2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award Winner

Creolizing The Nation

Northwestern University Press (September 15, 2020)

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. Drawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris F. Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, human communities.  Analyzing the work of thinkers such as Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Mariana Ortega, Sealey shows that a properly creolizing account of the nation provides an alternative imaginary out of which collective political life might be understood.  Creolizing practices are always constitutive of anticolonial resistance and its ongoing negotiations with power should be understand as everyday acts of sabotage. Sealey demonstrates that the conceptual frame of the nation is not fated to re-create colonial instantiations of nationalism but can rather support new possibilities toward liberation and justice.

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SUNY Press (December 1, 2013)

Moments of Disruption

In Moments of Disruption, Kris Sealey considers Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre together to fully realize the ethical and political implications of their similar descriptions of human existence. Focusing on points of contact and difference between their writings on transcendence, identity, existence, and alterity, Sealey presents not only an understanding of Sartrean politics in which Levinas’s somewhat apolitical program might be taken into the political, but also an explicitly political reading of Levinas that resonates well with Sartre’s work. In bringing together both thinkers accounts of disrupted existence in this way, a theoretical place is found from which to question the claim that politics and ethics are mutually exclusive.

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Moments of Disruption

SUNY Press (December 1, 2013)

In Moments of Disruption, Kris Sealey considers Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre together to fully realize the ethical and political implications of their similar descriptions of human existence. Focusing on points of contact and difference between their writings on transcendence, identity, existence, and alterity, Sealey presents not only an understanding of Sartrean politics in which Levinas’s somewhat apolitical program might be taken into the political, but also an explicitly political reading of Levinas that resonates well with Sartre’s work. In bringing together both thinkers accounts of disrupted existence in this way, a theoretical place is found from which to question the claim that politics and ethics are mutually exclusive.

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