Caliban as Philosopher: An Interview with Paget Henry

Paget Henry, Linda Alcoff

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 147-163 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/40197

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 Caliban as Philosopher
An Interview with Paget Henry

Linda Martín Alcoff

Paget Henry, professor of sociology

at Brown University and author of Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-
Caribbean Philosophy (2000), is one of our most innovative and interesting
social theorists writing today. His work over the past twenty-five years has
focused principally on interpretive studies of C. L. R. James and other major
Caribbean thinkers, along with development theory from the perspective of
the Caribbean, covering such topics as structural adjustment and the North
American Free Trade Agreement.
In recent years, Henry has dedicated himself to a new project:
bringing forth and developing critical reconstructions of the original philos-
ophies of the Caribbean, showing their important relationship to African as
well as European thought, and exploring their contributions to a liberatory
philosophy that speaks to today’s complex world. Thus he titles his book
Caliban’s Reason, invoking the slave who talks back, who has his, or her,
own ideas, concepts, and philosophical problematics.
Caliban’s Reason offers a new conceptualization of the rich tra-
ditions of thought in the English-speaking Caribbean, articulating philo-
sophical ideas from poets, writers, and literary critics, as well as social
theorists, and dividing them into two broad categories, the historicist and
the poeticist, which Henry defines in the interview below. The book offers
excellent overviews as well as insightful critiques of the work of C. L. R.
James, Frantz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Wynter, and others, bringing
them into dialogue with the critical theory tradition of Jürgen Habermas
and the burgeoning Afro-American philosophy now being written in the
United States. In future work, Henry plans to explore the South Asian

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 4.1
Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press

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Indian thought that plays such a key role in the West Indies today, the
intellectual work of Caribbean women (to a greater extent than he was
able to do in Caliban’s Reason), and the relationship between the liberatory
philosophies of the English Caribbean, the Spanish Caribbean, and the rest
of Latin America.
In our conversation Henry talks about, among other things, how
he understands the relationships between philosophy and culture as well
as between sociological, historical, and philosophical approaches to ideas,
about coming to New York from Antigua to go to college, about tak-
ing courses from Hannah Arendt, about postmodernism’s relationship to
anticolonial philosophy, and about the need to have more South-South con-
versations in the development of new philosophical work. —L. M. A.

Linda Martín Alcoff: Latino readers will be interested in your book, Caliban’s
Reason, first and foremost because of the overlap between Latin American
and Caribbean societies, but also because of your subtitle, Introducing Afro-
Caribbean Philosophy, which identifies a philosophy by its cultural location.
This is an issue for us as well, because this is not the usual way Anglo-Americans
think about philosophy, which complicates our efforts to gain a foothold in
North American philosophy. So I want to begin by asking how you understand
the relationship between philosophy and culture. Can philosophies transcend the
cultures that gave birth to them?
Paget Henry: Well, two things. I think that philosophy has two capabilities
that enable it to transcend its cultural context, neither one of which is per-
fect. These two possibilities rest with the logical and the phenomenological
capabilities of philosophical discourses.
To me, the logical gives philosophy a deductive/inductive mode
of conceptually abstracting from specific cultural contexts. In contrast, the
phenomenological gives it a self-reflexive capability in the negating and
transcending of specific cultural contexts; just think of Hegel’s definition
of the “I” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that capacity to negate one’s
surroundings and to define oneself in terms of that capacity to negate,
right? That’s the phenomenological moment that gives philosophy this
ability to rise above specific cultural contexts.
So we have a logical and a self-reflexive capacity, but the philoso-
pher, before he or she comes to maturity, is formed in a specific culture.
He or she has to learn a specific language and is shaped by that language,
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you see, so that the capacity to be formed culturally and the capacity to
transcend go together. Neither one is an absolute in my view. I see them
as parts of a dialectic that go together. If we absolutize either one of these
capabilities it leads to trouble. In the case of the logical, it leads to a form of
logicism that is formalistic and ultimately quite shallow. In the case of the
phenomenological capability, as we can see so well in the case of Edmund
Husserl, it can lead to a form of a priorism that can also become quite
formalistic. So while it’s possible to transcend cultural contexts through
these two registers, I think we have to recognize at the same time that they
are finite, limited, and that they are part of a dialectic in which cultural
specificity is very much a player. These can never really give philosophy the
ability to completely cut its ties with the culturally specific.

LMA: Why did you write Caliban’s Reason?

PH: Again, two things. As I pointed out in the dedication, we have this
outstanding journalist and activist in Antigua, Tim Hector, a very eloquent
writer, and one of his most piercing questions has always been, where is
our philosophy? He would ask it in a way that you got a feeling he knew it
was there, somewhere, but he couldn’t find it; he never made the argument
that we didn’t have one, but at the same time he couldn’t quite put his
finger on it. I always had the feeling that he was right, and I always had
the feeling that I knew where it was! Later, after the rise of neoliberalism
as the dominant ideology in the Caribbean, I was no longer able to be
involved in on-the-ground developmental work as a sociologist, and so I
found myself out of the loop in terms of advising governments and so on. I
was a sociologist of development without a praxis. But for me this was the
perfect opportunity to reflect on what I had been doing and why my praxis
was all of a sudden nonviable, suspended. This became the opportunity
to explore these philosophical questions. I usually spend my summers in
Antigua, so there I was talking to Tim and there he was asking these
questions, so all of that came together.

LMA: But you’ve had an interest in philosophy for a long time. You’re a so-
ciologist by discipline but your work belongs in the broad category of social
theory. Could you talk a little about your educational background and different
things that led you to study philosophy and social theory? And I also want to ask
you about the distinction between philosophy and the sociology of knowledge, as
well as the distinction between the history of ideas and philosophy. These are two
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very sharp distinctions that philosophers like to make, but in your book you’re
crossing those boundaries all the time because you are providing so many insights
about the sociology of knowledge, but also giving a history of ideas, as well as a
critical evaluation of those ideas all along the way.
PH: I’ve always taken quite seriously that statement by Merleau-Ponty that
the sociologist philosophizes every time he’s required not only to record
facts but to comprehend them. And I’ve always added to that that the
philosopher sociologizes whenever he or she is required not only to deduce
conclusions but also to comprehend that act of discursive production.
That reciprocity between doing philosophy and doing sociology
has been visible to me from day one. I was always conscious of the philo-
sophical element in my sociological work. There are inevitably difficult
methodological choices to be made as a sociologist and there’s no way that
you are going to make these choices without the aid of philosophy. There
are different conceptions of social science practices: the nature of the social
sciences is a matter of long-standing debate, and in this philosophers have
had a lot to say. This takes you right into epistemology and the nature of
social science knowledge. I’ve always enjoyed these discussions, and I really
turned to philosophers to help me in making some of my crucial sociolog-
ical choices. So, the intertextual conception of philosophy that I develop in
the book arose directly out of my sociological practice.
I’ve never seen sociology as a separate autonomous discipline. Soci-
ology is not autonomous; it depends on statistics, it depends on philosophy,
it depends on psychology. You cannot separate sociology from its neighbor-
ing disciplines, right? And I could flip over this intertextual conception of
sociology and look at the way in which philosophy draws on and can be
supplemented by sociological work. To me Marx really exemplifies this—
how he brings the two together in a very, very powerful way, so that they
supplement one another. That’s the way I’ve always seen the relationship
between sociology and philosophy. So it was very easy for me to link the
two as I was writing the book.

LMA: But sociology has changed a lot as a discipline since the 1960s when you
were a student, hasn’t it? At that time the link was more explicit and accepted,
and now sociology has become much more quantitative and empirical.
PH: No, there have always been three distinct approaches to sociology: the
quantitative, the historical, and the interpretative or hermeneutic. These
three compete for dominance; who the leading scholars are at the moment
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and which schools they fall into determine how visible these three different
approaches are. So if we are in a period where we have an Alfred Schutz,
or somebody like that, then the hermeneutic side of the discipline is very
visible, and lots of graduate students get trained in it and so forth. But if you
don’t have a figure of that stature then it tends to become invisible. However,
you are right in the sense that institutional and financial support is greatest
for the quantitative aspect. There’s this feeling that sociology should be
scientific, that it should look like a science, like the natural sciences, but
this has never been the whole story in sociology. I’ve always been in the
historical school, always considered myself a historical sociologist.

LMA: Let me get in a biographical question here: Could you tell us about how
you came from Antigua and became a professor of sociology at Brown?
PH: I graduated from high school in Antigua when I was fourteen. My
parents didn’t know what to do with me; I was too young to go to the
University of the West Indies, and of course nobody wanted to send me off
to the wilds of America at the age of fourteen. So I stayed in school another
year, did courses in physics and chemistry, all on my own, because we did
not have science teachers. The situation with teachers was very bad.
Now, the school system in Antigua is modeled on the British
system, so in high school you do two sets of exams: the O levels, which is
the equivalent of high school in the United States, and then, two years later,
the A levels. So at age fifteen, I did additional O levels and later my A levels
in the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. I became really
enthused with the natural sciences, but when I applied to the University of
the West Indies, which at that time was very small, I got put on the waiting
list. I was very frustrated; I wanted to get on with my studies, so I applied
to universities in the United States. City College in New York was the first
to accept me. From there I went to Cornell for graduate work and got my
first job at SUNY, Stony Brook. I taught at the University of Virginia for
two years, and now I am here at Brown.

LMA: And City College was a good place for you?

PH: Oh sure. I loved New York. As a matter of fact I only applied to
universities in New York City, because as far as I was concerned the United
States was New York at that time. A little kid in Antigua, what did I know
about Iowa and California? I knew nothing about them. All I knew was
New York, so I applied to NYU, Columbia, City—that was it.
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LMA: And you moved to Harlem?

PH: Yes, I moved to Harlem, and actually moving to the United States is
what got me out of the natural sciences. For me, the natural sciences, physics
in particular, was a dialogue with nature. When I came to the United
States that changed dramatically. I developed this interest in sociology,
and several things were responsible. First, the shock of living in a large
industrial society. I had to find out what that was all about because it was
so different from Antigua. And then came the shock of living in a racist
society. I thought Antigua was bad but the United States was a shock, a real
shock. You really felt the racism much more sharply. The degradation of
blackness, of black identity, of what it meant to be black was much greater
here. I felt it to the point where I had to do something. I never felt the
corresponding need to deal with racism in Caribbean society the way it
became a pressing issue, a moral issue, a political issue for me here in the
States. So much so that doing physics and carrying on this conversation
with nature seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford. That was the second
big factor in explaining why I gave up physics and turned to sociology.
The third factor was, at least at City College (I don’t know about
other places), the technologization and commodification of physics, which
was awful. I felt as though I was being prepared for a job at General Motors
in so many of the physics classes. Professors would be explaining a principle,
and there was always a reference to something that Ford or GM was doing. I
was not at all excited about doing all this technological stuff for corporations
and began to lose interest in physics because of its industrial orientation.
It was physics being converted into technology, and that for me was not
a particularly exciting intellectual challenge. And finally, meeting Erich
Fromm and reading his book The Sane Society also was very instrumental
in my shift from physics to sociology.

LMA: Tell us about that meeting with Erich Fromm.

PH: Well, it was during the sixties, right at the peak of the student takeover
at Columbia in 1968, at the height of the student movement, the height
of the Civil Rights movement. U.S. society was wonderfully politicized,
with all these political mobilizations taking place. There was just so much
to be involved in. During the takeover at Columbia, Mark Rudd was
head of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. They
wanted solidarity and support from other students at other universities, so
we organized a massive contingent of students at City College and marched
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Alcoff . Interview with Paget Henry

from 137th and Broadway, right down to 116th and Broadway. And of
course we had lots and lots of speakers, and the chief speaker at the rally
was Erich Fromm.

LMA: I can’t imagine him as a rally speaker.

PH: No! But he certainly rose to the occasion and many of us knew that he
would because he had done this little thing called the Socialist Manifesto. I
read it, picked it up quite by accident. So he gave a great talk at the rally
and later on we brought him to City College to speak at the City College
Forum. I had the pleasure of picking him up at the airport and driving
him in, and so I had this chance to really talk to him. He began telling me
all about the Frankfurt School and all the players in it, as well as some of
his exchanges with Herbert Marcuse, the differences between them, and so
forth. He also spoke of what sociology meant to him, and of course what
he thought were the problems of modern industrial society. So it was really
this question about the nature of modern industrial society that made our
conversation most engaging for me, and that really helped to push me in
the direction of sociology. And yes, I was quite impressed.

LMA: I know that you had many incredible experiences in those years: tell us
the Hannah Arendt story.
PH: One of the great things about going to school in New York is that you
have all of these great universities not far from one another, and in those
days classes were open and lots of us students in sociology used to go down
to Columbia and sit in on Robert Merton’s lectures. I mean that was just
the thing to do, so even though we were not students at Columbia, we’d go
down and listen to Robert Merton. For me, the other person’s classes that
I always looked forward to sitting in on were Hannah Arendt’s. She was
just such an amazing lecturer, and so I would always go whenever I could.
So one day she was talking about her book On Revolution. Actually
it had been assigned and I had read it in preparation for the class. I was
very engaged by her reading of Herman Melville in that book because,
being a student of C. L. R. James and having read Mariners, Renegades, and
Castaways, which was James’s study of Melville, it was striking to me that
hers was sort of an exact opposite reading. James reads Melville and sees in
the Pequod, the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of American society, the
fact that you have all of these racial types on board the boat, various classes
and everything. He sees all of the contradictions of the modern individual
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who is obsessed with power, control, and domination, and who has to know
how to manage bureaucratic structures and bureaucratic organization. So
for him all of the major themes of modern life are there on the Pequod.
And what strikes James more than anything else is the tragic
figure of Ahab in contrast to the humanity and the spontaneous creativity
of the workers. Even though they don’t rise up and take control, as he
thinks they will do one day, we don’t see in them the human destruction
or the depths of neurosis and decay that we see in Ahab. So for James this
is why the future belongs to the crew on the Pequod, the workers—it’s a
very Marxist, radical reading of Melville, sensing very clearly the rise of a
new class in America, the class of capitalists. In a way James reads Melville
in relation to Prospero, as opposed to Faust, because in the case of Ahab,
as a capitalist, he’s dealing with racial capitalism in a way that Faust is
not. And so he becomes a classic Prospero figure and the workers become
these Caliban-type figures. You have a classic conflict between Prospero
and Caliban being played out on the Pequod. The way he reads the other
texts of Melville, if this problem is not resolved then U.S. civilization will
certainly go deeper into crisis. That’s how James reads a novel like Pierre, as
an example of what happens when this crisis is not resolved. It’s the failure
to resolve social crises that breeds and produces the neuroses of Ahab and
Pierre.
Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, sort of sidelines Moby-Dick
and focuses mainly on Billy Budd. She focuses on the failures, the inability
to change the dominant order. And in these later works of Melville there’s
no question that there’s greater pessimism about the possibility of change,
that the individual characters who are challenging the existing order don’t
come out as well—they don’t remain the spontaneous, creative creatures
they are in Moby-Dick—and so what Arendt uses Melville to show is that
there are fundamental things you can’t change, which begins to echo her
positions on race and gender. So she sort of instantiates the power of the
dominant order.

LMA: So why did you like to go listen to her?

PH: Because she was just sheer brilliance. I disagreed with a lot that she said,
but just to watch her at work and to listen to her was quite amazing. It was
also a wonderful confirmation of my own philosophical understandings.
Hearing her talk about Kant confirmed my own understanding of Kant;
hearing her talk about Marx and Hegel confirmed my grip on these figures.
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Alcoff . Interview with Paget Henry

She went in and out of Kant, jeez, the way I went in and out of a newspaper,
and that was really powerful.

LMA: It was confirming not in the sense that she had the same take as you. . . .
PH: Oh, no no.

LMA: So in what sense did it confirm you to hear a different view?

PH: Because in her style of lecturing she would always begin by doing
this wonderful exposition, laying out the great thinker, and then she would
begin to position this thinker so she could critique him. So listening to her
do the expositions was always for me the confirming experience. Then you
would watch how she did the critiques; in the case of Melville I could see
how her process of selection was very different from James’s. So you saw her
making these moves that were very specific, very particular, questionable,
but at the same time strategic for what she was doing. There were certain
things you could disagree with, but one was always impressed with her
intellect and her imagination. Very insightful.

LMA: So you took her a copy of James’s book on Melville.

PH: Yes. So to finish the story, after we had discussed On Revolution and
I had heard her reading of Melville, I decided that I must expose her to a
completely different view of Melville. So I took her my copy of Mariners,
Renegades, and Castaways and went up to her after class. This was the first
time she realized that I wasn’t really in her class, and she said to me, “I don’t
remember getting an exam from you.” I said, “There’s a very good reason
why you haven’t gotten an exam from me: I’m not in the class”! Then, I
explained to her that I just had to be there. She was really thrilled. We had
a great exchange about James. She took the book and promised to read it.
Unfortunately, we never really had the chance to talk about it because, not
long after that, she left for the University of Chicago and became a member
of the Circle of Social Thought, and I took off for Cornell.

LMA: Let’s go back to your book. I wanted to ask about the categories that
you develop, the poeticist and the historicist: Could you define these for us and
explain how you came up with them? And do they correspond to contrasting
political orientations? Clearly the historicist group is more Marxist, but what
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you show in the book is that it is a mistake to see the poeticists as not thinking
about political issues.
PH: Let’s take the historicist category first. As a sociologist of development
operating out of a tradition of political economy, I always saw myself as
being in this historicist tradition. So even before I formulated this cate-
gory I had a vague awareness that this is what we were philosophically. I
knew that as a group we had a kinship with historical materialism and by
that category—historicist—what we shared was an approach to the study
of society and of identity that saw both as being the product of histori-
cal action, as the product of historical praxis. Praxis was the medium in
which institutions came to be and the medium in which identities were
formed, sustained, and realized. It was historical activity—people engag-
ing in collective action, people undertaking a social project that resulted in
institutions—which brought about changes in society. So historicism was
this view that history was constitutive of self and society, that it was also the
great transformer of self and society, and that to understand the transfor-
mation of colonial identities into postcolonial ones we need some form of
praxis, some form of historical activity. That’s the core of what historicists
share.
Now, I use the term historicism as opposed to historical materialism
because not all historicists are Marxists. If we look at a lot of the pan-
Africanists, they are also historicists. They too believe in historical action
as the great transformer of human identities and societal institutions, but
at the same time their conception of history is very different. If you look at
Marcus Garvey, history for him had the structure of cycles of racial conflict,
racial rise and fall, and certainly not the pattern of class conflict that you
have among Marxists. So you find different conceptions of history in the
historicist school. We have providential conceptions of history, which hold
that history is an arena in which God is active and that to understand history,
to read it, one has to attempt to read the providence of God. So the category
of providence becomes central for many historicists. I find the category of
providential historicism very interesting because it marks that transition
out of predominantly religious philosophies and into secular ones.
So that’s the school of historicism, and I was located in its political
economy wing. When I came to write this book I simply began by reflecting
on what I was doing as a historicist; I began to formulate the fundamental
ontology that was so central to it: history as this constituting activity. Then
I went on to talk about the epistemological positions that were implicit in
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what we were doing, how we saw knowledge, why were we opposed to

certain conceptions of knowledge production, why we banned the category
of spirit, why were we so opposed to idealism, and things like that. And
then, when we came to consider issues of race, for example, I had to consider
the pan-Africanists and how they differed from my version of political
economy. That’s how the category historicism got worked out.
The category of poeticism was a bigger challenge, because here
were all these great Caribbean intellectuals, well known, and there was
always a real tension between what they were doing and what we were
doing. Occasionally these debates would break out in which we would just
be at each other’s throats. We did a major James conference at Wellesley, I
can’t remember the year, and we invited Derek Walcott, who proceeded to
trash the whole conception of historicism. He made the argument that the
poet is totally and completely beyond the reach of history. As a matter of
fact at one point in his talk, I remember, he made this claim: “If history had
never existed, poets would still be here.” I don’t have to tell you what kind
of reaction he got. So there it was, a whole other school of thought that was
saying something very different from what we were saying. So I knew if
I was going to write this book I had to make a phenomenological move
and suspend my own ontological commitments to historicism, suspend my
opposition to poeticism, or what I would later call poeticism, and begin to
look philosophically at what this group was doing.
The one that I found most accessible was Wilson Harris, so I fo-
cused on him very intensely, reading his works very carefully and looking
at the philosophical assumptions he made in the course of producing nov-
els. The interesting thing about Wilson Harris is that the philosophical
elements in his art are very up front, very explicit, easy to see, especially
when he uses words like “ontic closure.”

LMA: In a novel?
PH: In a novel! He makes it very easy for you. As a matter of fact, James
said about Wilson Harris, “Mr. Harris writes his philosophy and his art in
the same line.” I think that is so true. Wilson was the perfect candidate for
me to really begin to inquire into this alternative philosophy. So as I began
to look at it as a philosophy I saw that they were using the process of poetic
creation, poetic composition, in the way in which we were using historical
action, that the process of poetic composition became an ontological space
and also an epistemic space. The process of poetic composition, they argued,
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was the site at which human self-formation occurred. It was the poetic
process that gave society its original naming and original meanings: the
original semanticizing of reality was a poetic process. That is why they
believe poetics is fundamental, because it is constitutive and has ontological
status. This is so clear in Wilson. Once I realized that, I called it poeticism.

LMA: So there’s a kind of parallelism between poeticism and historicism, and

neither are apolitical.
PH: No, there’s no easy correlation between these two schools and pro-
gressive politics; it’s a much more complex relationship. We have poeticists
who are very progressive and radical and we have historicists who are very
apolitical and conservative.

LMA: Let me turn next to some of the issues about decolonizing philosophy
in the book. You argue that the African aspects of the philosophical traditions
in the Caribbean have been woefully neglected, and you offer a wonderfully
helpful overview of some of the main strains in African philosophical traditions
that continue to be influential in Caribbean thought, especially concentrating
on the ontological categories. Were you concerned with issues of interpretation
here, given the enormous variety in African philosophy?
PH: Not really, and in some ways I surprised myself, but for me I knew
when I was doing it that it was going to be a matter of striking a balance
between the general and the culturally specific, which relates back to your
first question. So I very consciously used both phenomenology and logic to
try and articulate what were to me the most general features—or if you like,
the common features—among these different philosophies, or I should say
common features among philosophies of different ethnic groups in West
Africa. In other words, if you looked at them logically and phenomenolog-
ically they allowed you to see the generalities and the commonalities. At
the same time I knew that there was a danger of either overgeneralizing or
just not seeing specific differences. So those logical and phenomenological
strategies I combined very carefully with my skills as an ethnographer.

LMA: So you relied both on text and on dialogues that you had with people.
PH: Right. Basically I just interviewed a lot of sages. I went to Ghana
and I was particularly fascinated with the Tellensi, so that was the group
that I studied most intensely. I spent the entire summer of 1994 among the
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Tellensi just talking to their barnabas, tendaanas, all of the major religious
leaders of that community. Why the Tellensi? Because they have the most
explicit set of predestinarian beliefs of any West African ethnic group. The
explicitness of their predestinarian discourses is just amazing, striking, you
can’t miss it.

LMA: Many people think that the project of decolonization has a natural ally
in poststructuralism, that poststructuralism is the philosophy that will best be
able to do postcolonial work. Though you are critical of postmodernism to some
extent, you have more positive things to say about poststructuralism. In your
discussion of Sylvia Wynter’s focus on epistemes, for example, and the need to
critique the developmental teleology that one still finds in James, one might
find a resonance with some aspects of poststructuralism. So how do you position
Afro-Caribbean philosophy in relation to European poststructuralism?
PH: Poststructuralism has functioned in Afro-Caribbean philosophy pri-
marily as a hermeneutic resource. Its functions have been primarily to
deepen interpretive capabilities. It has allowed Afro-Caribbean thinkers
and in particular Afro-Caribbean philosophers to get at deeper levels of
meaning than they were able to while remaining within the historicist and
poeticist traditions. So in a way I think it has enriched the hermeneutic
capabilities of Afro-Caribbean philosophy.
There is a real parallel between the way in which Sylvia Wynter in
particular has used poststructuralism and the way in which Lewis Gordon
uses phenomenology. Lewis uses phenomenology to get at the deeper con-
stitutive processes by which groups produce and legitimate racism. Seeing
racism as grounded in the process of meaning construction enabled Lewis
to bring new phenomenological resources to Afro-Caribbean philosophy.
And so it really gets appropriated for hermeneutic use, for use in inter-
preting racial meanings, gender meanings, and this is also how poststruc-
turalism has been appropriated for the most part. It has not fundamentally
shaken the hegemony of historicism and poeticism, those remain very much
the dominant schools, and I would argue that the work of Lewis Gordon
has had a more profound impact. Lewis’s existentialism has taken people
back to Fanon and has really renewed the interest in Fanon, and so we are
more likely to see a strong school of Caribbean existentialism than a school
of poststructuralism.

LMA: Because it has more resources for theorizing racism?

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PH: Not necessarily that but because there are more existential roots already
planted. Lewis is watering some roots that haven’t been watered in a long
time. While poststructuralism may develop such roots, at the moment
they are not as obvious as the existential roots that are gaining new life. I
think that it’s possible to talk about an emerging school of Afro-Caribbean
existentialism. I see more of an influence there.
Sylvia Wynter’s work, as I said, continues to gain recognition, but
doesn’t have quite the same level of recognition as Lewis’s. If anybody
could do for poststructuralism what Lewis has done for existentialism it
certainly would be Sylvia. But at the moment I really don’t see a Caribbean
school of poststructuralism developing. It might take root in the French
Caribbean, which I don’t know very well because I don’t know French
very well, but I was thinking more of the English-speaking Caribbean.
The other interesting development that I think has potential is the work
of Charles Mills and his use of logic. While I don’t think it will hold the
kind of attraction that existentialism has, I think we should keep an eye out
for the impact of his work. There has always been, because of the British
influence, a strong analytic, empiricist tendency in Afro-Caribbean thought
and Charles is likely to appeal to that tendency.

LMA: A lot of what you are doing is teasing out the metaphysical presuppositions
and categories in the various works that you are looking at, and showing that
you need to have a different set of metaphysical categories sometimes to describe
adequately or take account of different phenomena. I am wondering if there
are also ways in which you see an epistemological difference. I’m thinking of
the chapter on Sylvia Wynter where you discuss her critique of some of the
orthodox Marxist traditions that in her view neglected the sphere of knowledge
production. Their neglect of and failure to critique the epistemological process
is what caused some of their main problems in her view.
PH: Sylvia is probably exceptional in terms of the comprehensive and well-
thematized nature of her epistemic turn. This sharp turn is one of the
reasons why she is such an innovative figure. It is new for Afro-Caribbean
philosophy. In her analysis of the crisis of Caribbean Marxism as well
as of Caribbean liberalism, Sylvia argues that both remain epistemically
colonized, trapped in a Western episteme. This is the situation of Caliban:
remaining trapped in the episteme of Prospero and not realizing fully the
consequences of that entrapment. So in a way Sylvia has raised the question
of the depths of that epistemic entrapment and what it means for fashioning
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new ideas about oneself, new definitions of oneself, and revolutionary social
alternatives. If the episteme limits what you can think by always framing
your thoughts within certain horizons, then there are going to be serious
consequences if you want to get out of this colonial situation.

LMA: And that’s why you named the book Caliban’s Reason. This is the
trope of Latin American philosophical and cultural identity, and it has been
put to various uses, from Rodo, who arguably was internalizing colonialism, to
Fernández Retamar, who invokes a new articulation of Latin American cultural
identity for revolutionary purposes.
PH: Yes, just as in Latin America you had this tradition of appropriating
the Shakespearean construction, there’s also been a long tradition of that in
the Caribbean, in the work of Césaire, Lamming, and others. This is really
where we begin to see some of the similarities between Latin American and
Caribbean thought. I see Latin American philosophy as having a historical
trajectory very similar to that of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, in the sense
that both have this experience of coming into modernity through European
imperialism. In other words, you move from a situation that is primarily
mythic and religious, in which existence is the creative project of the gods.
That’s your premodern experience of life. And modernity is not the internal
breaking down of this order of existence but a kind of crushing intrusion in
which this mythic conception of existence is disrupted by the imposition of a
conception of existence in which life is a project of European imperialism.
Modernity, for both Latin America and the Caribbean, moves between
these two poles, and I think that is why the figure of Caliban becomes
central to both.
Octavio Paz is very popular among Caribbean poeticists. As a
matter of fact, in coming up with the term poeticism my key clue came
from the way John Hearne, the novelist, spoke about Paz, in particular,
his The Labyrinth of Solitude. Paz is one of these poets that I see as really
similar to Wilson Harris, who himself loves Paz, and you can see why.
Paz writes in a way that makes the poetic process explicit, especially in
some of his essays. Here’s a poet who is also a thinker, and he’s thinking
through a poetic imagination and so here’s the poetic imagination being
forced to come to grips with this experience of imperialism. The similarity
with Caribbean poeticism is particularly clear in his work.
And of course there is also a very strong school of Latin Ameri-
can historicism. I’m most familiar with Latin American schools of political
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economy, and, again, the way history functions within the work of Caribbe-
an political economy is very similar to the way it works in Latin American
political economy. The work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso has been very
influential in the Caribbean, as has that of a number of other Latin Amer-
ican political economists, such as Aníbal Pinto. The whole school of Latin
American dependency was very influential on Caribbean political economy.
As a matter of fact there were several Latin American political economists
who published in Social and Economic Studies, the premier journal in which
the school of Caribbean dependency emerged. I don’t think my political
economy would have been what it was if I hadn’t read Cardoso.

LMA: For my last question I’d like to link your project this time not with South
but with North American philosophy. I wanted to ask you about the connections
and tensions that you see between African-American and Afro-Caribbean phi-
losophy. And this question is of course relevant not only for the development of
African-American philosophy but also for the development of Latino philosophy
that some of us are engaged in, as well as philosophies generally of people of color
in the United States. Do you see these as developing differently or as essentially
one discussion?
PH: Clearly, the primary obstacle in the conversation between these philoso-
phies that have so much in common is the extent to which they all privilege
their conversation with the philosophical tradition of the West. For both
institutional and historical reasons we are so profoundly involved in the dia-
logue with the Western tradition—a kind of replay of the Prospero/Caliban
thing—that we’ve had little time to converse among ourselves. And this
is something that I really want to change, which is why I wrote a chap-
ter on Afro-American philosophy. Right now I’m working on opening up
dialogues with Indian and Indo-Caribbean philosophy in the Caribbean.

LMA: Meaning not the indigenous but the South Asian immigrant populations?
PH: Right. So I see a potential for great dialogue that could take philosophy
as a discipline in completely different directions because I see philosophy
as based on concrete experiences. Once you begin to philosophize about
different historical experiences, the philosophy that emerges is going to be
different. In a way the West has had all of us reflecting on its problems,
its experiences, and what we need to develop now is a genuinely compar-
ative philosophy in which the experiences of different peoples, both their
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premodern and their modern experiences, can be looked at conversation-

ally, with the idea that each can learn from the other.
As long as the West doesn’t think it can learn anything from
African philosophy we can’t have this conversation. And to the extent that
that bias continues to operate among third world philosophers, where they
think that they can only learn by being in touch with the latest currents
in the West, and that they must always be up on what is happening in the
capitals of the West, then we have a problem.
But I think if we can really begin to see that the roots of philosophy
are in people and in people’s experiences, that philosophy is a formalization
of lived experiences, then we can come to appreciate that philosophy lives in
people. And people’s experiences, whether in Africa, Latin America, or the
Caribbean, are very valuable and very significant. Now, this specificity of
experience, on the other hand, is where, to come back to your first question,
in spite of our philosophies having a lot in common, each is culturally
and historically specific. These differences must be appreciated, they must
be recognized and framed in a kind of language that will not do them
violence. So in this dialogue I see the need for understanding and deploying
very clearly the phenomenological and logical resources of philosophy to
get at the general, while at the same time linking these general features to
certain styles of ethnographic research that will keep us in tune with what
is culturally specific. If we learn to link the two dialectically, that is, the
logical and the phenomenological, on the one hand, and the ethnographic
and the historical, on the other, I think we can really take philosophy in
new directions.