by Jane Anna Gordon
The American Political Science Association’s Foundations of Political Theory awards books that contribute to re-thinking canonical work and theoretical concerns in political theory and philosophy. This year’s awardees and runner-up are testaments to this commitment. They were honored in Boston at the American Political Science Association’s annual conference.
The runner-up for the 2018 Foundations Best First Book Award is Angélica Maria Bernal’s Beyond Origins: Rethinking Founding in a Time of Constitutional Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
For readers who might otherwise be seduced by overly effete theoretical debates or short-term political thinking, Bernal argues that building political power and legitimacy for the excluded and marginalized takes years and many failed efforts, and, even when relatively consolidated, political decisions are taken in predicaments of continued contingency, uncertainty, and “underauthorization.”
While many have made this observation in the study of social movements and identity formation, few, if any, have used it to revisit the default and prevailing scholarly approaches to thinking about founding and foundations.
Bernal’s theoretical advancement of an anti-foundationalist account of founding also informs her methodological approach. Distinguishing foundations from origins, she finds valuably illustrative examples of her central theoretical points in Plato and in the Roman Livy, through engaging Thomas Jefferson, the 1804 Haitian Proclamation of Independence and 1805 Haitian Imperial Constitution, instances of Latin American presidential refounding with special focus on Ecuador, and the Mexican-American parents in 1940s Orange County, who challenged their children’s segregation from California’s public schools.
Beautifully written and rigorously argued, the Foundation’s First Book Award committee hopes that the highly constructive political acumen and ambition of Beyond Origins will be widely read, engaged, and emulated.
There are two co-winners for the 2018 Award.
The first is Siavash Saffari’s Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in which the author revisits the thought and practice of Iranian intellectual and revolutionary Ali Shariati. Drawing on English- and Persian-language scholarship and interviews, he advances an account of Shariati and neo-Shariatis who are critical of both European colonialism and parochial traditionalisms. Engaging with intellectual history, resources in comparative political theory, and with contemporary Iranian political thinkers, this is a real political theoretical contribution in the sense that it tries to work through seeming political binaries and impasses by drawing on existing political frames and aspirations.
Given that while growing English-language scholarship on Shariati is still relatively limited, Beyond Shariati offers a comprehensive but concise relevant history of his ideas and debates over their reception, placing them into a global, particularly Global Southern, discussion that remains rooted by commitments to Iran and its future.
The committee saw the text as playing a central role in helping to advance a growing movement of scholars writing in English, including Arash Divari of Whitman College, to establish Shariati’s major historical and contemporary political theoretical significance. In addition to his own thought, Shariati is also known in Iran for his translation of Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (most known in English as “The Wretched of the Earth”) into Persian.
The co-winner was Sina Kramer’s Excluded Within: The Unintelligibility of Radical Political Actors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Catalyzed by the author’s experiences in 2003 with protesting the US bombardment and invasion of Iraq and witnessing—in real time—the construction of lies as the truth, Excluded Within draws on critical theory, radical democratic theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory and the examples of Antigone, Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, and the LA Rebellion/Riots of 1992 to explore the epistemological and political invisibility of radical actors or how the operations of hegemony and oppression render some claims unintelligible as political claims and some persons unintelligible as political agents.
As Sina Kramer writes, “When marginalized and oppressed people fight back against intolerable political conditions and are rendered thugs, criminals, terrorists not political agents making a political critique of political conditions, constitutive exclusion is at work.”
More generally, Kramer argues that constitutive exclusion occurs when a system of thought or political body defines itself by excluding some difference that is intolerable to it. This excluded difference nevertheless remains within the system or body that has excluded it, defining and constituting from within as it is covered over, repressed or disavowed. This figure therefore remains both the condition of possibility and impossibility of that constitution in a way that cuts through ontological, epistemological, and political levels, often marking the border between levels.
Offering both a diagnosis and critique of the concept of constitutive exclusion, Kramer is ultimately exploring how the contestation of constitutive exclusion happens and who we are as a result. She poignantly asks: What have we lost as a result of these exclusion? What might we still recover? Who are we and who might we have been? What might we still be?
Crucially her analysis culminates not in arguments for inclusion through assimilation but in a case for fundamental societal reconstruction based in acknowledgment of our fundamental and inevitable mutual constitution.
Our committee was particularly impressed by the fierce care with which Kramer leads readers through an intricate argument that blends highly technical theoretical argumentation with subtle analyses of historical and contemporary political action. I especially appreciated the text’s critical engagement with Afropessimism: that while acknowledging the profound and fundamental nature of antiBlack racism, Kramer argues that unlike Afropessimism, constitutive exclusion describes the production of multiple exclusions and therefore a multiplicity of positions from which resistance and subversion may originate.
Excluded Within could not be more relevant to thinking through how best to build a radical progressive movement now.
Jane Anna Gordon chaired the 2018 Foundations of Political First Book Prize committee of the American Political Science Association and is Associate Professor of Political Science, with affiliations in American Studies, Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, and Global Studies, at UCONN-Storrs. Her recent books include Creolizing Political Theory (Fordham UP) and The Politics of Richard Wright (U. Press of Kentucky). She is a former President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and co-editor of the two Rowman and Littlefield International book series Creolizing the Canon and Global Critical Caribbean Thought.
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