The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the recipients of the Frantz Fanon, Nicolas Guillén, and Claudia Jones awards for contributions to philosophical thought, science, and literature, and the best paper at the association’s 2023 international conference:
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Achievements in Science, Philosophy, and Leadership
Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. Sternberg Press, 2022.
Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Richard Jones, Skinny Poem. Politics & Prose, 2023.
Jaspal Kaur Singh, Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming. Finishing Line Press, 2023.
Claudia Jones Award
Arwa Awan’s “Aimé Césaire’s ‘Tropical Marxism’ and the Problem of Alienation” presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2023 international conference.
The selection of recommended recipients, books, and essays is made 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.
Unusually, this year’s Frantz Fanon achievement awards include two psychologists and a theoretical physicist. Their contributions speak to Fanon’s legacy as a philosopher, scientist, clinician, and activist. Similarly, this year’s Guillén lifetime achievement award winners speak to Guillén’s legacy as a philosophical poet and social critic. The careers of all address their namesakes’ legacies as activist intellectuals.
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Chabani Manganyi
Chabani Manganyi stands not only among South Africa’s but also the globe’s most eminent clinical and theoretical psychologists and social theorists. A committed intellectual activist during the traumatic apartheid years and beyond, Dr. Manganyi oversaw the transformation of the South African Department of Education when he served as the Director-General from 1994 to 1999.
Despite facing many obstacles from his youth, he managed to attend the University of the North (now the University of Limpopo) and later the University of South Africa (UNISA), to become one of the country’s first Black psychologists. In 1970, he received his doctorate with his thesis entitled “Body Image in Paraplegia,” followed by post-doctoral research at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Manganyi’s many books include the classic Being-black-in-the-world (Raven Press, 1973; new edition by Wits University Press and NYU Press, 2019), followed by texts on E’skia Mphahlele, Gerard Sekoto, and Dumile Feni. In some of his writings he incisively examined the effects of institutionalized racism that characterized South Africa, including alienation and distorted individual body relations amidst a quest for freedom. Some of the early works were the first serious attempts by a South African psychologist to engage with the interface between the individual and society in the context of both symmetrical and asymmetrical relations of power, which were welcomed by many researchers who were searching for a psychology better able to make sense of the internal and more explicit social realities of the lives of the majority of South Africans. He identified several critical imperatives for a more generative South African psychology, among which was his appeal that mental health services should be made more appropriate and accessible to all South Africans, a call which is still pertinent today.
Manganyi’s intellectual pursuits have not been limited to the narrow confines of psychology. In 2016 he turned the lens on himself to write a memoir and autobiography entitled Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist, which won the Academy of Science of South Africa’s Humanities Book Award in 2018. The book illuminates the history of South Africa through sensitive, insightful, personalized accounts of the devastating effects of rural poverty, family dislocation, migrant labor, and Bantu Education on entire communities. The memoir gains its authority from the Manganyi’s skills as a psycho-biographer, as well as his restraint as a writer even as he recounts painful recurring episodes of personal and family suffering through the course of his life. Manganyi found even in the most oppressive circumstances opportunities for learning, which advanced his career. He refused to yield to the many obstacles in his path as a Black man and a psychologist.
In addition to being one of this year’s recipients of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, Manganyi’s many accolades include Honorary Fellow of the Psychological Society of South Africa (2012), the Humanities Book Award of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) (2018), Lifetime Achievement Award, National Research Foundation (2016).
In the words of Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:
Chabani Manganyi’s clinical and intellectual achievements stand as an exemplar of a life dedicated to usurping the power of institutionalized racism from the level of the singular human being struggling to survive and thrive, to the broader social level in which social structures themselves exert relentless power against that very struggle. Manganyi’s work carries on the tradition of radical struggle inaugurated by Fanon himself.
Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Sylvia Marcos
Sylvia Marcos is a psychologist and scholar committed to Indigenous and feminist movements throughout the Americas and across the globe. She works at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos. She was founder of the CIDHAL Documentation Center in 1974, and Professor of Psychology at the Benemérita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP). Her research and publications contribute to the fields of feminist critical epistemology, Mesoamerican religions, and women within Indigenous movements, while promoting an antihegemonic-feminist practice, theory, and hermeneutics. Her recent book is entitled Una poética de la insurgencia zapatista (AKAL, 2024), and her many other books such as Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Brill, 2006), El libro Dialogo y Diferencia: retos feministas a la globalización(2008), Mujeres, Indígenas, Rebeldes Zapatistas (2011), and Cruzando Fronteras: mujeres indígenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda (Quimantú, 2017). For a full list, please consult the bibliography on her website.
Dr. Marcos has participated in many social and critical movements. She was part of Ivan Illich’s Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a proposal of the early 1970s with a critical anti-institutional analysis of churches, schools, and medical establishments. She was a colleague of Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, and her political theoretical thought is inspired by her work among Zapatista women and that entire movement. Her intellectual work includes Mayan thought, particularly the duality of equal and complementary mutual interconnectedness and interdependence of feminine and masculine life. She is also a contributor to thinking epistemologies beyond hegemonic and centrist models from the global north.
President Jacqueline Martinez observes that:
Sylvia Marcos is the embodiment of our highest ideals of intellectual work that is intricately interwoven with the daily life needs and aspirations of communities who are objects of colonial oppression in all of its forms. She stands as an exemplar of courage and conviction lived in projects that elevate the health and well-being of people and communities whose humanity is most at risk within the Euromodern colonial systems of thought.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Monifa Love
Inspired by great Black music and visual art, Monifa Love seeks, in her words, “to record our daily and centuries-old contests to live as free persons on this earth.”
Monifa Love is Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Bowie State University. She was a 2023 Board of Regents Faculty Awards recipient for Outstanding Creative Activity and a 2021 recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Love earned her doctorate in English from Florida State University and studied as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and as an associate of the great philosopher and oppression theorist William R. Jones. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Anthropology with honors from Princeton University.
Love is the author of two poetry collections, Provisions and Dreaming Underground (2003), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Award. She co-authored two fine arts catalogs about the life and work of the artist Ed Love. She produced “….my magic pours secret libations,” a fine arts catalog and video of an exhibition she curated of African American and Afro-Cuban women artists. Love is the co-author of Romancing Harlem, a cultural memoir of Harlem written with Charles Norman Mills. Additionally, Love co-authored “Deep-Rooted Cane: Consanguinity, Writing, and Genre” with writer Evans D. Hopkins, who is the inspiration for the character of David Carmichael in Love’s award-winning novel Freedom in the Dismal (1998). She founded Home Base Women, a women’s poetry chorus. Her work can be found in numerous reference books, textbooks, and journals. She co-edited and wrote the introduction to Speculations on Black Life: The Collected Essays of William R. Jones (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Love has participated in two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships: African Cinema (Dakar, Senegal, 2005) and Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement (University of Kansas, 2015). Recently, her poem “Abraham Lincoln Turns to Listen to the Lower Ninth” was featured on Poem-A-Day. She lives in Maryland with her spouse, and they work on development projects in Ghana.
On Love’s selection, President Martinez states:
Monifa Love’s life and work brings us into contact with the consequential nuance of life struggles in ways that are only possible with the highest levels of artistic expression. Deeply relevant for present struggles, Love’s poetry moves with incisive reverence for our collective histories.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award
Nathaniel Mackey
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of twelve chapbooks of poetry, Birds Anonymous (Verge Books, 2023) the most recent; six books of poetry, Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015) the most recent; a boxed set comprised of three double books of poetry, Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church (New Directions, 2021); and a five-volume prose/fiction work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the last volume of which is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017). He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16–25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a coeditor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974–1976), the University of Southern California (1976–1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979–2010).
Jeremy Matthew Glick, whose The Black Radical Tragic (NYU Press, 2016) was a Guillén Outstanding Book of 2017, which earned him a Laureate member’s place on the Awards Committee, sent a letter to the Executive Board upon learning of Professor Mackey’s selection. Here, with his permission, is an excerpt:
…in all Mackey revolutionizes the poetic-epistolary form with Henry Dumas-esque insurgent force.
Jean Genet famously wrote that George Jackson gave life to an epistolary form that languished since its eighteenth-century heyday (representative in the work of the likes of Samuel Richardson and its afterlives—such as the nineteenth century “epistolary activism” of Harriet Jacobs). Genet transitioned in 1986 the year of Bedouin’s publication and would have most certainly extended his timeline if given the chance to read Mackey’s work. And if all that wasn’t enough to merit recognition for lifetime achievement—Mackey’s recording with Taj Mahal “slaps” as the kids these days say.
Nathaniel Mackey in his person as scholar, poet, performer, educator should be honored and honored again and again and again. He is like Bradbury’s iconic figure of men and women as memory-fonts committed to preserving a single book; yet Mackey’s embodied scale is the entire library! He’s such a brilliant and decent human. His example is an important bulwark against revanchist, retrograde times.
President Martinez agrees:
Nathaniel Mackey’s life and work carries enormous relevance toward understanding the power and significance of artistic expression in the ongoing development of culture. Mackey’s work shows us how the musicality of Jazz infuses linguistic expression with the vitality of cultural rebirthing beyond the static repetition of a dehumanizing culture. Mackey’s work moves beyond art and expression as things to be seen and directs us toward the living and breathing sources of humanity.
Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Achievements in Science, Philosophy, and Leadership
Stephon Alexander
Stephon Alexander is a theoretical and computational physicist, and author whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, AI, quantum gravity and music technology. His expertise is in constructing new theories of the early universe and elementary particle physics that has predictions for the universe at present, such as dark energy and dark matter. He also combines mathematics and tools from theoretical physics into machine learning, the geometry and cognition of musical perception, signal processing and computational algorithms.
Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University and a past President of the National Society of Black Physicists. Alexander was also the Executive Director of the Harlem Gallery of Science. He had previous appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College, Penn State, Dartmouth College, and Haverford College. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string theory and cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of cosmic inflation based on string theory.
In his critically acclaimed book, The Jazz of Physics (Basic Books, 2017), Alexander revisits the ancient interconnection between music and the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways music, in particular jazz music, mirrors modern physics, such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the physics of the early universe. He also discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from “improvisational logic” exemplified in jazz performance and practice. His most recent book is Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics (Basic Books, 2021).
The great Antiguan Brown University Professor Emeritus Paget Henry, the first winner of the Frantz Fanon Award for his classic Caliban’s Reason (2000) and a member of the Awards Committee states:
The Philosophy of Science in the Caribbean is still very much an underdeveloped area. But I see the future of it very much in the hands of Stephon Alexander. I would say more than any other individual, he is at least the future face of Afro-Caribbean Philosophy of Science.
President Martinez adds:
Stephon Alexander’s work shows us how deeply relevant our human artistic endeavors, especially jazz, are to the very energies through which life and matter emerge and evolve at the sub-atomic level. His work reminds us that our highest scientific achievements are always marked by a concern with the interrelatedness of all life in the universe.
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt. Sternberg Press, 2022.
Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.
In the words of one of the evaluators:
It is without doubt one of the most remarkable, brilliant, and audacious books that I have ever read. I cannot think of a more deserving book and author for this significant award.
I am so delighted to have been asked to evaluate this book. The nuance, creativity of its author’s thought, and subtlety of her analysis on this and other complex questions of marked enslavement are profound. Ferreira da Silva must be read. Her book deserves this award.
President Martinez agrees:
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt places before us a clear and deeply incisive understanding of the “unpayable debts” incurred through the deployments of coloniality, raciality and economic exploitation as they have exacted an essential and pervasive violence that attacks humanity at its core. This work is a remarkable achievement even within the total oeuvre of this prolific author whose tremendous insights challenge us to reach the same depths of understanding.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and co-Directory of the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab (CRACS), at New York University. An academic, an artist, and an activist her work reflects and speculates on themes crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minnesota 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (OIP & Casa do Povo, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg, 2022), Homo Modernus (Cobogó, 2022), and La Deuda Impagable (Tinta Limón, 2023) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (JHUP, 2013) and (with Mark Harris) of Postcolonialism and the Law: Major Works (Routledge 2018) and Indigenous peoples and the Law: Major Works (Routledge, 2019). Her several articles and essays have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, including Social Identities, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Text, Griffith Law Review, Critical Ethnic Studies, Cultural Dynamics, Amerasia, and Theory & Event and have been translated into several languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Danish. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and held visiting positions at Birkbeck-University of London’s School of Law, La Trobe University’s School of Law, University of São Paulo’s Department of Political Science, Université Paris VIII’s Department of Philosophy. Currently, she is an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and Faculty at the European Graduate School. Her artistic works include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), and Ancestral Clouds/Ancestral Claims (2023), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the art practices Poethical Readings,The Sensing Salon, and Reading with Echo, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London) MASP (Sāo Paulo), Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Guggenheim (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), Center for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Tai Khun Contemporary (Shanghai), the Kunsthalle Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), the 2022 Singapore Biennale, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and the 35th Sao Paulo Biennale. She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and featured in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, Artalk, and E-Flux. She is a founding member of the EhChO Platform and works closely with the feminist collectives Teia de Solidariedade da Zona Oeste (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Periferia Segue Sangrando (São Paulo, Brazil).
Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award
Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.
In Disalienation, Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis’s study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement’s place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.
In the words of one evaluator:
Robcis’s scholarship in her chapter on the Catalan anti-fascist psychiatrist François Tosquelles and the early Saint Alban school is breathtaking. It outlines the tenets of the philosophy of the radical movement within psychiatry called “institutional psychotherapy” whose political dimensions emphasize breaking down all forms of walls, encampment, occupation, and segregation which function as technologies of “the-all-power” seeking to de-socialize, alienate, and colonize human reality. After reading the book, I find it impossible to understand Fanon’s thought without studying the history of institutional psychotherapy and the milieu of ideas in which he was trained as a resident. The connections jump out with vigor. Readers will be awestruck by just how innovative and courageous Tosquelles himself was, as we are talking about a man who thought some of his best clinical work was conducted in a makeshift clinic, he operated out of a refugee camp (more like a concentration camp) in Vichy France. … suffice to say that Robcis is thinking big, as her ultimate argument is that institutional psychotherapy (particularly through Fanon) resulted in a creolizing of French theory.
According to President Martinez:
Camille Robcis’ Disalienation offers a deeply insightful account of the consequences of the institutional deployment of thought in the practices of care for the human psyche. This work reveals the deeply human cost of “fascist psychiatry” and the courageousness of those who recognize and struggle against this kind of “colonization of human reality.”
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. In addition to Disalienation, she is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled The War on Gender. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Richard Jones, Skinny Poem. Politics & Prose, 2023.
In 1965, Cornell University Press published A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year. Inspired by Ammons’s great wit and lean methodology—short lines constrained by the width of the adding machine tape—Richard A. Jones has written a poem on a continuous 160-foot roll of adding machine tape. He used a fifty-year-old manual typewriter (Hermes 3000) to type the poem. Written over a span of eight months in 2019–2020, this continuous poem is a chronicle—COVID-19, George Floyd, social protests and his own struggles with ageing, books he’d read, and his ongoing philosophical problems. The ludic motivations for Skinny Poem—beyond the obvious homage to Ammons—is to prevent a roll of paper from being used commercially in a gasoline pump.
As one evaluator reports:
As one would imagine, I was intrigued. I wasn’t disappointed. This “skinny poem” is epic! It rolls along 258 pages in a transition from what for so many was another world, as time itself—or perhaps, properly, durée has changed on a global scale. No one could have portended the tumult as of the writing of this review, but the depth, tenderness, breadth, philosophical acuity, wit, care, pathos, anger, joy, loss chronicled in this work—harkening not only Proust and Dostoevsky but also Neruda, Giovanni and other voices from “below”—I found my myself returning to the author’s journey, as if on a long walk, into that profound experience of a mind rhythmically attuned to matters of the heart. … From existentialism to Africana philosophy to contemporary critical reflections on blackness and “Black death,” this poetic meditation is nothing short of a tour de force. A triumph! It’s worthy of this award, as I imagine it evokes Langston in conversation with Guillén through this African American philosopher-poet. I strongly recommend awarding this unusual work, which rises to the occasion of its namesake.
President Martinez adds:
Richard A. Jones’ Skinny Poem is a remarkable achievement that offers us a living through of time confronted with the full range of collectively shared and privately lived experiences. From COVID-19 to the massive movements of social consciousness following the murder of George Floyd, Jones offers us a deeply human presence whose poetic reach elevates humanity itself.
Richard A. Jones is a social and political philosopher and postmodern poet. A life-long educator, Jones taught philosophy for ten years at Howard University in Washington, D.C., after earning his Ph.D. in philosophy in 2000 from the University of Colorado. As the elected Co-Coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association, he organized an international conference on “Transnational Capitalism” in Cape Town, South Africa in 2009. Jones’s philosophical writings provide frameworks for addressing deep metaphysical questions with practical political and moral implications. His scholarship is marked by its meticulous exegetical work and original, provocative arguments. His papers have appeared in Teaching Philosophy, The Journal of Black Studies, Socialism and Democracy, and Radical Philosophy Review. In The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), he examines Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work through the lens of African American and Africana philosophy in arguing its contemporary relevance for Black people. Jones’s next philosophical work, Postmodern Racial Dialectics: Philosophy Beyond the Pale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), is a collection of ten essays addressing a wide range of issues beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between the changes in racial discourse ethics after Barack Obama’s election. A prolific writer and poet, Jones has published ten poetry collections and two novels during the past twenty years. His poetry in volumes like Bippie Poems (Publishamerica, 2004), and Iowa Poems (Beckham Publications, 2008), and Skinny Poem continue his irreverent, postmodern, ludic playfulness with language against a backdrop of dead earnestness about the racial and existential struggles of the twenty-first century. Scientific American magazine featured his poem “String Theory” in 2021. Jones’s Memoirs of a Black Philosopher (Hamilton Books, 2024) is forthcoming. He is privileged to have his lifetime works included in the Archives of Africana Philosophy recently established by Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., at Haverford College.
Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award
Jaspal Kaur Singh, Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming. Finishing Line Press, 2023.
Exiles and Pleasures, reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival, echoes the poet’s own multiple migrations as a member of the Sikh diaspora—from the mountains of the Shan States in Taunggyi, Burma, to the subtropical and semi-arid capital of India, New Delhi, to the hot deserts of Baghdad, Iraq, and eventually to the cold shores of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States. The poetry, inspired by Singh’s exile from her birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962, to her resettlement as a stateless citizen in her ancestral home in India during her teen years and eventually, her arrival in her thirties to the U.S. as a resident alien, is fueled and driven by ancestral female voices-grandmothers and mother-and especially by the poet’s own hybrid ethos through woman-centric poetics. It is the community of women, in domestic and public spaces of the home and the world, in India/Burma and in the Indian diaspora, particularly the Sikh, that defines Singh’s singularly creative style. She, too, like many diasporic writers, uses hybridity to create an aesthetic that, although not unique in terms of postcolonialism, is particularly hers in that, as a tricultural transplant, her writing vividly reveals the pluralistic ethos of an exile and a diasporic. Like George Lamming (life-time achievement winner of the Guillén Award), Singh highlights not only about the trauma of dislocation, but also about the “pleasures of exile” through her splintered poetics.
From one of the evaluators’ reports:
This gorgeous, poignant, profound, reflective, and sensuous book evokes the complexities of agency in the midst of colonial imposition, familial bonds, hunger, and struggles of dignity. The role of food, of the aesthetic dimensions of nourishment, in which ginger, mangoes, teas, alongside spices, offer connection despite exile without collapsing into nostalgia but affirmations of life. Matthew Gavin Frank’s review of the book is wonderfully on point: “In Singh’s careful hands, the erased names of the dead can again be conjured and therefore remembered in the juice of a broken mango, the ferment of tea leaves, the sliver of ginger that hisses as it fries. This is a book—yes—about exile and estrangement, but also about the ferocity and persistence of joy, and about how a willingness to engage the pleasures of the flesh in the aftermath of the atrocities perpetuated thereon can be not only an act of rebellion, but [also] an act of re-dedication. This is a beautiful and essential book.” I agree. It’s worthy of the namesake of this book award.
Adds President Martinez:
Jaspal Kaur Singh’s Exiles and Pleasures compromises neither trauma nor sensuality in a complex admixture of poetry and prose that is both historical unearthing and incisive critique of colonialism and its legacies. The work takes the reader far beyond the limits of colonizer-colonized dualities to grapple with complexities of displacement and placement as markers of the human struggle to find beauty and love.
Born and raised in Burma, Jaspal Kaur Singh has lived in India, Iraq, South Africa, and Turkey. She is Professor Emerita of the English Department and Gender Studies at Northern Michigan University. She currently teaches courses in English Literature and Writing at Oregon State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon in 1998, a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry and Hybrid Writing from Northern Michigan University in 2022, and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (English Literature, Composition, and Gender Studies) from Oregon State University in 1992. Additionally, she holds an M.A. degree in English Literature from Agra University, India (1976), and a B.S.C. from the University of Delhi, India (1974). Her other books include Red Henna Blues (Creative non-fiction, Finishing Line Press, forthcoming); Sikh Gender and Sexual Identity: Construction of Gender and Queer Sexuality in Indian and Diaspora Writing (book, co-author, Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2026); Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity (Routledge, 2020); Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas, Postcolonial Studies (Peter Lang, 2009) Narrating the New Nation: Writings from South African Indians (anthology, co-author, Peter Lang, 2018); Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey (anthology, co-editor, Peter Lang, 2016); Representation and Resistance: Indian and African Women Writers at Home and in the Diaspora (monograph, University of Calgary Press, 2008); Trauma, Resistance, Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Writing (anthology, co-editor, Peter Lang, 2010); and Voice On the Water: Great Lakes Native America Now (anthology, assistant-editor, Northern Michigan University Press, 2011).
Claudia Jones Award
Arwa Awan
Arwa Awan, “Aimé Césaire’s ‘Tropical Marxism’ and the Problem of Alienation” presented at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2023 conference.
Arwa Awan is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in the history of political thought, with a focus on French, Iranian, and Caribbean anti-colonial thought, as well as in Marxist social theory, race, and political economy. Her dissertation project examines receptions of Marx and Marxism in twentieth century anti-colonial thought by bringing to light a distinct approach to anti-colonial critique that adopted alienation as its central idiom. Arwa is currently a residential fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago.
According to a member of the Awards Committee:
This paper offered a very nuanced account of Césaire’s political thought, situating it in relation to a variety of other Marxist figures of the Global South in the mid-20th century. In particular, this paper focused on discussing Césaire’s efforts to theorize and deploy a Marxism attuned to the specificities of the Caribbean context and antiblack racism. Awan’s argument was a fitting contribution to the project of shifting the geography of socialist reasoning. Awan contends that Césaire’s critical comments on Marxism and relation to the French Communist Party have often led to Césaire being understood as non-committally socialist or even anti-Marxist. A consequence of this is that Césaire’s contributions to poetry and literary theory often crowd out genuine discussion of their relation to not only Césaire’s own political career but also his contributions to political thought and questions of decolonization beyond the aesthetic. Considering Awan’s contribution in relation to the theoretical vernacular current in the CPA, what this paper demonstrates is that Césaire both participated in the project of creolizing Marxism as well as making significant theoretical statements on why thinkers of the Global South ought to be involved in creolizing Marxism, as opposed to embracing it in a spirit of orthodoxy on the one hand or throwing the baby out with the bathwater on the other hand. Moreover, Awan’s paper was paired with a paper focusing on more literary aspects of Césaire’s work. This pairing produced one of the conference’s strongest and most memorable panels, offering a wide perspective on Césaire; Awan’s contribution . . . brought a context and depth to the discussion of Césaire in this context that otherwise would be lacking. In short, this was a strong paper that made for a memorable panel and which touched on an array of intellectual currents and topics that are both central to and distinctive of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
President Martinez adds:
This remarkable work by Arwa Awan deepens our understanding of the relevance of Césaire both within political thought and to the ongoing project of the CPA to shift the geography of reason. An exemplar of cutting-edge theoretical work, Awan is positioned to help lead the way through the coming generation of scholars.
The Caribbean Philosophical Association’s assessment of Awan’s paper was shared by others. It is now available online in the peer-reviewed journal Political Theory.
The awards will be formally conferred by the Chair of the Awards Committee at a special ceremony at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting, which will take place this June 27–30th, 2024 in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
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).
