Kris Sealey opens Creolizing the Nation, recent winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award, by relating the circumstances around the birth of her son, Isaiah. The fact that he was granted citizenship by virtue of being born in the U.S., while Sealey herself was not a citizen, raised certain “crises,” in her words, regarding financial obligations and immigration status. Her son, for instance, was entitled to the support and protection of the state, while his mother, on whom he was so profoundly dependent, was not. How could two such intimately connected human beings have such different relations to the nation of his birth?
Sealey uses this anecdote to raise important questions about “identity, community, borders, and belonging,” noting that her larger project “seeks to make explicit the ontological frameworks out of which such crises are born in the first place” (7). While she offers an engagement with contemporary critiques of the nation as a liberatory form, Sealey ultimately seeks to conserve the concept of the nation as a liberatory tool, arguing that liberatory efforts “must be grounded in localized communities, historically situated within a colonial matrix of power” (8) and that this, in turn, requires appeals to a national culture. Unlike colonial national projects, however, which appeal to some primordial and static origin-myth and aim toward some final claim to “wholeness and finality” (9), Sealey advocates a creolizing theory of nation.
Creolization, Sealey reminds us, occurs “when human living must begin as resistance to domination” (48). Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Jane Anna Gordon, and myself, Sealey characterizes a creolizing account of the nation as one that “emphasizes the many instead of the one, movement instead of stability, and difference instead of sameness” (43), such that its “methodological first premise… is the idea of being free in one’s relation to a past (history) without being ahistorical” (49). A creolizing nation form is thus one that is dynamic and emergent in and through its encounter with difference, articulating itself in relation to a colonial/dominating history, but decidedly not determined by that history. Human beings are in this way able to resist domination by generating “homely spaces” (119) that promulgate “a model of solidarity that neither squashes the urgencies of the local nor uses them to foreclose the possibility of a shared decolonial project” (160).
A creolizing national project is one that therefore eschews appeals to purity and the elision of difference, offering instead a dynamic and historically-sensitive nation in process through the encounter with “constitutive disruptions” (67) that leave the nation ambiguous and open-ended, yet stable and intelligible (provided one abandons ideals of purity and stasis). Sealey’s text offers rich engagements not only with Glissant but also with Frantz Fanon and María Lugones, among others. Her text is a provocative and productive theorization of freedom and belonging, and in my brief reflections on her work here, I wish to focus on these two important concepts.
Oppression is often expressed through variations on the theme “know your place.” Both oppressors and oppressed are posited as having a “proper” position within the order of things, and particular manifestations of oppression reinscribe or reinforce one’s positionality in that order. Within the settler-colonial and anti-Black context of the U.S., the “place” of the settler entails proprietorship over everything (to paraphrase DuBois), and the place of all others involves subordination, exploitation, and displacement. The “proper place” of the oppressed in a settler colonial context, in other words, amounts to not really having a place at all, except at the sufferance of the settler. When one’s being in our land is always already illicit (even though, ironically, it is quite necessary for the continuation of the colonial project), then freedom and belonging must, as Sealey points out, begin in resistant practices of constitutive disruption (that is, in creolization). What does it take to constitute (Sealey’s appeal to this phenomenological term is not accidental) a sense of belonging through resistant moments of disruption?
One way to approach this question is by beginning with an observation about the way in which the colonial sense of belonging operates. As Sealey notes, the colonial sense of belonging emerges as a “myth of homogeneity,” that is “dynamic and active in its operation as it is simultaneously static and stable in its apprehension” (25). This mythic narrative of belonging constitutes a nation that perceives itself (themselves) as belonging in a way that is “immanent” to the people so constituted themselves (32).
What is crucial about Sealey’s point here is her emphasis on the way in which this mythic “immanence” is in fact a phenomenon of ongoing active production, even as it pretends, in bad faith, to be a passive mode of being. Take, for example, the more recent iterations of “nativism” in the U.S.—the recurring appeal to a lost or endangered “real America” under constant threat from those who do not belong (which, of course, very much includes those who were, in every important sense, here first). “Real Americans” understand themselves to belong in this land in a way that is metaphysical. It is a matter of blood, a matter of (manifest) destiny. This sense of belonging generates an isomorphic relation between people and place, such that “Real America” becomes the place where “Real Americans” live, and those parts of the country under the sway of other-than-real Americans must be “taken back” and, of course, thereby “made great again.”
Sealey’s point about dynamism and activity in this mythic narrative of belonging, and the theme I want to emphasize, makes clear this sense-of-self as immanently belonging is itself a dynamic and ongoing act of constitution by means of the ritual repetition of those mythic narratives and origin stories. In other words, the colonial sense of belonging is produced and reproduced through the mythic repetition of rituals, the function of which is to portray what is an ongoing activity as if it were a given feature of a mind-independent reality. The pledge of allegiance, the story of the first Thanksgiving, the “purchase” of Manhattan Island, the commodification of “Indian” images and practices, the valorization of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, and the anxiety over the “invasion” occurring at the southern border: these are all ritual reiterations of the mythic narrative of a “pure” national identity under constant threat from those who do not belong. And the power of this myth is maintained through the rituals that give it meaning and context.
To disrupt the ritual, to offer a counter-narrative, is to directly threaten the (always mythic) integrity and coherence of the nation. One need look no further than the “crisis” generated by “critical race theory” to see this phenomenon in action—a counter-narrative that threatens the ritual articulation (through “history” education) of our rightful dominion emerges that must be thwarted by any means necessary.
Sealey’s “constitutive disruptions” that form the creolizing nation will thus emerge, at least in part, as the ritual practices that express not only a creolizing resistance to domination, but manifest a life of meaning, and even joy, in the face of that domination. Such rituals need not be formal, or even explicitly recognized as such. The languages, foodways, religions, dances, modes of socializing (of coming-together)—all of these can be understood as ritual practices that form living and evolving (creolizing) community in the face of (though not always as mere reaction to) oppression and dehumanization. We can see these rituals in the ways in which María Lugones writes of “hangouts,” and the way Mariana Ortega articulates “hometactics,” both figures that Sealey works with in her text. Belonging, not in the mythical sense of being of a place, but in the dynamic and heterogenous sense of the constitution of community in and with a place, is a matter of the generation and enactment of rituals that function unsettle and disrupt the mythic “belonging” of the settler-colonial nation.
In this way, the creolization of the nation that Sealey is advocating is not a matter of introducing difference to the already-existing colonial nation, but the generation/constitution of an alternative (and more genuinely human) nation. This, in turn, is a matter of identifying and assuming responsibility for and to the rituals through which this ongoing process takes place. Sealey’s text is a call for precisely this sort of responsibility, and it is vital that we take heed.
Michael Monahan
Michael Monahan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. His teaching and research focus primarily on the philosophy of race and racism, political philosophy, Hegel, and phenomenology. His most recent book, Creolizing Practices of Freedom: Recognition and Dissonance, is part of the Creolizing the Canon series at Rowman and Littlefield.
