000; 2009) has argued that the ease with which scholars have marginalized the study of Haiti in accounts of modern history is also a function of ways of conceiving of political geographies that have less to do with space and time than commitments that require nearing and distancing . She challenges scholars not to naturalize these creative political feats, but instead to make problematizing them the focus of our scholarship. 222 Notes to pages 13–19 7. One might consider here the overrepresentation of many North African Muslim practices in the heavily homosocial worlds of Italian organized crime. Insightful commentary on this phenomenon was outlined in Celeste Morello’s introductory comments to the screening of The Godfather II in the Politics in Film Series at Temple University in April 2006. For her definitive study of Philadelphia ’s Mafia and La Cosa Nostra, see Before Bruno, Books 1 and 2. 8. Similarly, when one reads the disparaging view that Marx and Engels had of utopian and nostalgic brands of French socialism, one rarely thinks of proto-socialist movements to which they refer as centrally involving the theological writings of thirteenth-century nuns, such as the Poor Clares, Catherine of Siena, and Douceline of Digne, lay mystics including Mary of Oignies, Ida of Nivelles, and Margaret Porete, and heretics (Robinson 2001, 50–51). 9. For examples of the former see Tommy Curry (2009) and Paget Henry (2009a). For an example of the latter, see Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon (2009). 10. There is some disagreement over how best to characterize Rousseau’s contributions to such debates. More positive views are well represented by John Oyatunde Isola Bewaji (2003) and Bernard Boxill (2005). The former emphasizes Rousseau’s unusual willingness to recognize Egyptian civilization as a precursor to that of Greece and Rome, as one of the litany of places that through imperial enrichment developed arts and sciences at the price of their moral ruin. The latter insists that while Caribs and Native North Americans were unquestionably framed by Rousseau as occupying an earlier, less corrupted stage of collective development than European man, he made equally clear that the innate abilities of human beings are the same the world over with the implication that palpable differences were nothing more than the outcomes of contingent historical events. Furthermore, in Rousseau’s early accounts, to be more developed was also to have fallen further away from collective virtue. Louis Sala-Molins (2006) is less forgiving: while Rousseau did not actively endorse theories that buttressed the colonial policies of his day, his failure to be one of a small set of critical voices given his tremendous capacity to speak and think against the conforming grain was, in Sala-Molin’s view, worthy of condemnation. For a lengthier account of these discussions, see Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts (2009, 6–8). 1. delegitimating decadent inquiry 1. This can be found in Rousseau (1992e, 189). 2. Critics of Rousseau will no doubt accord great significance, proof even, to the (devilish) number of years that he lived. 3. For a complete photographic account of the many regions and towns that Rousseau visited, see “Chronologie de Jean-Jacques Rousseau: présentation en [3...