Abstract:
“Creole,” as per the plantation nomenclature, is a tool to which enslavers in the French colonies resorted to perfect the enslavement of Africans. De facto, that communication means bears all the unethical inflictions of the plantation. This fact also raises critical philosophical questions directly engaging thought and practices related to humankind and humanity. Using primarily the example of the Martinican context, I want to show how the philosophical intervention of enslaved Africans onto “Creole” provided the latter with the ethical humanness allowing it to escape the fate enslavers had set for it to eternally be a plantation language dooming its (native) speakers, across time and space.

Bio:
Hanétha Vété-Congolo is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College, past chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, president emerita of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, founder and coordinator of Lyannaj des chercheurs guadeloupéens, guyanais et martiniquais aux États-Unis, and co-founder and co-director of the CPA/ASEPHI African School of Philosophy in Senegal. Vété-Congolo is affiliated to the Africana, the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Programs of her institution. She is a member of AI4A-Artificial Intelligence for Afrika, a Board member of Women in French, of the Advisory Board of The Society for Caribbean Research (S.O.C.A.R.E), Membre d’Honneur of the Research Group on Black Latin America at the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France (CRESEM/GRENAL, Languages and identities) and a member of the Committee on Gender Issues of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and of Journal of African and African Diasporic Studies.

Her scholarship focuses principally on Caribbean and (West/Central) African critical thought, philosophy, literature, culture, and orality and, on discourses by and about women of the Caribbean and, West and Central Africa. Vété-Congolo is author of Nous sommes Martiniquaises, Pawòl en bouches de femmes châtaignes : Une pensée existentialiste noire sur la question des femmes (2020),  L’interoralité caribéenne: le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne) (1st ed. 2011. 2nd ed. 2016), and editor of Pensées et philosophies d’Afrique, Pour demain : voir, comprendre et penser l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui (with Hady Ba and Oumar Dia. Présence africaine 201, 2022), Penser le sujet femme noire francophone. Recherches féministes, vol. 34, N.2, 2022 (with Agnès Berthelot-Raffard), The Caribbean Oral Tradition (2016), Léon-Gontran Damas : Une Négritude entière (2015) Le conte d’hier, aujourd’hui : Oralité et modernité (2014), and MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (2004).

Among other refereed journals, her articles have appeared in the C.L.R. James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Contemporary Thought, Journal of World Philosophies, Ethiopiques : Revue négro-africaine de littérature et de philosophie, Journal of Black Studies, Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore, Wadabagaï: A journal of the Caribbean Diaspora, Postcolonial Text, Présence francophone, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Les Cahiers du GRELCEF, Women in French, Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis.

Her poetry collections, Avoir et Être : Ce que j’Ai, ce que je Suis was published with Le chasseur Abstrait in 2009 and, Mon parler de Guinée in 2015 with L’Harmattan, coll. Poètes des cinq continents. Her unpublished collection of poetry Womb of a Woman was Shortlisted for the 2015 Small Axe Literary Competition.