CPA Summer School 2017
More Information
Important Dates
Deadline to Apply: February 15th, 2017 by midnight EST
Deadline for Summer School Deposit: April 1, 2017
Deadline for Remaining Summer School Fees: May 1, 2017
To Apply
Please complete the Application Form here before midnight EST on February 15th, 2017.
We will send out notifications of acceptance by March 1st.
Who Should Apply
While our target audience for the CPA Summer School at UCONN is graduate students at all stages, advanced undergraduates, faculty, and independent scholars are also very welcome to participate.
For members of the CPA, philosophy is conceived, not as an isolated academic discipline, but as rigorous theoretical reflection about fundamental problems faced by humanity. Understood in this way, Caribbean philosophy is a transdisciplinary form of interrogation informed by scholarly knowledges as well as by practices and artistic expressions that elucidate fundamental questions that emerge in contexts of discovery, conquest, racial, gender, and sexual domination, genocide, dependency, and exploitation as well as freedom, emancipation, and decolonization. Reflection about these areas often appears in philosophical texts, but also in a plethora of other genres such as literature, music, and historical writings. The CPA invites theoretical engagements with all such questions, thematic areas, and genres with emphasis on any given discipline or field, but with a common interest in shifting the geography of reason, by which we mean approaching the Caribbean and the Global South in general as zones of sustainable practices and knowledges.
Logistics and Fees
The total price for the CPA Summer School includes the cost of meals and housing for June 14th-20th, 2017, conference registration and CPA membership dues, and Summer School fees.
For graduate and advanced undergraduates from the United States and Canada, the total price is $1500.
For non-UCONN faculty based in the United States and Canada, the total price is $1700.
For graduate and advanced graduate students coming from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, the total price is $1000.
For faculty based in the Caribbean, Latin America, and in Africa, the total price is $1200.
For UCONN faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, participation in the Summer School is free.
If you will be flying to UCONN, you should arrive into Hartford’s Bradley Airport on June 14th by mid-day and depart from there in the afternoon of June 20th. You can also take the bus or train into Hartford’s Union Station. In either case we will arrange to pick you up if you send us your travel itinerary by June 1st and if you are scheduled to arrive before 4p.m. on the 14th.
The Week’s Main Activities:
Wednesday, June 14th:
Arrive to UCONN & Check into the Dorms
4:30p.m. Early Dinner at El Instituto
Introductions
CPA Summer School Opening Lectures:
“Shifting the Geography of Reason,” Lewis Gordon, UCONN
“Sylvia Wynter, Economics and Afro-Caribbean Philosophy,” Paget Henry, Brown University
Thursday, June 15th:
Breakfast
“Truth-telling and the Discourse of Modernity,”
a seminar with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Cornell University
Lunch
“A Brief History of African Political Philosophy,”
a seminar with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Cornell University
Dinner
Friday, June 16th:
Breakfast
“Afro-Iberians as Black European Sailors, Soldiers, and Travelers in the Spanish Empire, 1500s-1600s,”
a seminar on Afro-Iberia with Leo J. Garofalo, Connecticut College
Lunch
“The History of Philosophy as Racial Project,”
a seminar with Peter K.J. Park, University of Texas, Dallas
Dinner
“Crossing Academic Disciplines for the Sake of Problem-Based Inquiry,”
an evening discussion with Peter Park
Saturday, June 17th:
Breakfast
“A Closer Look at Eighteenth-century Race Science,”
a seminar with Peter K.J. Park
Lunch
“Anti-colonialist Commitment and Critical Theory,”
a seminar with Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot
Dinner
“Thinking Democracy and Emancipation from a Muslim Perspective in an Islamophobic and Eurocentrist Environment,”
an evening discussion with Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun
Sunday, June 18th:
“A Farewell to Subalternism: Pluriversalism and Creolization,”
a seminar with Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun
Lunch
“Chasing Modern Slavery’s Specter: The Visual Culture of Today’s Abolitionism,” a seminar with Samuel Martínez, UCONN
“Turning Theory into Praxis: Teaching at a Community College,”
an evening discussion with LaRose Parris
Monday, June 19th:
“Being Apart and Africana Existentialism,”
a seminar with LaRose Parris
Lunch
“Sisters in Struggle: Reading Lorraine Hansberry and Simone de Beauvoir through Africana Existentialism and Black Feminist Thought,”
a seminar with LaRose Parris
Party at the Gordon’s Home
Tuesday, June 20th:
“Creolizing Theory,” a seminar with Michael Monahan, Marquette University and Jane Gordon, UCONN
Featured Guests and Conveners
Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun is the 2016 recipient of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a committed intellectual who is also a Shoah survivor. She has devoted her life to ideas in the service of struggles for human dignity. A world-renown sociologist, philosopher, and activist, she was among a group of activist philosopher social scientists that included Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze. Now Professor Emerita at the University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot, she is also known for her mentorship of generations of young women and immigrant scholars in France and across the globe. In addition to her research and ethnographic work in North Africa and the Middle East, she also built institutions ranging from Le Centre de Sociologie des Pratiques et des Représentations Politiques (CSPRP) to the journal Tumultes. In 2007, she organized the UNESCO conference Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, which contributed to recent scholarship on Fanon in the French-speaking world. After studying philosophy, she taught for several years in different secondary schools. Between 1969 and 1985, she taught sociology at the University of Paris 10- Nanterre before being recruited to University of Paris 7. With anthropologist Tassadit Yacine, she held a seminar at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales on gender in the Maghreb and Mashriq. With other academics she has been committed, since the eighties, in the defense of human rights and international law in Palestine and still is. She is author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of many works, including, Aristotle, Physique et Métaphysique (Paris PUF, 1966), Correspondance Marx-Lassalle (Paris PUF, 1977), L’invention du parti ouvrier. Aux origines de la social-démocratie (1848-1864) (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1990), Mythes et mémoire du mouvement ouvrier: le cas Lassalle (Paris, L'Harmattan, 1990), Désirs de paix, relents de guerre. Afrique du Sud, Irlande du Nord, Proche-Orient (Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), Femmes et politique au Moyen-Orient (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005), Vers une pensée politique postcoloniale. À partir de Frantz Fanon (Tumultes, octobre 2008), Edward Said, théoricien critique (Tumultes, novembre 2010), Le Moyen-Orient en movement (Tumultes septembre 2012), Dire les homosexualités d'une rive à l'autre de la Méditerranée (Tumultes octobre 2013), and L'État: concepts et politiques (Tumultes, mai 2015). She collaborates regularly as a reviewer in the literary journal, En attendant Nadeau.
Leo Garofalo’s research in Peru draws attention to the central roles of Native Andeans and Afro-Peruvians in shaping daily life within colonial cities. Recently, his work led him into the archives of the Spanish Inquisition and the cavernous vaults of the Spanish imperial bureaucracy in Seville to uncover traces of the passage of the tens of thousands of West Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Andes in the 1500s and 1600s. In order to fully understand the colonization of Pacific South America, he continues to reconstruct the physical and cultural paths of Afro-Andean peoples and their impact on colonial society and upon the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic worlds they passed through. His current research is on the Afro-Iberian roots of Andean witchcraft and the Atlantic and European routes of the West African Diaspora to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes. He co-edited Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early-Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812 and Más Allá De La Dominacion y La Resistencia, Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX with Paulo Drinot and published with Erin O’Connor Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire, vol. I and Documenting Latin America: Race, and Nation, vol. II. His recent publications and papers include “The Shape of a Diaspora: The Movement of Afro-Iberians to and from Colonial Spanish America”; “Conjuring with Coca and the Inca: Defining Colonial Cultural among Afro-Peruvian Ritual Specialists, 1580-1690”; “The Case of Diego Suárez: Afro-Iberian Roots in the Confraternities and Christian Identity of the Early Spanish Atlantic World”; “To Drink With Friends: The Dynamics of Gender and Ethnicity in the Andeanization of Peru's 17th-century Inns and Hispanic Shops” and “The Inka’s Drink in Colonial Goblets: Kurakas in Cuzco’s Chicha Corn Beer Market, 1640-1700.” He is a fellow at the UCONN’s Humanities Institute.
Jane Anna Gordon, a specialist in Africana political, social, and educational thought, modern and contemporary European social and political theory, methodologies in the social sciences, and contemporary slavery, is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science and Associate Professor in Political Science at UCONN. Her first book, Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict over Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville , was listed by the Gotham Gazette as one of the four best recent books on civil rights. She is co-editor with Lewis R. Gordon of Not Only the Master’s Tools and of The Companion to African American Studies, which was the NetLibrary Book of the Month in February 2007. She is also the co-author of Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age and author of Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. Her articles have appeared in Africa Development, Critical Philosophy of Race, The C.L.R. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Contemporary Thought, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Journal of Political Theology, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Performance Research, SOULS, and Philosophical Studies in Education. Her recent essay, “Theorizing Contemporary Practices of Enslavement: A Portrait of the Old and New,” won the American Political Science Association 2012 Foundations in Political Theory Best Paper Prize. She is Former President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association.
Lewis Gordon studied for his doctorate at Yale University, where he met his graduate mentor, the great Maurice Natanson, a phenomenologist and existentialist who was also a child of Yiddish theater in Brooklyn, New York, and whose mentor was Alfred Schutz, the great Austrian Jewish phenomenologist of the social sciences. Gordon’s research in philosophy is in Africana philosophy, philosophy of existence, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of science. While he has written on problems of method and disciplinary formation in the human sciences, Gordon has more recently devoted attention to problems in philosophy of physics, especially through a series of ongoing discussions and research projects with Stephon Alexander, who teaches physics at Brown University. In addition to theories of social transformation, decolonization, and liberation, Gordon’s research in social and political philosophy also addresses problems of justice and its normative scope. As a public intellectual, Gordon has written for a variety of political forums, newspapers, and magazines such as truthout (on which he now serves as a member of the Board of Directors), the Pambazuka News, the Johannesburg Salon, and The Mail & Guardian, has lectured across the globe, and co-founded book series, journals and organizations, including, with Paget Henry, the past Routledge series Africana Thought and, with Jane Anna Gordon, the Rowman & Littlefield International series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, the journal Radical Philosophy Review and the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of which he was the first president (2003 to 2008). He holds the Visiting Chair in Europhilosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Toulouse University.
Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. Founder and editor of The C. L. R. James Journal, Henry is also an external examiner for the University of the West Indies and the University of Guyana. Henry has presented papers in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa and organized several major international conferences on such topics as C.L.R. James’s Years in the U.S. and on Democracy and Development in the Caribbean. In 2003, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education recognized him as 26th of the 30 most quoted black scholars in the humanities. Henry is the co-editor (with Paul Buhle) of C. L. R. James’s Caribbean (Duke University Press, 1992) and author of Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000) which received the 2003 Frantz Fanon Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and Shouldering Antigua and Barbuda: The Life of V.C. Bird (Hansib, 2010). He is currently completing a book tentatively entitled, Further Studies in Caliban’s Reason: Africana Phenomenology and Political Economy.
Samuel Martínez is a Cuban-born ethnologist. In 2016, he was awarded the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) President’s Award for outstanding service to the Association. He has served as Program Chair for the 2016 AAA Annual Meeting, been a member of the board of the American Ethnological Society (AES, 2010-2014), and organized the AES’ 2014 Spring Meeting in collaboration with the Society for Visual Anthropology. He has also served as Chair (2003-04) of the American Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human Rights. His main area of research expertise is the migrant and minority rights mobilizations of undocumented Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Martínez contributed an extensive expert affidavit in support of the landmark case of Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic presented before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2005. He is the author of two ethnographic monographs and several peer-reviewed articles on the migration and labor and minority rights of Haitian nationals and people of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic. He is also editor of a contributory volume, International Migration and Human Rights (U California Press, 2009) and co-editor of three journal special issues. In his current research and writing, he brings critical scrutiny to the writings of northern human rights monitors, journalists and social scientists about Haitian-ancestry people in the Dominican Republic. He is also writing a book on the discourse and visual culture of antislavery in the late 20th & early 21st centuries. And with support from the Public Discourse Project of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, Martínez is organizing a conference and contributory volume examining the schismatic tendency of today’s anti-trafficking/antislavery discourse.
Michael Monahan joined Marquette University’s Philosophy faculty in 2003 after spending two years teaching at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois and earned his undergraduate degree at Purdue University. His teaching and research focuses on social and political philosophy, and issues of oppression and liberation (especially race and racism). He has published several articles on philosophy of race and political theory in journals including Philosophia Africana, Social Theory and Practice, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and the Journal of Philosophy and Sport. His book, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity, published by Fordham University Press in 2011, offers a challenge to the contemporary discourse on the nature of race and racism, beginning with a re-reading of the history of 17th century Barbados and pointing ultimately toward a paradigm of liberation beyond “the politics of purity.” He recently finished editing a book entitled Creolizing Hegel for the Creolizing the Canon series at Rowman and Littlefield International that is forthcoming in February 2017. Dr. Monahan attended the first meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2004 in Barbados and has not missed a meeting since. He served as Vice-President of the organization from 2008-2013 and is now its Treasurer. He has also been studying martial arts for 16 years, and teaches them as well.
Peter Park received a B.A. from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined University of Texas Dallas in the fall of 2007 as Assistant Professor of Historical Studies and in 2013 became Associate Professor. He teaches courses on historical methodology, early modern Europe, the European Enlightenment, the history of philosophy, and comparative philosophy. He studies European knowledge systems, cultural transfer, cultural canons, and identity. He has published articles and book chapters and has co-edited two books on historical and philosophical topics, including German Orientalism, comparative linguistics, early modern Jewish anti-Christian literature, philosophical skepticism, scientific racism in the Enlightenment, and German and French Enlightenment thinkers on China. He is the author of Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, which won the 2016 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award. He has begun work on a critical translation of Die speculative Trinitätslehre des späteren Orients (The Speculative Doctrine of the Trinity of the Late Orient) (Berlin, 1826) by the Lutheran theologian Friedrich August Tholuck (1799-1873), possibly the earliest study in the German language of heterodox philosophical sects of early Islam. This project is a collaboration with Dr. Ali Anooshahr, Middle East historian at the University of California at Davis.
LaRose T. Parris was born in Jamaica and raised in New York. She is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY where she teaches courses in African American Literature, Contemporary Black Fiction, Composition, and Basic Writing and is English Department Liaison to the Office for Students with Disabilities, Faculty Advisor to the Honors Student Journal, and Rotating Chairperson of the Faculty-Student Disciplinary Committee. Her first book, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2015, was awarded the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2016. Her fiction and criticism have also appeared in Callaloo and the Journal of Pan African Studies. In addition to teaching at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY, Dr. Parris has also taught classes in writing and literature at New School University, New York Institute of Technology, and City College/CUNY. Before beginning work on her PhD, Parris worked as a homelessness prevention advocate at the Urban Justice Center and completed a bachelor’s degree in History and Art History at New York University.
Olúfémi Táíwò aims to expand the African reach in philosophy and, simultaneously, to indigenize the discipline and make it more relevant to Africa and African students. His scholarly activities seek to contribute to the creation, at the intellectual level, of the categories that will enable all who share similar experiences to indigenize the alien idioms of our philosophical training and, simultaneously, globalize the historical experience of African peoples and their modes of discourse toward the emergence of authentic African voices in the ongoing polylogue among the world’s peoples. His book, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) was a joint winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015. His works have been translated into French, Italian, German, and Chinese. His pedagogy has always been guided by the need to impress on students the fact that philosophy, as a discipline and a vocation, has never been univocal or unilingual. Given that the African inflections have always been missing or unheralded in philosophy’s discourses and practices, it has always been crucial to him to inculcate in his students an appreciation of the multidimensionality and complexity of philosophy and the fact that it has always spoken in multiple registers. He strives to enable students to acquire a critical awareness of the world that they inhabit, be active participants in whatever sphere of life they find themselves and, finally, be suspicious of cant and ideas or patterns of thought for which they could not generate their own reasons to embrace. Every class he teaches aims to produce educated students who are aware of the world, expansively conceived; their place in it, both as individuals and as members of whatever communities they belong to; and the connection between them, their location, and the world.
Summer School Reading
PDFs of all of these readings will be emailed to everyone accepted to attend the Summer School.