The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the 2011 recipients of the association’s awards for philosophical literature and contributions to Caribbean thought.
The Nicolás Guillén Award for Philosophical Literature
Junot Díaz, “for his unsettling and imaginative portraits of contemporary life.”
Past recipients of this award include Wilson Harris, Ramabai Espinet, Edwidge Danticat, and Gabriel García Márquez.
The Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of African American Studies at Temple University, “for the originality and influence of his scholarship, his leadership in the struggle for work respecting the dignity of dispossessed peoples and the recognition of themselves as historical agents.”
Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Professor of Anthropology and the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, “for the originality of his interrogations in the human sciences, especially anthropology and history, and his articulation of the importance and challenges of Haiti in contemporary discussions of freedom and reclamations of the past.”
The Frantz Fanon Book Award
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
According to the committee, “This book challenges hegemonic history, discourses of freedom, and presumed universality through raising the contradictions posed by the underside of history, modern subjectivity, and methodological aspirations in the social sciences.”
Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.
“Nissim-Sabat’s new vision of authentic existence is,” announced the prize committee, “responding to the challenge set by Frantz Fanon: to ‘work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’ (Wretched of the Earth). Like Fanon, she works out her philosophical concepts and her vision of human possibilities through her experiences as a practicing psychotherapist. Her book also makes a contribution to African-American/Africana emancipatory literature.”
Past winners of the award include Paget Henry, Walter Mignolo, Brinda Mehta, Enrique Dussel, Linda Alcoff, Catherine Reindhart, Drucilla Cornell, Elias Bongmba, Patricia Donatien-Yssa, Nigel Gibson, Bernard Boxill, Angel Quintero Rivera, and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.
The awards will be conferred at the Caribbean Philosophical Association Annual International Meeting, which will be held at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, September 29th to October 1st, 2011. Information on the conference is available at the Association’s website:
Information on the awards and previous winners is also available at:
http://www.temple.edu/isrst/Events/CPA_FanonPrize.asp
and http://www.temple.edu/isrst/Events/guillenprize.asp
