Professor Angelica Bernal recently contributed to a Special Volume of the journal Philosophy & Global Affairs on Jane Gordon's "Creolizing Political Theory."
Bernal's article engages with a creolized approach to the problem and paradoxes of founding: where do a people get the legitimacy to found or refound a new political order? In this article, Bernal argues that Jane Gordon’s creolized reading of Rousseau’s problem of the general will—via Frantz Fanon—offers us a novel approach to this question: one that neither resorts to an outside lawgiver or projects the solution for a people to solve in the future. Bringing together this solution with Bernal's own work on foundings, they contend that Gordon’s creolized general will offers not only a “third way” beyond traditional Rousseauian solutions to the problem, but also a solution that is importantly informed by and can continue to inform real world processes of founding and refounding in colonial and post-colonial contexts. (Philosophy and Global Affairs, 9/22/2021)