The fine collection of essays in this volume comprise part of a series entitled Creolizing the Canon. While the theory and practice of creolization emerged out of the activities of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the term has evidently assumed a metaphorical significance far beyond the circumstances of its localized provenance.
What, then, are we to understand by the term ‘creolization’? In his introduction, the editor suggests that descriptive creolization occurs when ‘various social forces […] bring together otherwise distinct and disparate peoples and cultures’ (2). In the prescriptive sense, creolization ‘is a positive good or disposition toward which we ought to direct our theoretical, political, and aesthetic praxis’ (2). The term creole emerged in the 16th century to refer to people of mixed blood, whose ancestry was ‘fragmented’, whose languages and cultures are taken from diverse sources. In theoretical terms, creolization generates ‘unpredictable and new hybridities’, forgetting the older paradigms that are predicated on some mythical purity. However, as Michael Monahan points out, this forgetting also entails a preservation of sorts, as exemplified in the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, which both supersedes something and preserves it in a new form. For example, previous religious roots or cultural practices are preserved in the new practices that abrogate them (7–8).
As opposed to the system-oriented, unified and holistic thinking that is often identified with Europe, creolization values the chaos issuing from intercultural exchange; it sees hybridity and ambiguity as a strength, and conceives of a ‘unity born of openness to others, rather than conquest’ (4). As such, the boundaries of creolization are incapable of being fixed or defined. So, if we want to creolize theory or the canon or philosophy, what exactly is it that we are seeking? It entails our engaging an openness in relation to practices or methods, and abandoning what the editor calls the ‘politics of purity’ that strives after any form of conceptual or cultural or methodological purity (7).
However, creolization is not an end in itself, and will most likely emerge when our primary object is liberation, understood not negatively as the removal of constraints, but as a commitment to the empowerment of human agency. The rationale behind this is that the politics of purity—which institutes sharp boundaries, for example, between races and cultures—is fundamentally dehumanizing. The ultimate aim of creolization must be a genuinely human world, where humanity is a ‘hybrid, ambiguous, and dynamic process of ongoing creolization’ (7). Such openness and dynamism is the condition of possibility of human freedom. As such, creolizing the canon, for example, entails decentring it, so that we do not study non-Western figures through the lens of Western literary or philosophical assumptions. Rather, non-Western and Western ideas should be placed in dialogue with one another, where such discursive exchange alters our reading of both (8).
So, what exactly is the project of creolizing Hegel? It involves uprooting him from any pure and mythologized canon, and placing him in unfamiliar contexts, such as those of sexual variety, environmental degradation or modern forms of enslavement. This will transform our reading of Hegel himself, which is peculiarly significant given Hegel's standing as a paradigm of Western system-building, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. Hegel's amenability to such transplanting inheres in his own emphasis on change and process, and in his endeavour to sublate rigid boundaries (as in his Logic, where the binary of Being and Nothing yields Becoming).
Monahan reminds the reader of Hegel's distinction between Understanding, which sees the world in terms of fixed and static entities, and Reason, which apprehends opposites in their unity (10–11). For Hegel, the Idea is essentially process, and contradiction is the motive force behind all ontological activity. In short, ‘Hegel's logic can be characterized as creolizing’ (16)—like Hegel's Speculative Reason, creolizing treats as dynamic processes what were previously seen as static objects or substance. Hence, Monahan states, ‘what is rational is creolizing’ (19).
The essays that follow illustrate (i) how Hegel can be creolized, and (ii) the creolizing potential of his own thought. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on reason and dialectic, and the essays in this section offer critiques of ‘universal’ reason as driven by motives of hegemony and colonialism. The essays in the second section focus on history and aesthetics, taking to task the idea of universal history. The final section engages with various aspects of Sittlichkeit, dealing with issues of identity, oppression and law. Rather than offer a rapid account of all the essays, I will focus on the one essay that, perhaps more than any of the others, illustrates the process of creolizing Hegel.
Paget Henry demonstrates how the Caribbean philosopher C. L. R. James appropriated Hegel to draw out the transcendental implications of Caribbean philosophy. In showing how James creolizes Hegel, Henry compares the stages of Hegel's intellectual growth through which the dialectic developed, with the appropriation of this dialectic in James's own intellectual journey. Examining Hegel's early ‘theological’ and other writings, Henry suggests that, just as Hegel's philosophical persona sublated his religious one, so James achieved a dialectic of culture, economics, politics, and sport as reflected in his own literary/ludic persona. This dialectic is distinctively Creole in the highly visible place it gives to sports. James effectively achieves a ‘poetic sociohistoricism’, in which he ‘integrates athletes and his ludic persona, along with other artists, into the larger sociogenic and humanizing processes by which human civilizations have advanced’ (58).
What is most valuable about this book is that the essays that compose it, approaching Hegel's canon from a variety of perspectives, unravel that canon and explore its ramifications in often uncharted territory. There is a recognition throughout the essays that it is Hegel himself who arguably gives us the tools to undermine the very patriarchism, Eurocentrism and indeed racism that he is often held to epitomize. It may be that the project of creolizing Hegel is not quite as original as is here claimed; after all, there is a long and vast tradition of using Hegel's ideas against the grain of his own conclusions and for purposes that he could not have imagined. This tradition includes Marx and many Marxist thinkers, Derrida, Deleuze, Žižek, and Jameson, not to mention philosophers of language and numerous gender theorists, as well as African philosophers and Indian literary and cultural theorists. These have all in their own ways creatively misread Hegel so as to show that his ideas and methods are still alive in deeply ‘foreign’ contexts, and that such transportation between cultures has the power to transform our reading of Hegel.
In this sense, the project of creolization might be regarded as participating in the work of what is now called ‘world literature’, as defined by David Damrosch and others. Nonetheless, this book makes a compelling case that Hegel is not only alive today, but vital for understanding the plurality of worlds that we now inhabit.
