Creolizing Practices of Freedom : Recognition and Dissonance

"Creolizing Practices of Freedom" argues that many of our long-standing debates over the concept of freedom have been bound up in the politics of purity-explicitly or implicitly insisting on clear and distinct boundaries between self and other or between choice and coercion. In this model, freedom becomes a matter of "purifying" the self at the individual level and the body politic at the larger social level. The appropriate response to this is a creolizing theory of freedom, an approach that sees indeterminacy and ambiguity not as tragic flaws, but as crucial productive elements of the practice of freedom. [Publisher's Text]