ABSTRACT
With Harris, we leave behind the world of Caribbean historicism and move to the center of the region’s poeticist tradition of thought. Harris’s work is rooted in the creative space of this tradition and often attempts to make this unconscious background an object of explicit thematization. If James represents the transformative aspects of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, then Harris exemplifies its reconstructive and transversal tendencies. Harris’s focus is the particular type of symbolic world that can be created out the imploded worldviews of the Caribbean colonial experience. In this undertaking, Harris’s point of departure is the self, its creative dynamics and their relations to practices of world constitution. Thus like Fanon, the immanent, creative dynamics of the self are explicitly thematized in Harris and occupy a central place in his philosophy. However, raising more than issues of recognition and creolization, Harris’s philosophy points the way to a contemporary dialogue with traditional African philosophy.
