The Nicolas Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical Literature Prize are awarded at the international annual meetings of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. The prize is to be awarded to an author whose contribution to Caribbean thought is through the medium of the novel, poetry, theater, or cinema.
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce the 2018 recipients of the association’s awards for contributions to Caribbean thought and philosophical literature. The awards will be conferred in a special session of the 17th annual conference of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, which will take place on April 1-4 at the University of the Virigin Islands in St. Croix. For more information on the conference, click here.
Rozena Maart
Rozena Maart is a philosopher, poet, novelist, and longtime activist against antiracism and sexual violence and a champion for the flourishing of Africana thought in her native South Africa and other countries such as Canada, Colombia, the UK, the United States (especially through Philosophy Born of Struggle), and across the globe through the Caribbean Philosophical Association and other organizations such as the St. Croix Literary Festival. Here is a link to a lecture she gave at the University of Cape Town in 2020 before the pandemic lockdowns, and here is the Wikipedia page on her. The Award Committee celebrates Professor Maart for the philosophical, political, and literary richness of her writings and her contributions as an institution-builder in education and her work as a psychoanalyst and social worker.
Firoze Manji
Firoze Manji is a medical worker (dentistry) who has devoted his life to radical, liberatory politics through creating publishing outlets for writers across the Global South, in addition to writing books of his own and many articles as a journalist. He has also organized many multimedia forums presenting the work of intellectuals across the globe through a variety of organizations. All of this work has been done as he lived and worked not only in his native Kenya but also in Senegal, the UK, South Africa, and Canada, for organizations ranging from Amnesty Intellectual to CODESRIA and Tricontinental. Here is an interview with him from summer 2020, and here is the Wikipedia page on him. The Awards Committee celebrates Dr. Manji for his years of dedicated work, which includes the founding of Daraja Press, publications on intellectuals of struggle ranging from Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral to Walter Rodney, and his ongoing global activism building of global networks devoted to the cultivation of dignity, freedom, and liberation.
Chandramohan S., Love after Babel and other poems. Daraja Press, 2020.
Chandramohan S. is an Indian Dalit poet who is also a member of the P.K. Rosi foundation, a cultural collective, which is named after the great Dalit actress, devoted to the demarginalization of Dalit-Bahujans. According to three reviewers:
Love after Babel is a brilliant new poetry collection by Dalit poet Chandramohan S, a highly charged political treatise. Chandramohan's position as a Dalit writer illuminates his treatment of caste-based oppression, while also creating a sense of radical solidarity between various marginalized identities in contemporary Indian society through his focus on other forms of oppression, namely on experiences of Islamophobia, gender based violence and racism. It is an active political tool to counter multiple forms of oppression in India and across the world.
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Chandramohan's poetry is an extraordinary combination of a strong individual voice, crying out against a deeply felt sense of personal abuse, and a sophisticated understanding of the long history and mythology of such abuse, in India but also in the world at large. The poems are by turns shocking, moving, and exhilarating.
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This is poetry—at its best. No wonder then that, his poems have been published worldwide. He is perhaps now one of the very few, if not the only Indian poet in English to have taken the burden of social and political repression, as a distinct and livid political idiom. To read his poems is also painful, but the poetry is in the pain!
2020
Lifetime Achievement:
Frankétienne
Haki Madhubuti
Outstanding Achievements:
Dionne Brand
Outstanding Book:
Slavery Unseen
By Lamonte Aidoo
2019
Lifetime Achievement:
Kamau Brathwaite
Robin D.G. Kelley
Outstanding Book:
What Comes from a Thing
By Phillip Barron
Heaven
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
2018
Life-time Achievement:
Conceição Evaristo
Outstanding Achievements in Philosophical Literature Award:
Felwine Sarr
Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature:
Intimacies of Four Continents
By Lisa Lowe
2017
Life-time Achievement:
Hortense Spillers
Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature:
La rebelión de las niñas: El Caribe y la “conciencia corporal.”
By Nadia V. Celis-Salgado
The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution
By Jeremy Matthew Glick
2016
Life-time Achievement:
Jamaica Kincaid
Philosophical Literature:
Arturo Dávila-Sánchez
Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature:
Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature
By LaRose Parris
2015
Life-time Achievement:
Samuel R. Delany
George Lamming
Philosophical Literature:
Víctor Fowler Calzada
Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature:
Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora
By Bénédicte Boisseron
2014
Life-time Achievement:
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Philosophical Literature:
Frieda Ekotto
Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature:
Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours
By Supriya Nair
2013
Life-time Achievement:
Ana Lydia Vega
Philosophical Literature:
Jose Buscaglia
2012
Life-time Achievement:
The Mighty Chalkdust / Hollis Urban Lester Liverpool
Prafulla Kar
Philosophical Literature:
Gordon Rohlehr
2011
Junot Díaz
2010
Gabriel García Márquez
2009
Edwidge Danticat
2008
Ramabai Espinet
Wilson Harris
