Gertrude M. James González de Allen
In residence Fall 2007
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia
Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 617.384.8341
Email: gallen@fas.harvard.edu
Biography
Gertrude M. James González de Allen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Spelman College. Dr. González de Allen specializes in Africana philosophy, Caribbean philosophy, theory, literature and culture, post-continental philosophy, Afro-Latin thought, theory about colonization/de-colonization, theory about identity and the explorations of the intersections between philosophy, literature and culture, transcultural studies, and aesthetics. She is co-editor of the anthology Cultural Activisms: Poetic Voices, Political Voices (SUNY 1999) and author of the essay ‰Of Property: On ‘Captive’ ‘Bodies,’ Hidden ‘Flesh’ and Colonization” Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (Routledge 1997). Her recent essay “Enrique Dussel and Manuel Zapata Olivella: An Exploration of De-colonial, Diasporic, and Trans-modern Selves and the Politics of Recognition” appears in Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise,www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko Fall 2006.
Project
“Sediments and Interceptions: Reflections on Encounter and the Development of Transnational Identities in the U.S. Virgin Islands”
Sediments and Interceptions: Reflections on Encounter and the Development of Transnational Identities in the U.S. Virgin Islands is a monograph that examines how colonization affects and is affected by modern subjectivities in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). It explores the intersectional relationships between encounter, appropriation, knowledge production, power and the development of identities. Geological and geometric metaphors are used to explore and explain the movement of subjects, meanings, interpretations and cultures. Geology and geometry offer ways to transgress dialogues about identity and colonization centered in human actions and the Caribbean as a passive region engaged by foreign forces that it has not been able to control. The text shows how agents of foreign forces have been affected by pre-existing movements of people and nature; from this it deduces that the Caribbean has not been a passive region and that there is something beyond human interactions forced by invasion and colonization that influences identity. Terms such as sedimentation, erosion, intercept, aeolian, involution, angular and involution appear as ways to describe identity and the complex forces driving world-capitalism. These are applied to the USVI, because it has a rich, meaningful and complex colonial and neo-colonial history and culture ignored in contemporary dialogues about colonization, post-coloniality, and migration. The VI has played an important role in U.S. strategic political interventions against European domination and expansion in the Caribbean in the early 20th century. This text builds on the theoretical work of Sylvia Wynter who looks at the beginnings of civilization to understand what it means to be human. Contrary to Wynter, this study does not seek to look at the “first” humans for answers, but locates meaning in geological metaphors which are used to identify and explain complex identity processes.