Sunday, 11 January 2026: 1:45 PM-3:00 PM
Zoom 2 (Zoom)
The three papers in this special session panel will extend the field of cognitive literary studies to the Caribbean literary and philosophical field, including the francophone and creolophone Caribbean traditions, which to date have had little presence in the largely anglophone cognitive literary studies domain. The Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter's explicit and extensive use of the cognitive paradigm will serve as a foundation for exploration of works including Michael Roch’s Caribbean futurist novel, Tè Mawon, by NYU Assistant Professor Isabel Bradley; Michel-Rolphe Trouillot's Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti in the paper by Duke University doctoral student Michaelle Vilmont; and Edouard Glissant's novel Le Quatrième Siècle in the paper by Emory University doctoral student Timothy Messen. This panel will complement and extend work to be presented in the Cognition and Affect forum, the nineteenth century French studies panel on cognition, and various other manifestations of the creative interdisciplinary interface of regional literary and philosophical studies with cognitive studies.
René Descartes’ “res cogitans” has been explored and critiqued in cognitive literary studies as a cerebral subject standing as a figure of modernity. For Wynter, Man is represented as the “res cogitans,” contrasting with “his symbolically inverted unmarked state, the “res extensa” (extended matter) [...] as revealed to him through that Natural Reason, allotted to him by Natura Cogitans in whose image he was made." Man as the subject of humanism for Wynter, masks a more specific individual whose sovereignty is built on a freedom that is the opposite of enslavement. But do Caribbean and global island figures of maroon meaning-making nevertheless find roots in a “natura cogitans” aligned not as much with natural reason and natural law as with thinking through the “res extensa”?
Bradley explores Michael Roch’s Caribbean futurist novel, Tè Mawon—Martinican creole for “maroon earth”—a gleaming megapolis engulfs archipelagos, braced up by a vigilant network of surveillance nanobots and sanitary checkpoints. As Roch’s human and transhuman characters navigate a “res extensa” comprised of interlocking webs of humans, machines, and degraded tropical ecologies, they transform dystopian sprawl into sites of ancestral reclamation. Bradley suggests that Tè Mawon offers a timely and clairvoyant portrayal of marronnage as a cognitive collaboration with the res extensa, in a prophetic vision of how Caribbean territories might metabolize climate coloniality into new modes of Relation.
Vilmont asks how neurological marronage--a form of neurodivergence from colonial norms--emerges through embodied cognitive practices to create spaces of resistance in colonial and postcolonial Haiti and the greater Caribbean. By analyzing departures from Cartesian disembodied rationality, Vilmont reveals a psychological proto-phase of marronage that precedes physical flight. Drawing from Wynter’s theorization of ceremony as an epistemological emancipation, and from Chancy's lexicon of autochthonomous indigenous forms, Vilmont explores a marronage from within. With particular focus on Michel Rolphe Trouillot's creole history Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti as an exemplar of collective forms of "4E" cognition--embodied, embedded, extended and enacted cognition--Vilmont argues that what Ralph J. Savarese calls "Postcolonial neurology" aligns with resistance strategies and identity formation in the Caribbean.
Messen proposes that in the archi-logos, Glissantian opacity serves as a figure of thought for epistemic critique and as a modus operandi of anarcho-maroon political action. In addressing the question of the materiality of cognition, Messen explores the literature and phenomenology of both sand and the bayou in the Circum-caribbean. The word “bayou” itself is absorbed into French from the Choctaw language in the late Renaissance; in the same period Descartes’ res cogitans and landscape painting were emerging out of the Low Countries. This reading of Circum-caribbean res extensa emphasizes the possibility of modes of cognition not legible to res cogitans. Environmental features like black sand beaches and the murky waters of bayous provide a place for thinking. The site-specificity of cognition motivates the function of opacity in “co-naissance” and liberates thinking from the gesture of possession.
In the words of the late Frankétienne, this panel will ask, “Who will dig out the center of marooning words?” (Ready to Burst). The papers here explore an archipel-logos where a new "public thing" emerges from the human nervous system in partnership with extended matter. Caribbean literature and philosophy challenges us to sift the metamorphic secrets of dirt as a fundamental mirror of our family resemblance to the environment itself.
The participants would prefer to present in person in a room with theater format. However, we would like to request the option of an online format in case the doctoral students do not receive full funding for international travel in this uncertain economy.