The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of the association’s awards for contributions to philosophical thought, literature, mentorship, and best papers at the association’s 2022 international conference:
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Activist Intellectual and Scholar Award
Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award
Gertrude Gonzales de Allen and Al-Yasha Williams
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Azad Ashim Sharma, Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time. Broken Sleep Books, 2022.
Anna Julia Cooper Award
Tara Jones: “I Get Out! Pan African Traditions of Educational Fugitivity”
Claudia Jones Award
Margaret Goldman: “Care Beyond the Carceral Education State”
The selection of awardees is made annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Awards Committee, which consists of all prior recipients 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 awards will be formally conferred at a special ceremony at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Summer School, which will be hosted by the University of Rochester from June 25th to July 2nd, 2023. In lieu of its annual in-person conference, the Caribbean Philosophical Association will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding through a global remote meeting of its many members across the globe.
Each recipient is being acknowledged for the importance of their work for the Caribbean Philosophical 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.
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Dr. Gerald Horne is a long-time activist in antiracist and working-class struggles, whose research and scholarship played and continues to play an important role in bringing to the fore important dimensions of struggles for freedom along axes and intersections of class, gender, and race. This combination made him not only a student of the Black radical tradition, but also one its major figures, alongside Herbert Aptheker, Manning Marable, and Cedric Robinson, all of whom are part of the namesake of this award. He holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne is the author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His current research includes the forthcoming Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918–1968, as well as a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Dr. Nkiru Nzegwu is a world-renowned artist, art historian, curator, documentary film producer, philosopher, and radio show host, as well as a public intellectual in West Africa and North America, as her work in Igbo and other Nigerian communities and women’s organizations across the globe attest. A profile of her was published in Black Issues in Philosophy, among many others commentaries and discussions across the globe. Her writings are among the most influential texts in contemporary African philosophy and studies of African art, with her book Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy and Culture (2006) being a classic contribution. She is Chair of the Board of the State University of New York (SUNY) Distinguished Academy; SUNY Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, and of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University; Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor 2023–2024, Department of Political & International Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa; and Professor Extraordinarius, School of Transdisciplinary Research and Graduate Studies, University of South Africa, UNISA.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Activist Intellectual and Scholar Award
Eve L. Ewing (Photo credit Jaclyn Rivas)
Poet, visual artist, activist, and sociologist, Eve L. Ewing exemplifies the spirit of this award in the worlds she brings together, in her creative mixture of art and scholarship, as she brings to the fore the realities of and transformative possibilities for the lives of the historically excluded, especially Black and Native American girls. Her website states: “Even though these things are listed separately…, they all live jumbled up together in her head and her heart.” That is an understatement, as her work is not corralled but instead, in the spirit of relational theory and practice, opened to the possibilities of imagination and committed practice. Paraphrasing her website bio: Dr. Ewing is the author of Electric Arches, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, 1919, and Maya and the Robot. She writes comic books, including Ironheart—a Marvel character introduced to their cinematic universe in the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever—and the next series of Black Panther. She has also written for TV, theater, and across genres ranging from fiction to poetry. (Learn more here.) She is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on education and racial inequality, in addition to directing the Beyond Schools Lab. And finally, although remarkably not exhaustively, Dr. Ewing is a cultural organizer who focuses on nurturing creative communities striving for social transformation through artistic and cultural practices.
Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentor Award
Gertrude Gonzales de Allen and Al-Yasha Williams
The 2023 Hall award is shared this year because of the unusual collaborative work of the recipients. Dr. Gonzales de Allen and Dr. Williams carry on Spelman College’s tradition of preparing students for the challenges of academe and other professions in which many have taken up leadership roles. Writing of their efforts and achievements, alumnae stated:
Dr. Allen… taught me the value of philosophy as an act of creativity. Dr. Allen positioned me to see philosophy as an art to make sense of the world rather than theorizing from the armchair.
Dr. Williams is a living example of theory and practice coming together. I remember working on a project for my UNCF Mellon-Mays fellowship about Black women’s anger, and she gave me this book about the topic that she remembered her mother having in the 1970s. I was so grateful for her willingness to pour into my work in such a tangible way.
Dr. Allen and Dr. Williams continue to guide numbers of hard-hitting, quality, Black women thinkers into academia, into philosophy, and into the world in general. I am grateful to have been taught and mentored by them…. They have been outstanding mentors to me, and so many Spelmanites before me, and I believe that they will be wonderful mentors to future Spelmanites.
Dr. Kathryn Sophia Belle, an alumna of Spelman College, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State, and Director of Penn State’s Africana Research Center, as well as founder of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, wrote:
I enthusiastically support both Gertrude Gonzalez de Allen and Al-Yasha Williams for this award…. I have worked with both Gertrude and Al-Yasha, and I have seen their impact through the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers over the last 15 years, as well as through working with them in my own efforts to recruit from Spelman. Spelman has produced the highest number of Black women to go on to earn doctorates in philosophy of any other undergraduate institution in the US, and this has been made possible in large part (especially more recently) because of the work Gertrude and Al-Yasha have been doing there. They not only help to prepare Spelman students for graduate school, but they also continue to mentor and support students beyond their time at Spelman.
Fanon Outstanding Book Award
In the words of one of the referees:
At its root, the text offers precisely what the title promises, a profoundly decolonial history of the long struggle of the Haitian people for liberation. The 1791 Bois Caïman ceremony that inaugurated the Haitian Revolution also marks the effort on the part of the enslaved to begin their own modernity—a modernity in sharp contrast with the colonial modernity that cast them in the role of “slaves.” These contesting modernities emerge in Casimir’s text as the principal combatants in the larger global struggles of the 18th and 19th century…. Through exhaustive appeal to the historical record, and first-hand accounts of key leaders during and after the revolution, Casimir mounts a compelling argument for the claim that those who ruled first the “Indigenous Army” and then the Haitian Nation-State were assuming both the colonial “right of conquest” and the colonial racial schema (preserved now in the distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens)…. [The] “sufferers” (Casimir’s analog to Fanon’s les damnés) continued to forge a life of their own…. [The] Haitian captives/sufferers were forming their own sovereign people/nation independent from (or at least indifferent to) the state. It was a community based on the principle of tout moun, se moun(every person is a person), and emerged along with what Casimir calls the “counter-plantation”—the perseverance of human life and growth in the struggle against dehumanization and oppression. I could go on about the many virtues of this rich text, but I hope this is sufficient to convey the ways in which it will bear a profound impact (in the Francophone and now Anglophone worlds) on the study of Haiti and its revolution, and on decolonial theory.
Jean Casimir has been teaching at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the State University of Haiti since 2001. Professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences and researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1961 to 1970, he collaborated as a visiting professor at the American universities of Stanford (1998) and Duke (2010), and at the University of the West Indies (Mona campus) in Jamaica (1999). He has been contributing to the summer courses at Roosevelt University College, Utrecht University in the Netherlands, organized in collaboration with the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities at Duke University in the United States, since 2013. Former staff member of the United Nations Secretariat and of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), from 1970 to 1985, he was a member of the Provisional Electoral Council of Haiti from 1990 to 1991 and represented his country as Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the United States of America and as Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, from 1991 to 1997. His doctoral thesis, La cultura oprimida, published in 1981, received the Jean Price-Mars award in 2013 from the Faculty of Ethnology of the State University of Haiti. He has published, among others, Haiti et ses élites, un interminable dialogue de sourds (2009), La Nation Haitienne et l’État (2018), Une Lecture Décoloniale de l’Histoire des Haïtiens (2018).
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
As one referee put it:
Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time is a rich collection of poets’ poetry, of philosophers’ poetry. It’s poetry for logophiles, where a phrase like “Śūnyatā moves in promethean prolegomena in the struggle of continuation” is at home as well as “I light another cigarette. Someone in the court is practising freekicks; he shoots, and the back of the cage rattles. The others start singing ‘Top baller, top baller, put it in the top corner.’” I read the volume with a dictionary in my other hand when coming across “chiasmatic,” “harmolodic,” even the title itself, “Ergastulum” (a reinforced space in which Romans held dangerous slaves in chains). Classical references abound to Greek, Roman, Sanskrit, and Kemet histories and cultures. But Sharma knows how to offset such intellectual weight with the jargon of easy communication between friends…. This is a beautiful, haunting meditation on the time and community that we, collectively, have lost to the coronavirus. To conclude, yes, I recommend awarding the Guillen. Ergastulum is powerful, erudite, inventive, and meditative—all on language and sociality and what has been lost to covid lockdowns and social distancing. It’s transcultural and honest.
Azad Ashim Sharma is a writer based in South London. He is the director of the87press. In addition to Ergastulum, his work includes Against the Frame (Barque Press, 2017; fifth anniversary issue with Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and the forthcoming Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books, 2024). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London where he is also an Associate Tutor in Creative-Critical Writing.
Anna Julia Cooper Award
Tara Jones, for her paper: “I Get Out! Pan African Traditions of Educational Fugitivity,” presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2022 conference held at Michigan State University.
Tara Jones is Coordinator of the African diasporic Cultural Resource Center at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Academic Achievement Counselor for UCSB’s Educational Opportunity Program, where she promotes Black student development, first-generation, and income eligible students’ retention and matriculation to advanced degree programs and diverse career paths. She is a final stage doctoral candidate in Depth Psychology, specializing in Community, Liberation, & Eco-Psychologies at Pacifica Graduate Institute (PGI). She holds a Masters in the Science of Teaching from Fordham University, a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from PGI, a Master of Arts in Depth Psychology from PGI, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Black Studies from UCSB. She has served as a secondary level public school teacher at the Frederick Douglass Academy II in Harlem, New York, a social-emotional learning facilitator for teens and young adults through a non-profit in public & private school settings and at the Santa Barbara City College in Santa Barbara, psychotherapist, community mental health expert, and an employment specialist for The Salvation Army’s Hospitality House in Santa Barbara. She researches the ecology of well-being in public education, cross-professional applications of counseling to teaching, Pan-African traditions of fugitivity in education, Black womxn’s activism as a response to Black maternal necropolitics, and legacies of transnational African diasporic research. Her scholarly work has been published in the journal, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and her visual art has appeared on covers of the National Conference of Black Political Science’s journal, National Political Science Review and been on exhibit at UCSB’s Multicultural Center.
Claudia Jones Award
Margaret Goldman, for her paper: “Care Beyond the Carceral Education State,” presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2022 conference held at Michigan State University.
Margaret Goldman is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and an educator in a community-based alternative high school. Her research focuses on the racialized nexus between schooling and systems of confinement, and the individual and collective movements that system-impacted young people and their communities employ to disrupt it. She is interested in the possibilities those movements expose for abolitionist alternatives to compulsory education.
The awards will be formally conferred at a special ceremony at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Summer School, which will be hosted by the University of Rochester from June 25th to July 2nd, 2023.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
