Comparative Political Theory, Creolization, and Reading Rousseau through Fanon

Jane Anna Gordon

The awareness of mixed origins does not mean that individuals can spontaneously retrace the flows that contributed to shaping their current practices and environment. Indeed, the long-term impact of cultural imports is often proportional to the capacity to forget that they were once acquired or imposed ... How many Italians today do not see the tomato as an intrinsic part of their cultural heritage? How many Native American leaders would dare to reject the horse as culturally foreign? ... [W]e could prolong the list interminably in a number of directions: Latin America without Christianity, India without English, Argentina without Germans, Texas without cattle, the Caribbean without blacks or rum, England without tea ... Culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global flows that started in the late fifteenth century and continue to affect human populations today. Yet the history of the world is rarely told in these terms. Indeed, the particularity of the dominant narratives of globalization is a massive silencing of the past on a world scale, the systematic erasure of continuous and deep-felt encounters that have marked human history throughout the globe.

— Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003: 34)

I offer, in what follows, a discussion and critique of comparative political theory, an outline of what it means to creolize political theory, and present an example of this alternative approach through bringing together the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon.

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THEORY AND DISAVOWAL

The terrain within the U.S. academy for creolizing political theory was significantly prepared by recent developments in the subfield of comparative political theory. Informed fundamentally by hermeneutics and postcolonial thought, comparative political theory has, from the outset, aimed to expand what is designated thought, in the words of Roxanne Euben, to ensure that "'political theory' is about human and not merely Western dilemmas ... [making] room for the possibility that there is humanly significant knowledge outside the confines of the Western canon" (1999: 9 — 10). For Fred Dallmayr (2004), echoing the challenge of Leo Straus