Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Introduction

The introduction defines the concepts of "creolization" and "creolizing" and what it means to have a creolized or creolizing approach to politics, political theory, and political science. This involves distinguishing creolization from other ways of understanding the relations among meaningful, politically salient forms of difference. In particular, creolization is differentiated from multiculturalism, hybridity, and decreolization and from the respective disciplinary counterparts of each. This is because ways of conceiving of "culture" overdetermine how scholars understand the nature and significance of the academic disciplines of which they are part. It advances the reading of Rousseau and Fanon in a way that breaks with comparative political theory since the focus is not on the contributions of each to their distinctive political and social worlds but to understandings of questions of method and political legitimacy more generally. Finally, this section introduces the idea of creolization as the progressive generalizing of political will through which syntheses that better approximate the needs and hopes of the society at large can emerge. While creolization does not have a necessary relationship to colonized peoples, it is likely to be opposed by those who benefit from claiming that existing arrangements are as representative as is possible.