The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the recipients of the Frantz Fanon, Nicolas Guillén, Stuart Hall, Claudia Jones, and Anna Julia Cooper awards for contributions to philosophical thought, philosophical literature and the arts, outstanding mentorship and public engagement, and best papers by a graduate student and a junior faculty member at the association’s 2024 international conference:
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Achievement Award
Stuart Hall Mentorship Award
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Sophie Maríñez’s Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
Kristin Waters, Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2021.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Caroline Déodat, Dans la Polyphonie d’une Ile. Paris, Fr: Éditions B42, 2024.
Sayan Dey, Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures Across the Indian Ocean. London, UK: Anthem Press, 2024.
Claudia Jones Award
Duncan Cordry, “Sylvia Wynter and Bernard Steigler: Critical Encounters of Myth and Memory”
Anna Julia Cooper Award
Elva Orozco Mendoza, “Toward a Theory of Decolonial Politics: Contributions from Latin America”
The selection of recommended recipients, books, and essays is voted upon annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Awards Committee. The committee consists of all laureates of the Frantz Fanon, the Nicolás Guillén, and the Stuart Hall Awards, two appointed senior scholars, and two appointed junior scholars. For more information, please consult:
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical Literature Prizes
Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is honoring the recipients for the importance of their work for the association’s ongoing project of “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” In the words of 2014’s Guillén Lifetime Achievement Laureate Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o:
[We] celebrate the new recipients of the awards; sisi kwa sisi (we for us/for one another/from us to us), we used to say in Kiswahili.
This year’s recipients include a global community of intellectuals whose careers address their namesakes’ legacies as activist intellectuals of high artistic, philosophical, political, scholarly, and scientific integrity and value.
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Rashid Khalidi
Described in The Guardian as “America’s foremost scholar of Palestine,” Rashid Khalidi is one of the great scholars of his generation and an exemplar of extraordinary courage and integrity. His scholarly work includes several distinguished books—including the classic Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), which won the Albert Hourani Book Award—and his editorship of the Journal of Palestinian Studies, and his work as an institution-builder includes not only Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University, where he is the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies, but also his membership on the Board of Sponsors of The Palestine–Israel Journal, and a founding trustee of The Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Well-known for his public intellectual efforts on the cause for Palestinian rights and self-determination across all forms of media, Khalidi stands as a global intellectual committed to struggles for liberation and freedom as is the namesake of this award.
Khalidi was selected for this award not only for the historical richness of his writings but also (in the words of the Awards Committee) “for his crucial role as a public figure and his commitment to the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, the 2016 winner of the Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, states:
The great historian Rashid Khalidi will receive the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in the same year that the translation of his major book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, is finally published in France…Rashid Khalidi has contributed to keeping Palestine alive, with the hope of a just and lasting peace.
Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, adds:
Rashid Khalidi, historian and scholar, has dedicated his life to bringing to light the reality and substance of Palestinian identity as an essential aspect of Middle Eastern history. Khalidi’s work challenges us to recognize how the colonial practices carried out in international geopolitics impacts the life circumstances of people and families who come to develop a national consciousness as Palestinians. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Raphaël Confiant
Raphaël Confiant is one of Martinique’s leading men of letters and a global intellect. He is co-author of Éloge de la Créolité (“In praise of Creoleness”), a critical manifesto of the Créolité movement, which advances the rich mixture of Caribbean peoples and the cultures they produce. Confiant is the author of six books in Martinican Creole and at least forty-eight books in French across genres of fiction, scholarly, and social-theoretical works. He taught at the University of the French West Indies and Guiana (UAG), at which he was Dean of Arts and Sciences from 2013 to 2016. In addition to his work in and on Créolité, his fiction and research mark crucial events in Martinican history. He has won many awards for his work. In 1993, he received the Prix Casa de las Americas and the Prix Jet Tours for his childhood memoir, Ravines du devant-jour (1995). He was awarded the Prix des Amériques insulaires et de la Guyane for his novel La Panse du Chacal (2004).
The notification of the award, which Confiant received on the 1st of January 2025, states that the committee selected him “not only for the theoretical richness of [his] writings on creolization and créolité but also for the philosophical richness of [his] creative writings and [his] role as a public figure and, through [his] efforts to articulate the diversity of humankind, [his] commitment to the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”
In the words of Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:
Confiant’s novels bring the history and culture of Martinique to life, offering his readers the details of circumstance, setting and character that give us indelible insight to the wide range of perspectives, experiences, and historical impact of Antillean cultures. His work is a tremendous gift to the world. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with this award.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Rico Speight
Rico Speight is an independent producer/director/writer of film and theatre; he is also a film and video editor and educator. The Committee selected Speight for the fine films he has produced and his work as a public artist committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom. His production credits include documentaries, narratives, television productions, web productions, and live theatre. His documentary, Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?, the first installment of a two-part series on the parallel lives of African American and Black South African young people, was released in 1997; in 1999, that documentary screened at the 52nd Cannes International Film Festival. In 2007, Speight released a follow-up production titled Where Are They Now?, which is a sequel to Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? In 2007, Where Are They Now? was broadcast nationally in South Africa on South African Broadcasting Corporation television. In 2010, he produced and directed Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo at the Lion Theatre at Theatre Row in NYC. Watch the trailer HERE.
Speight’s narrative film credits include Choices, an original narrative short starring Samuel L Jackson, which premiered at “Prized Pieces” Fest in Columbus, Ohio in 1992, and Defiant, an adapted narrative short based on the classic The Defiant Ones that premiered at Roxbury Film Festival, Boston, MA in 2001. Watch Prized Pieces HERE. Watch Defiant HERE.
In 2003, Speight traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to shoot a short documentary called New Generation, which chronicled developments in the Congo from the period when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power in 2003 until the Congo’s first democratic elections in four decades held in 2006. Watch New Generation HERE.
In 1990 and again in 1993, Speight was awarded artist fellowships by the New York Foundation for the Arts in film and video, respectively. In 1998, he was honored by the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame for his original short narrative entitled Deft Changes, featuring musicians Mark Whitfield and Freddy Waits.
Speight recently completed a feature documentary on Frantz Fanon entitled Rediscovering Fanon. Learning of his selection for this award, the Reverend Nana Carmen Ashhurst (former president of Def Jam Records, former Advisor for the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada, and the Music Supervisor for Rediscovering Fanon) offered this statement:
Liberation movements from the African diaspora need both a philosophical foundation and protests from the people seeking liberation, both philosophers and warriors. Connecting these two needs can be a struggle in itself. Rico Speight has forged a career making films that make the philosophical foundation for struggle clear to those who experientially know oppression and provide motivation for their activism. His films have become tools for liberation fighters in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.
The Awards Committee agrees. In the letter sent to Speight on January 1st, he was informed that he was selected for this award “for the fine films [he has] produced [and] for [his] work as a public artist committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”
Adds Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:
Rico Speight has spent a lifetime offering audiences penetrating accounts of antiblack racism as it impacts the lives of people and their communities. Speight is a filmmaker, documentarian, visual artist, scholar and teacher who gives us penetrating insight into the lived worlds of the people and communities confronting and responding to the violence and brutality of antiblack racism. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with this award.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Achievement Award
Tendayi Sithole
Professor Tendayi Sithole is a Political Theorist whose work on Black intellectuals and political thought in South Africa transcends disciplinary reductivism and national borders as he creatively conjoins not only ideas from thinkers in South Africa and the African Diaspora but also methodological frameworks from the study of politics to those in literature, the arts, and varieties of media. He does so with a focus on destitute and other forms of subaltern communities. As his award letter states, he is receiving this award not only for his outstanding writings as a political theorist and a scholar connecting political thought with film, photography, and literature but also for his work as a mentor and public intellectual committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.
A son of Johannesburg, South Africa, Sithole is currently a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and a former Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. In 2022, he was a writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg, and also a 2024 visiting scholar at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Sithole’s poetry collection is entitled The Life and Music of Zimontology (East London: Poetry Printery, 2018). He is also the author of Hortense J. Spillers: Subject, Abject, and Insurgent in Black Radical Thought (2024), Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania (2024), Refiguring in Black (2023), The Letter in Black Radical Thought(2023), Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania (2022), The Black Register (2020), and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (2016). He is currently at work on two projects that include a poetry collection entitled “The Last Trumpet of Mongezi Feza” and a book-length manuscript provisionally titled “Hands on the Tape Deck: Techno, Spectrality, and Black Sonic Imagination.”
The 2015 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Laureate Mabogo P. More states:
This Guillen Batista Outstanding Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association is a highly fitting and well-deserved acknowledgement and testament of Professor Tendayi Sithole’s voluminous work output. Professor Sithole is in my opinion one of, if not the most, prolific and productive young South African intellectual to date. A brilliant mind indeed, with nine published books and two in press to his credit. I definitely anticipate more from him in the years to come.
President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Jacqueline Martinez, adds:
Tendayi Sithole’s scholarship offers a penetrating and sustained examination of Black existence as it is lived within the brutality of South African post-apartheid. His work brings together Black thinkers from across continents and temporalities to offer a sober and penetrating examination the relationality of power as it has functioned in a past that is also present, and always with the commitment to creating a truly liberatory future. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize Tendayi Sithole with this award.
Stuart Hall Award for Outstanding Mentorship and Public Engagement
Daniel McNeil
Professor Daniel McNeil is an award-winning author, editor, and mentor who explores how movement, travel, and relocation have enhanced creative development, the writing of cultural history, and the assessment of political choices. Over the past two decades, he has transformed and boosted interdisciplinary research, teaching, and program development across various disciplines and institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
Professor McNeil has held permanent positions as a lecturer in Black and Minority Studies at the University of Hull, a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, and Carleton University’s strategic hire in Migration and Diaspora Studies. His fellowships and visiting positions include the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Visiting Professorship of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University, a position designed to support intellectuals with a proven track record of research excellence, and the Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellowship at the University of Toronto, a position open to citizens of all countries who are tenured faculty members with a history of research achievement, the capacity to present their research across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and a promise of continued excellence. In 2021, he was appointed the Queen’s National Scholar Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in recognition of his demonstrated excellence in cultivating innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research programs as well as rich and rewarding learning experiences for students to study and engage the connections between the arts, social justice, and decolonial thought.
Professor McNeil’s award-winning research includes Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic (Routledge, 2010), Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and “Even Canadians Find It a Bit Boring: A Report on the Banality of Multiculturalism” (2021), which was the inaugural recipient of the Editor’s Award from the Canadian Journal of Communication. His most recent book, Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2023), delves into the personal and social connections with music, film, and culture that have inspired multiracial groups to envision and establish social movements aimed at dismantling racial inequalities. His public engagement profile also includes cultural criticism, and he is a producer and co-host of the Black Studies Podcast, which assembles artists, activists, curators, scholars, and musicians to discuss creative and collaborative knowledge-making.
Professor McNeil was selected for the Stuart Hall Award for his combination of excellent scholarship, excellent teaching, and citizenship in the academic profession. His recent accolades include two Black Excellence in Mentorship Awards at Queen’s University. These are part of a long line of acknowledgment of his mentorship, teaching, and community work. The Committee received comments on his outstanding mentorship as far back as his time at DePaul University in 2013 when he was the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Visiting Professor in African and Black Diaspora Studies. His impact on students, staff, and colleagues was as palpable then as it continued to be over the years in his subsequent appointments. The Chairperson of the Award’s Committee has argued that there are four kinds of leaders: the blockers, the do-nothings (those who neither block nor facilitate), the advocates/facilitators, and the prejudiced (those who help whom they like and block those they dislike). Professor McNeil is definitely the third kind: he seeks out others’ strengths and does what he can to facilitate their flourishing. He works with communities and finds ways for different members to work together.
The Committee regards Professor McNeil as a scholar who, like Stuart Hall, brings communities working on Black Atlantic Cultural Studies to the forefront of contemporary debates not only in Europe and North America but also in the Caribbean and much of the global south. The impressive list of students he has mentored as a scholar over the past two decades speaks for itself: he has mentored communities outside of the academy through Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, and his doctoral students span the globe in a range of disciplines ranging from Indigenous and Canadian Studies (at Carleton) to Black digital studies (at Queen’s), as well as subaltern musical ecologies, film and media studies, decolonial worldbuilding, and more at institutions such as Dalhousie, Concordia, and California State University. His commitment to public learning is attested to in this article as well. His career is marked by taking education to the proverbial streets through podcasting, radio, and community-centered teaching.
President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Jacqueline Martinez, comments:
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is most pleased to recognize Professor Daniel McNeil’s incredible impact through his mentoring that connects social justice and decolonial thought to the living relationships through which we seek mutual growth and understanding.
Testimonials from some of his students confirm this:
I found studying with Dr. McNeil to be intellectually stimulating and inspiring. He has a commitment to his students’ learning that is apparent immediately; he is a deep and focused listener. In his class, when you speak, he gives you his full attention, writing detailed notes and following up with fascinating reflections on your thoughts, pushing your ideas further with critically attuned questions. I always looked forward to his class, and without a doubt I feel that his class was the most energizing graduate class that I attended. He applies this same care and vitality to papers, reflecting at length on the work, both praising its attributes and encouraging you to push further. With Dr. McNeil you truly feel heard and invigorated to keep reading, researching, and writing.
It is for these reasons that I wanted Dr. McNeil to be part of my PhD committee. He is a dedicated reader whose insights on my research are illuminating, adding a rich perspective to my work. His ability to spark a vibrant conversation make our committee meetings both enjoyable and intellectually rewarding. It is an absolute pleasure to speak with him and I’m grateful that his role in the committee provides me with continued opportunities to engage with him on topics of shared interest. For me, Dr. McNeil has been a brilliant mentor, I’m very lucky to have his ongoing support throughout my graduate journey. I wholeheartedly recommend him for this award.
—Brandon Hocura
Professor McNeil’s support was crucial for my application to the Emerging Leader in the Americas Program (ELAP) scholarship. Much of the success of the application is due to his dedication. He fulfilled all expectations as a mentor, providing what is expected from a professor in this role. Starting by suggesting readings I wasn’t aware of and guiding the research direction.
I had the opportunity to take a graduate course taught by him, in which I learned a lot. I was also given the space to present my research to his local students which greatly contributed to enhance my research. He has helped me identify organizations and professionals who could assist me with my research. Even going so far as to send numerous emails to these professionals. He provided all the necessary support to ensure my stay at Carleton University was productive, helping me learn how to navigate bureaucracy and establish a professional network. I was also able to rely on his support to conduct research in other Canadian cities beyond Ottawa, as well as institutional support to submit a paper and travel to present it at the Stuart Hall Conference in West Indies University-Mona Campus (Kingston, Jamaica).
Finally, it is worth mentioning Professor McNeil’s full support during an episode of racism I experienced while I was a recipient of ELAP scholarship at Carleton University.
—Liliane Braga (Ndembwemi)
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Sophie Maríñez, Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
Spirals in the Caribbean responds to key questions elicited by the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Spirals details how a paradigm of permanent conflict between the two nations has its roots in reactions to the Haitian Revolution—a conflict between slavers and freedom-seekers—contests over which have been transmitted over generations, repeating with a difference. Anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric hides this long trajectory. Through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s called “Spiralism,” Sophie Maríñez explores representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence. She takes as evidence legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
According to one reviewer:
This is an innovative and profoundly interdisciplinary work that reimagines [Haiti and the Dominican Republic’s] cultural, historical, and philosophical landscapes. By introducing the “spiral” as a conceptual framework, Maríñez offers a powerful metaphor for understanding the cyclical, interconnected, and evolving discourses of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This framework captures the fluidity of cultural and historical exchanges, revealing how Afro-Indigenous histories and practices of liberation transcend colonial and racial hierarchies. The book moves decisively beyond Dominican nationalism and anti-Haitian narratives. By bridging Afro and Indigenous histories, Maríñez crafts a narrative of an Afro-Indigenous Caribbean that foregrounds the island’s shared histories of resistance, survival, and cultural exchange. Through her integration of literature, music, history, and philosophy, Maríñez illustrates the transformative potential of [the island’s two countries’] cultural productions, uncovering narratives of resistance and resilience that challenge exclusionary and divisive accounts of the past…Maríñez’s work offers a bold and transformative vision of the region’s cultural and intellectual possibilities.
Writes Caribbean Philosophical Association’s President Jacqueline Martinez:
In Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic Sophie Maríñez offers penetrating insight into how the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been structured as permanent conflict. Maríñez’ examination of the full range of practices, from official documents produced by state governments to oral traditions and spiritual practices, offers readers a new and insightful understanding. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Maríñez’ work with this award.
Sophie Maríñez is a Professor of Modern Languages at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and a Professor of French and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her current research lies at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural studies from the Caribbean and its diasporas with a focus on anti-slavery movements, anti-racism, post-colonial/decolonizing thought and aesthetics, collective memories, and cultural productions that challenge dominant notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity. Her first monograph, Mademoiselle de Montpensier: Writings, Chateaux, and Female Self-Construction in Early Modern France (2017), examines the work of women writers who addressed gender constructs and misogyny in early modern France through writings and châteaux reaffirming their authority, legitimacy, social status, and political identities. Her research has received multiple grants and fellowships at CUNY, as well as support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2021, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Connecticut. Since 2021, she has also served as Series Editor of the Caribbean Series at Brill.
Born in France to a French mother and a Dominican father, Maríñez grew up in the Dominican Republic, where she earned a degree in Translation. She moved to New York in 1994, raising her two children while pursuing her Ph.D. in French at The Graduate Center, where she graduated with honors in 2010. A recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award at BMCC, Maríñez has shaped her work through her immigrant perspective; fluency in French, Spanish, and English; and her earlier professional background as an actress, translator, journalist, and diplomat. Her next project, also funded by the ACLS, examines transatlantic relations between France and Latin America, focusing on the Caribbean during the Cold War.
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Kristin Waters, Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2021.
Between 1831 and 1833, Stewart’s intellectual productions, as she called them, ranged across topics from true emancipation for African Americans, the Black convention movement, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, Black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for a moral and political theory that is finding new resonance today—insurrectionist ethics.
In this work of recovery, author Kristin Waters examines the roots of Black political activism in the petition movement; Prince Hall and the creation of the first Black masonic lodges; the Black Baptist movement spearheaded by the brothers Thomas, Benjamin, and Nathaniel Paul; writings; sermons; and the practices of festival days—through the story of this remarkable but largely unheralded woman and pioneering public intellectual.
According to one reviewer’s report:
Waters’s book is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing addressing the problem of epistemicide, particularly regarding Black women’s thought. If one looks at much of the literature on Stewart, a common argument that emerges is that most people do not know about Stewart’s ideas due to epistemicide. I admit, as an expert in the field and someone who wrote a dissertation addressing problems in Black Political Thought, I did not know about Maria Stewart prior to reading Waters’s book. As I speak with people, I am quickly realizing the same is the case for other so-called experts in the field. In short, Waters brings us the ideas of Maria Stewart in an extraordinary way. Most of the literature on Stewart has a difficult time approximating Waters’s rigor. Her book effortlessly weaves historical context and philosophy together so that non-experts, as well, can read and understand it. This must be Waters’s magnum opus. Waters [also] demonstrates how Stewart’s thought is connected to the Caribbean world. This makes her book appropriate for honor by our organization despite the fact that its subject was not herself from the Caribbean. It’s clear from Waters’s account that Stewart’s philosophy was shaped by her burgeoning consciousness of what Julius C. Scott, a previous Caribbean Philosophical Association award winner, called The Common Wind. Haitian rebels, Jamaican maroons, and other faraway lands where enslaved people overthrew their masters were impressive to Stewart. They were people and events she learned about during her most productive years in Boston while formulating what clearly became her most directly political thought.
Commenting on this book’s selection for the Fanon Outstanding Book Award, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Jacqueline Martinez writes:
Kristin Waters’s work on Maria Stewart offers readers a penetrating account of Stewart’s intellectual and political tenacity and brings to light the rich and radical projects of liberation that Stewart undertook. Waters’s work allows us to recognize today the long and powerful history of black feminist thought as its bears on the most important political and intellectual issues of our day. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is most pleased to recognize Waters’s work with this award.
Kristin Waters, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Worcester State University in Massachusetts and was a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University for seventeen years. Throughout her professional life, she has drawn on disparate resources to disrupt the canons of intellectual history and philosophical thought. Her scholarship explores philosophical works across race and gender, situating them historically and within contemporary global intellectual frameworks. Waters’ edited collection of primary source writings reclaims oppositional discourses reaching back three hundred years. Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations (2000) challenged the still-dominant narrative of Euro-colonial Enlightenment thought and remains one of the few race and gender-inclusive political theory collections.
Through a series of essays by renown scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Brandeis University Press, 2007), co-edited with Carol B. Conaway, brings to light a powerful stream of nineteenth-century thought by writers and activists such as Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Pauline Hopkins, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells. It was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize for best anthology by the Association of Black Women Historians.
Prior to this distinct honor of a Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book award, Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Theory was chosen as one of six finalists for the Pauli Murray Award from the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and has been called “a brilliant intellectual biography…[that examines Stewart’s] political philosophy through the lens of the long tradition of African American feminism” (Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause). Stewart’s thought was shaped by her community in Boston, which had strong ties, familial, cultural, and intellectual, both to West Africa and the Caribbean.
Additionally, Kristin Waters has published on the Jamaican adventurer and healer Mary Seacole and has contributed to the development of Insurrectionist Ethics and philosophies of epistemic violence. She is also the author of a play, Aphra Behn: A Women’s Comedy, that addresses the life of the author of Oroonoko (1688), a fact-based fictional account of a captive West African (Akan) prince who is enslaved in Surinam. She has authored many journal articles and book chapters across a wide range of subjects. She credits the Caribbean Philosophical Association and its members for their profound influence on her research and writing.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Caroline Déodat, Dans la Polyphonie d’une Ile. Paris, Fr: Éditions B42, 2024.
In Dans la polyphonie d’une île: Les fictions coloniales du séga mauricien, Caroline Déodat builds upon the racial and colonial genealogy of the Mauritian musical tradition known as sega. She critically examines how these songs, music, and dances, born in communities of fugitives during slavery, become spectacles for tourists. Inviting readers to enter the agonistic circle of a sega, Déodat probes the construction of the colonial fictions that constituted this practice as an object of knowledge and a symptom of a diminished humanity. She then untangles the threads of “intervocality” at work in the poetics of Ségatieres, which were shaped in response to forms of violence that denied Mauritian people’s experience. Déodat offers the archives of this oral tradition through the excavation of voices, reactivated afterward by using transdisciplinary tools where ethnopoetics rubs shoulders with the moral and political philosophy of Saidiya Hartman, Elsa Dorlin, and Judith Butler, as well as the critical postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha.
“I am amazed at how this book fulfills the theoretical program of shifting the geography of reason and aesthetics,” writes one of the anonymous reviewers, who adds:
…The book shows how all attempts to re-install Séga’s lost African origin are doomed to fail, but how fiction and existential narration serve as an inexhaustible supplement to this absent identity. The notion of creoleness bears a very different meaning in the context of the Indian ocean, and the book does a wonderful job at showing how the repressed memories of Blackness and enslavement affect and condition the Mauritian experience of creolization. It offers a novel and decentered perspective on some of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s main preoccupations…
President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Jacqueline Martinez, notes:
Dans la polyphonie d’une île: Les fictions coloniales du séga Mauricien is a tremendous achievement. It advances our understanding of the tight imbrications of colonial and racist hierarchies sustained even as they are resisted. Déodat’s excavations of these tight imbrications reveals the spaces where the polyphonic expressions of the sega performers of Mauritius have not been fully foreclosed by colonial and racist discursive structures but can be discerned and cultivated. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Déodat’s work with this award.
Caroline Déodat (1987, FR/MRU/BE) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher. Holding a PhD in ethnography and social anthropology from EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), she completed her study with a Post-diploma in Art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. At the same time, she trained in contemporary dance and performance with Salia Sanou, Seydou Boro, Germaine Acogny, Anne Collod, and the Batsheva Dance Company, among others. Déodat envisions voices through images. As an artist and anthropologist, she intertwines these practices to follow in the footsteps of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which, as a writing method, combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. In connection with her thesis on Mauritian séga, a poetic ritual of dance and song inherited from African enslavement, her films serve as attempts to transgress the order of the visible, transparency, and appropriation at work in Western modernity. They resist and displace, as much as possible, the violence inherent in colonial archives by the convocation of haunted memories and secret and speculative narratives.
Déodat’s work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, in international festivals such as Jih.lava International Documentary Film Festival, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, at the Musée Théodore Monod–IFAN in Dakar, at the 14th Bamako Encounters and soon at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. She was a Fellow of the Villa Médicis–French Academy in Rome (short Residency Program). Her work is part of prestigious collections (KADIST Fondation, Frac île-de-France).
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Sayan Dey, Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures Across the Indian Ocean. Anthem Press, 2024.
This book examines the evolution, movements, and shifts in the often-overlooked Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. Despite the existence of diverse archival documents from at least 600 BCE to the late 19th century on the IOW trade activities, dominant narratives on the IOW, to a vast extent, have been shaped by Western/colonial historians, who have imaginatively constructed the IOW within separate geographical, cultural, epistemological, and ontological enclaves. Based on these socio-historical concerns, Performing Memories and Weaving Archives unearths how Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa preserve their ancestral memories through spiritual, culinary, and musical practices on the one side, and generate creolized socio-cultural spaces of collective decolonial resistance and well-being on the other.
This anonymous reviewer elaborates as follows:
This timely book starts with a crucial question: are our identities fixed, or do they travel across races, communities, religion, economies, geographies, cosmologies, epistemologies and ontologies? In the process of addressing the question, the book takes us on an excursion of the geographical, cultural and topographical features that have marked the journey of Africans in India and Indians in Africa.
The book…tackle[s] topics such as porosity, spiritual memories, music, dance, culinary memories and finally concluding with a [discussion of] the archipelagos of resistance, where the string of islands between Africa and India speak to the histories of this migration and the embodied experiences that tell the testimonies of time.
At the core of the book is the unpeeling of the Indian ocean’s ancestral dispersal and transportation of culture and identity between India and Africa. Dey offers insight into what many of us located on the African continent wake up with: a dream that stems from a place where many of our Indian ancestors come from, the sound of musicality known to our bones, and a memory that we cannot always place but know is part of our ancestral make-up as we wake up on African soil. As our day continues, sounds from the surrounding filter in, smells from cooking on the braai or the cluttered kitchen and the garden fill our nostrils, while churches, mosques, and Hindu temples sound out reminders of our relationship with the African continent and the Indian subcontinent. In our ancestral dreams, colonisation has not managed to interfere or disrupt the threads of our ancestry. Performing Memories and Weaving Archives brings to the reader a sense of home, but also a sense of belonging to places where our senses, or dreams, our rhythm stems from, and from which we cannot flee—they are all embedded in what we call identity, with all its historical nuances…
Dey captures the visual as well as the murmurs of memory that meander in and out of the lives of our [African East Indians], often times identified by those who see further than our freckled faces or our [Indian African] accents, our culinary cousins playing joyfully with green chilies on top of the mountain of fish curry and rice, and the way we use our hands in speech and in the intimacy of pleasure, as sauce rolls down our fingers, tickling the wrists that bind us.
Dey is not afraid to address class and caste, religion and its roaring resistance from reluctant worshippers, nor the spirituality that is practiced by the Gujaratis in Durban, determined to retain their Indianness with spoonsful of pap from their African identity.
…The creolization between India and the African continent, especially South Africa, speaks to a diaspora that is alive and well and bursting with unwritten knowledge, begging for continued interpretation and engagement. The author has offered us a precious gift with this book: it is rich, savoury, and draws one into the soul of the politics of race, empire and coloniality while offering the much-needed written nuances of neglected histories that bring a smile, a tilted head of satisfaction and a deep breath of contentment.
“Performing Memories and Weaving Archives greatly advances our understanding of the complex interplay of space, geography, and culture in what comes to be expressed as a human sense of self,” adds President Jacqueline Martinez. She adds:
Dey’s work shows us how the geography of the Indian Ocean constitutes a rich site of Indian and African diasporic communities whose everyday practices of relating through dance, music and culinary practices, carry forward ancestral knowledges that survive, ironically, through the colonial interventions in India and Africa. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Dey’s work with this award.
Sayan Dey is a Bengali. He was born and brought up in Kolkata, and he traces his ancestry to different parts of Bangladesh. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor (Department of English Studies) and Vice-chair (The Committee for Research, Innovations, Consultations, and Training) at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest), Oman. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship with Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2021–2023). He is also an Associate Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada, a Critical Research Studies Faculty at The NYI Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York, and an Affiliated Member of the Global Posthuman Network. His latest monographs are Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (2022), Performing Memories, Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (2025). His research interests are posthumanism, decolonial studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, critical diaspora studies, culinary epistemologies, and critical diversity literacy. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com.
Claudia Jones Award
Duncan Cordry
Duncan Cordry, “Sylvia Wynter and Bernard Steigler: Critical Encounters of Myth and Memory
Duncan Cordry is a Ross-Lynn Research Fellow and PhD candidate in philosophy at Purdue University. His research approaches topics in the philosophy of technology through insurrectionist ethics, focusing especially on the relationships between technology, sociogeny, and corporeality. His dissertation engages with the concept of political spirituality to examine how technologies and technological evolution affect social change and social cohesion in a revolutionary context.
According to a member of the Awards Committee:
This paper offered a critical reading of Sylvia Wynter focused on topics and themes often neglected in contemporary Wynter scholarship. Through the unlikely juxtaposition of Wynter and Bernard Steigler, Cordry offered a new perspective on Wynter’s conception of the relationship between cosmogonies and the functioning of symbolic orders. By exploring Steigler’s critical reflections on technology and its relation to capitalism, Cordry raised novel questions about Wynter’s prognosis for achieving a world “after Man,” while also adeptly applying insights from Wynter to identify shortcomings in Steigler’s analytic framework. The paper excellently spoke to issues raised by the other papers on its panels and sparked significant discussion. Indeed, this paper accomplished what may be a singular achievement: in the Q&A, it prompted Paget Henry to spend several minutes discussing Timothy Leary.
Anna Julia Cooper Award
Elva Orozco Mendoza
Elva Orozco Mendoza, “Toward a Theory of Decolonial Politics: Contributions from Latin America,” presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2024 conference in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Elva Orozco Mendoza is a political theorist with interests in Latin American feminist thought, coloniality-decoloniality studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her research interests are extreme gender violence, critical approaches to state sovereignty, maternal protests and action, and protest politics in the Americas. She teaches courses in the Department of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut. Elva’s book The Maternal Contract: A Subaltern Response to Extreme Violence in the Americas is forthcoming in Oxford University Press’s Studies in Subaltern Latino/a Politics Series.
As a member of the Award’s Committee, reflects:
Dr. Mendoza sketched an alternative vision of Latin American decolonial theory, centered on theory by Latin American women. Taken on its own, that would be a worthy feat. There is an unfortunate degree to which an implicit “epistemic apartheid” leads to cleaving between “Latin American decolonial thought” on the one hand and “Latin American feminism” on the other hand, where the decolonial aspects of the latter are given less attention than they are due. This paper would have been an important contribution had it just done that. However, Dr. Mendoza went much further, articulating a key theoretical point that this reorientation prompts: rooting the account in women’s decolonial theory calls into question the notion that Latin American decolonial theory has, at least in recent decades, been overwhelmingly idealist and out of touch with materiality. Dr. Mendoza’s alternative canon suggests that the notion that decolonial theory is overly concerned with the epistemic (and perhaps aesthetic) is in error, and that it is the relation between ideality and materiality that forms the core of Latin American decolonial theory (at least, if the women engaged by Dr. Mendoza are taken seriously.)
The awards will be formally conferred in July 2025, in Martinque at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s International Conference Shifting the Geography of Reason XXIII: Fanon at 100.
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