John Drabinski
Professor of English and Comparative Literature, English
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
Research Expertise
African American/African Diaspora
Comparative Literature
Postcolonialism
John E. Drabinski is Professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African American Studies. He the author of four books, most recently Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minnesota 2019) and Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh 2012; winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association), editor of a half-dozen volumes on key figures in Atlantic thought, and has published dozens of articles of post-structuralist and black Atlantic critical theory. He is completing a book-length study of James Baldwin entitled ‘So Unimaginable a Price’: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic and a short work on the idea of “the afro-postmodern” tentatively titled What is the Afro-Postmodern?
His teaching works at the intersections of critical theory, cultural studies, and vernacular culture and politics. In particular, he is interested in how vernacular cultural practices operate as forms of resistance and world making in afro-Caribbean and African-American traditions with focus on figures such as Alain Locke, Suzanne Césaire, Édouard Glissant, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Angela Davis, and others.
Drabinski holds an A.B. (1991) in Philosophy and English from Seattle University and a M.A. (1993) and PhD (1996) in Philosophy from University of Memphis, where he was trained in post-structuralist thought and the foundations of critical race theory. He was formerly Charles Hamilton Houston 1915 Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College and was a fellow at The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University in 2013-1014. He maintains a professional website jdrabinski.com, at which you can read about his research interests, teaching experience, and current writing projects.
Publications
Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss
A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness
Author/Lead: John DrabinskiGlissant and the Middle Passage establishes Édouard Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.
Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations
This edited collection gathers together leading commentators on the work of Édouard Glissant in order to theorize the philosophical significance of his work
Author/Lead: John Drabinski , Marisa ParhamEdouard Glissant's work has begun to make a significant impact on francophone studies and some corners of postcolonial theory. His literary works and criticism are increasingly central to the study of Caribbean literature and cultural studies. This collection focuses on the particularly philosophical register of Glissant's thought. Each of the authors in this collection takes up a different aspect of Glissant's work and extends it in different directions. twentieth-century French philosophy (Bergson, Badiou, Meillassoux), the cannon of Caribbean literature, North American literature and cultural theory, and contemporary cultural politics in Glissant's home country of Martinique all receive close, critical treatment. What emerges from this collection is a vision of Glissant as a deeply philosophical thinker, whose philosophical character draws from the deep resources of Caribbean memory and history. Glissant's central notions of rhizome, chaos, opacity, and creolization are given a deeper and wider appreciation through accounts of those resources in detailed conceptual studies.
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Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other
The idea of the Other is central to both Levinas' philosophy and to postcolonialism, but they both apply the concept in different ways.
Author/Lead: John DrabinskiNow, John Drabinski asks what we can learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference. Drawing on the works of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant and Subcommandante Marcos, he rethinks ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics and politics.
Edinburgh 2012; winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Godard Between Identity and Difference
This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference.
Author/Lead: John DrabinskiGodard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics, and so on.
Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas
Sensibility and Singularity contends that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was a vital, living resource throughout Levinas’ philosophical career.
Author/Lead: John DrabinskiThe standard account of Emmanuel Levinas’s work assumes his distance from classical phenomenology. Drabinski argues that Husserl was a vital resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. He documents Levinas' transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense, placing them centrally within Levinas' ethical work. What emerges in this book is a thorough account of Levinas’s constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.