The Decolonial Abyss
Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins
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The Decolonial Abyss probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. In order to do so, it builds a constructive and coherent thematization of the somewhat obscurely defined and underexplored mystical figure of the abyss as it occurs in Neoplatonic mysticism, German Idealism, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy.
The central question An Yountae raises is, How do we mediate the mystical abyss of theology/philosophy and the abyss of socio-political trauma engulfing the colonial subject? What would theopoetics look like in the context where poetics is the means of resistance and survival? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the abyss as the dialectical process in which the self’s dispossession before the encounter with its own finitude is followed by the rediscovery or reconstruction of the self.
The Decolonial Abyss offers a decolonial political theology that carefully considers but seeks to avoid pitfalls often found in political theologies and philosophies that are based or propose views grounded on absolute negativity, perpetual deconstruction, or on apparent radical views that collapse into Eurocentric conservatisms. It is a required reading for anyone interested in political theology, liberation theologies, decolonial thinking, as well as Caribbean literature and philosophical thought.---—Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Rutgers University
“The abyss provides a fascinating lens through which to politicize the mystical on the one hand and theologize the post- and decolonial on the other. Each of these is a worthy project on its own and even more compelling in relation to the other. . . . A sophisticated, readable, and important book."---—Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University
...The Decolonial Abyss is an erudite, insightful, and exceptionally important text.---Reading Religion