Author, Professor
Kris Sealey was born and raised in twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. She currently resides in Southwestern Connecticut, and teaches philosophy at Penn State University. Her scholarship is in the areas of Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy and Decolonial Theory, and has published in journals such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Philosophy Today.
2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Winner
Creolizing the Nation
Creolizing the Nation identifies the nation-form as a powerful resource for political struggles against colonialism, racism, and other manifestations of Western hegemony in the Global South even as it acknowledges the homogenizing effects of the politics of nationalism.
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Articles & Essays
When Heads Bang Together: Creolizing and Indigenous Identities in the Americas
In his essay, Dann J. Broyld offers the Underground Railroad…as a model for “untangling the threads of the Middle Passage from black world-making in the New World.” My focus, here, are on the geographies that are conducive to those…
“Other” by Kris Sealey
The racialization central to modernity orients otherness in terms of what is human, and what is, in some iteration, humanity’s “other”.
Humanizing the Landscape from the Edge(s) of Empire: Wakanda-Geographies of the Global South
In his essay, Dann J. Broyld offers the Underground Railroad…as a model for “untangling the threads of the Middle Passage from black world-making in the New World.” My focus, here, are on the geographies that are conducive to those…
‘Then’ and ‘Now’ of Mangrove Time: The Temporality of Lived Blackness in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
What does it mean to be linked to and intimately shaped through the Western Hemisphere’s history of anti-blackness? We find an answer to this question in the pivotal chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes being…
[insert state], Goddam: Black struggle, Black freedom, Black futures
The minutes leading up to the jury’s verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial were harrowing, in a historical sense. They are minutes that many of us will always remember. We’ll always be able to recall what we were doing and who we were with as…
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the Summer of 2020, Kris Sealey reflects upon the intractable and totalizing logic of anti-blackness. Working through thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, her piece…
Decolonizing Dialectics Review
One might ask of this proposal to decolonize dialectics: Why work within the frame of dialectics at all? Could the radicalization of the dialectical question by decolonization take us radically Outside of dialectics altogether?
Pain and Play: Building Coalitions Toward Decolonizing Philosophy
Given the plural histories and social locations from which we commit to the work of decolonization, how might we build conditions that are sufficiently attuned to the multiple ways in which our individual identities are always-already…
The Composite Community – Thinking Through Fanon’s Critique of a Narrow Nationalism
I bring these two together (Fanon’s critique of a narrow nationalism, and Glissant’s vision for a composite community) because they ground themselves on alternative ways of thinking about human relationality. In these alternatives, I find…