Description

By (author) Ciccariello-Maher, George; By (author) Maher, Geo

Short /annotation
Geo Maher brings the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a decolonized dialectics that is suited to the struggle against the legacies of slavery and colonialism while also breaking the impasse between dialectics and postcolonial theory.

Anticolonial theorists and revolutionaries have long turned to dialectical thought as a central weapon in their fight against oppressive structures and conditions. This relationship was never easy, however, as anticolonial thinkers have resisted the historical determinism, teleology, Eurocentrism, and singular emphasis that some Marxisms place on class identity at the expense of race, nation, and popular identity. In recent decades, the conflict between dialectics and postcolonial theory has only deepened. In Decolonizing Dialectics Geo Maher breaks this impasse by bringing the work of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel together with contemporary Venezuelan politics to formulate a dialectics suited to the struggle against the legacies of colonialism and slavery. This is a decolonized dialectics premised on constant struggle in which progress must be fought for and where the struggles of the wretched of the earth themselves provide the only guarantee of historical motion.

Table of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Ruptures 1
1. Jumpstarting the Class Struggle 23
2. Toward a New Dialectics of Race 47
3. The Decolonial Nation in Motion 75
4. Latin American Dialectics and the Other 103
5. Venezuela”s Combatiive Dialectics 123
Spirals 153
Notes 171
Bibliography 219
Index 233

Review quote
“Theoretically informed and mindful of the correctives real history offers to speculation, this book is a noteworthy contribution to critical social theory and decolonial discourses. Recommended. Graduate students through faculty.”

Review quote
“Decolonizing Dialectics marks an important contribution to a growing body of literature concerned with decolonizing critical – and, more broadly speaking, political – theory, as well as a worthwhile addition to the works devoted to the dialectical tradition and its critics. In particular, Ciccariello-Maher’s readings of Fanon and Dussel offer a valuable new take on their respective engagements with dialectical thought, and on the complex and fraught relationship that dialectics shares with decolonization, theoretically and practically.”

Review quote
“[A] rather unique and sophisticated project that at times leaves the reader breathless from the elegant speed with which it moves through concepts…. [T]his book functions as an opening, by recentering dialectical reason and placing it in service of a radical anti-systemic practice, to successive discussions….”

Review quote
“Decolonizing Dialectics makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the dialectic of unity and difference and how difference becomes antagonism within and beyond the legacies of colonialism. It is essential reading in the renewal of debate about the philosophy of internal relations and the systematic dialectic.”

Review quote
“Decolonizing Dialectics‘ timeliness lies in the fact that it gives us an approach to these tensions as academics, which exploits their decolonial potential, and affirms, after and through Fanon, their necessary violence, rather than just settle for reciprocity, closure, or another book on dialectics.”

Review quote
“This clear, well-written and refreshingly forthright book aims to decolonize dialectics and to wield that decolonized dialectics (never, Ciccariello-Maher insists, ‘the dialectic’) as a method to understand and further d