Books 

Reviews

A crucial intervention in political theory, Marxism, and critique that brings together decolonial praxis with the deconstructive indeterminacy of the value-form in original and generative ways. Andrés Fabián Henao Castro offers a committed, radical perspective on the too-frequently dematerialized category of intellectual labor. Elegant, clear language to its reader—a comrade in book-form sure to accompany a wide range of thinkers in struggle.
—Jordy Rosenberg, professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Henao Castro offers a solution to the problem of expertise that tends to separate rather than include the left-wing intellectual in larger social and political forms of struggle. This book is a model for how to think about radical politics such that thought and action become intertwined and mutually reinventing.
—James Martel, professor of political science, San Francisco State University

This book requires our most urgent attention and in its revolutionary untimeliness finds itself arriving right on time to catalyze and contextualize what it means to ethically participate in disruptive intellectual labor.
—Michael Sawyer, associate professor of African American Literature and English, University of Pittsburgh

In a time when revolutionary militancy tends to be criminalized and when resistance to domination is reduced to arbitrary and unjustified violence, this book reminds us that the time of the political understood as the time of life and liberation entirely depends on subverting and decolonizing the criteria that decide on the legibility of political action.
—Maria del Rosario Acosta, professor of Hispanic Studies, University of California Riverside

For far too long we have sought out philosopher-kings when in fact we needed something different. Tossed about by the choppy seas of the present with all their perils and possibilities, what we need is not a captain but a compass. Let this book be a contribution to getting our collective bearings.
—Geo Maher, visiting associate professor of political science, Vassar College

Link:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538145098/The-Militant-Intellect-Critical-Theorys-Conceptual-Personae

ANTIGONE IN THE AMERICAS: DEMOCRACY, SEXUALITY AND DEATH IN THE SETTLER COLONIAL PRESENT

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression.

LINK:

https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/Antigone-in-the-Americas2

THE MILITANT INTELLECT: CRITICAL THEORY’S CONCEPTUAL PERSONAE

In this book I argue that critical theory cultivates the militancy of the general intellect by training that intellect to work towards the intersectional and structural death of the colonist and thus to envision at the same time the materialization of that feminist decolonial communist queer marronage world that constitutes its horizon. I borrow and expand on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of conceptual persona to qualify the intellectual labor of critical theory as an undisciplined field, that performs its labor through the creation of conceptual personae capable of subjectivizing critical thought. Doing so, The Militant Intellect argues for the indispensable reinterpretation of Plato’s Philosopher Sovereign, Karl Marx’s Communist, Frantz Fanon’s Rebel, Jacques Derrida’s Specter, Gayatri Spivak’s Subaltern, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Life, Jacques Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, Judith Butler’s Antigone/Ismene, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Fox as compelling personifications of intellectual militancy for the general intellect to have new scripts capable of cultivating the virtuosity of its more revolutionary performances.

SPOTLIGHT ON ANTIGONE IN THE AMERICAS

2022     Interview with Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen for the American Philosophical Association Blog, September 2. Available at:

            https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/09/02/recently-published-book-spotlight-antigone-in-the-americas%EF%BF%BC/