Creolizing the Nation

“A valiant effort to rescue the concept and role of the nation from those who would use it to marginalize and abuse. Charting a middle path between the monolithic forms of nationalism that seek to eliminate difference on the one hand, and the complete abandonment of any appeal to the nation on the other, Sealey draws on Caribbean and Latin American resources to argue that the nation must be understood in a creolizing way. Her rigorous yet engaging analysis allows her to offer a vision of the nation as a resource through which it becomes possible to build a more just, and ultimately more human community. This is an important and timely book.” —Michael J. Monahan, author of The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

“This book offers a brilliant articulation of the concept of creolization. Sealey’s thesis is that with this concept the nation state can be rethought and reconstructed rather than abandoned, since the creolization paradigm reveals that coloniality has never achieved hegemony—there has always been sabotage, cracks from below—and that all of our cultural formations are creolized in substantial ways. She further shows that creolization is not equivalent to cosmopolitanism but has significant advantages over the letter. A must-read.” —Linda MartÍn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation