Creolizing Practices of Freedom: Recognition and Dissonance - Paperback

by Michael J. Monahan (Author)

Creolizing Practices of Freedom argues that many of our long-standing debates over the concept of freedom have been bound up in the politics of purity--explicitly or implicitly insisting on clear and distinct boundaries between self and other or between choice and coercion. In this model, freedom becomes a matter of purifying the self at the individual level and the body politic at the larger social level. The appropriate response to this is a creolizing theory of freedom, an approach that sees indeterminacy and ambiguity not as tragic flaws, but as crucial productive elements of the practice of freedom.

Author Biography

Michael J. Monahan is associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee. His teaching and research focus on political philosophy, philosophy of race and racism, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and Hegel. He is the editor of Creolizing Hegel (2017) and The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (2011).