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theses

“Intergenerational Geographies of Race and Gender: Tracing the Confluence of Afro-Caribbean and Feminist Thought Beyond the Word of Man,” proposes a theory of humanism that grapples with contemporary patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. First, following the work of Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon, it develops methodological tools for mapping experiments in collective life currently unintelligible to conventional understandings of the human. Second, it argues that Caribbean philosophy answers Wynter’s challenge to think the human in its multiplicity, as an expression of our shared and interdependent lives still singular and differential. This stems from the Caribbean’s history as a site of both violence and creolization, often mobilized around the distinction between different kinds of humanity and between humans and nonhumans. Finally, the dissertation brings this conceptual apparatus to bear on a site of analysis where the question of who counts symbolically is a matter of life and death and the environment impinges on the supposed sovereignty of the human: New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. This interdisciplinary work reconceives the relationship between feminist theory and Afro-Caribbean philosophy—often seen as antagonistic based on the question of whether a race or gender analysis should be “primary”—by juxtaposing those fields with various strains of new materialism and affect theory particularly inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Before an “ontological turn,” Caribbean and feminist thought articulated political-ecological readings of how bodies, landscapes and violence interpenetrate to produce hierarchies of the human. Thus, this dissertation represents not only a diagnostic tool for understanding how power is organized at a global level but also a repository of alternative political imaginaries where local practices index an outside to the current hegemony of a narrow Eurocentric, White Man. The result is a dynamic spatio-temporal model of race, gender, and economics Wynter calls “genre studies,” the study of human kinds, that is multi-scalar and pluri-conceptual, up to the task of mapping how neoliberal capitalism globally spaces partial incorporation and fungibilization. Genre studies both examines how specific descriptive statements of Man regenerate and how we struggle intergenerationally for a world otherwise.

ETD_6612

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Adam Maxlind Hantel

doi:10.7282/T3057HXS

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.