Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (review)

Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xiv + 304.

The ethnic, cultural, and historical facts of Caribbean pluralism are well known to specialists in regional literary production. Indeed, while much Caribbean literature has historically been concerned with delineating its difference from the metropole, the phenomenon of pluralism has come to play an increasingly larger role in discursive and theoretical approaches to [End Page 296] the identity quest that is arguably at the core of much recent Caribbean literature. In the French Caribbean in particular, writers and thinkers like Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant have elaborated historico-cultural theories that seek to stress this pluralism, drawing attention to the region’s Creole configurations of history, ethnicity, language and culture.