Philosophy
Books
Filosofía del cimarronaje
By Pedro Lebrón Ortiz
Awarded First Honorable Mention for the Essay Prize 2021 by PEN Club Puerto Rico
Filosofía del cimarronaje proposes a phenomenology of marronage in order to explore how marronage can be used as a framework to understand contemporary sociopolitical movements. More fundamentally still, Filosofía del cimarronaje seeks to explore how marronage can be understood as a particular way of being in the world of racial capitalism and anti-Blackness. The text begins by providing the reader a broad history of slavery and colonization in the Americas, the production of whiteness as a political category in those processes to safeguard the consolidation of racial capitalism, and the ubiquity and diversity of marronage across the hemisphere. Crucially, it emphasizes that flight from the plantation also constituted flight from the underlying logics which manifest on the plantation. The text then transitions to explore the ways in which logics of slavery and colonization persist today and argues that if slavery and marronage are inextricable, then logics of marronage must persist today as well. This book argues that a maroon subjectivity is constituted by a tension which involves the affirmation of one’s existence beyond the confines of Western humanism and a confrontation which seeks to fracture those logics of the plantation, which then manifest on multiple registers. The book then applies this framework to contemporary sociopolitical occurrences in Puerto Rico, specifically the summer of 2019 and instances of autogestión, in an attempt to shed new light on how these events and practices are viewed. Filosofía del cimarronaje contributes to the growing literature of marronage, while also contributing to the canon of contemporary Caribbean and Puerto Rican philosophical thought.
With a foreword by Anayra Santory Jorge and an afterword by Nelson Maldonado-Torres.
Also available on Amazon Kindle.
Journals
Special Issue for Diálogos, Revista del Departamento de Filosofía de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (January 2023)
Articles & Book Chapters
Articles
(2024) “Desde el oeste”. The Puerto Rico Review, No. 9, p. 55-60.
Article includes three of my photographs.
(2023) “Notes on Black Thought in Puerto Rico: A Brief Commentary”. With Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Amanda Pavley, Diálogos no. 112, p. 9-28.
(2023) Translation from English to Spanish of “George Floyd Jr as a Philosophical Problem: Why Disaggregated Data Should Guide How Philosophers Theorize Black Male Death” by Tommy J. Curry, Diálogos no. 112, p. 143-190.
(2021) “‘A Different Type of Time’: Hip Hop, Fugitivity, and Fractured Temporality”. Journal of Hip Hop Studies vol. 8, no. 1, 2021, p. 63-88.
(2021) “Death and Temporality in Against Muerto Rico.” Caliban’s Readings (A Blog of the Caribbean Philosophical Association). December 31, 2021.
Translated to Spanish as “Muerte y temporalidad en Contra Muerto Rico”. Intervención y coyuntura. February 28, 2023.
(2021) Translation from Spanish to English of “Memories from Piñones: Unapologetically Blackly Beautiful Women” by Maricruz Rivera Clemente, Studies in Gender and Sexuality vol. 22, no. 4, p. 333-337.
(2021) “Against the Mythological Machine, Towards Decolonial Revolt”. Theory & Event Vol. 24, No. 3, p. 787-815.
(2021) “To Live and Die in the Colony: Notes on Fractured Temporality and Fugitive Thought”. Taller Electric Marronage. May 7, 2021.
(2020) “Reconstructing Locality through Marronage”. American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Native American and Indigenous Philosophy Vol. 20, No. 1: 3-11.
(2020) “Teorizando una filosofía del cimarronaje”. Tabula Rasa, no. 35: 122–156.
(2020) “Aguadilla, Decoloniality, and the Summer of ‘19”. Society & Space.
(2020) “Resisting (Meta) Physical Catastrophes through Acts of Marronage”. Radical Philosophy Review 23, no. 1: 35–57.
(2019) “Maroon Logics as Flight from the Euromodern”. TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 9(2).
Book Chapters
(2026) “A Festival in Black”. In Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies, edited by Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell A. Meléndez Badillo, p. 153-166. Durham: Duke University Press.
(2022) “Marronage in the Great Caribbean”. In Routledge Handbook of Afro-Latin American Studies, edited by Bernd Reiter and John Anton Sánchez, p. 312-321. Abingdon: Routledge.
(2020) “Coronavirus y la descolonización de la ciencia”. In Convidar, edited by Anayra Santory Jorge and Luis A. Avilés, p. 56–62. Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente.
Reviews
(2023) Review of Filosofía de las existencias desde el cimarronaje, by Edizon León Castro. Diálogos no. 112, p. 275-285.
(2022) Review of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico, by Rocío Zambrana. Candela Review May 2022.
(2018) Review of Critique of Black Reason, by Achille Mbembe. Diálogos no. 103: 167-171.