The Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) has voted Creolizing the Nation (Northwestern UP, 2020) by Kris Sealey, PhD, a winner of the 2022 Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award.

“This recognition means the world to me,” Dr. Sealey said. “Especially from a scholarly community that’s been so instrumental in my growth.”

The award is an annual prize that recognizes an author whose contribution to Caribbean thought is through the medium of the novel, poetry, theater, or cinema. The honor also consists of a plaque acknowledging achievements, and it is awarded in a special ceremony, which the CPA will be organizing at its annual meeting this year at Michigan State University.

In Creolizing the Nation, Dr. Sealey investigates how everyday practices of freedom shape both subject formation and community formation in decolonial contexts. Her book offers creolization as a conceptual tool through which such formations might be theorized and brought to bear on contemporary understandings of the nation.

The CPA was founded on June 14, 2003 at the Center for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. It is an organization of scholars and lay-intellectuals dedicated to the study and generation of ideas with a particular emphasis of encouraging South-South dialogue.

Dr.  Sealey was born and raised in the twin island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. She currently resides in southwestern Connecticut, and teaches in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University. Her scholarship is in the areas of critical philosophy of race, Caribbean philosophy, and decolonial theory. She has published in journals such as Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. and Philosophy Today.

Learn more about the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences.