The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical Literature Prize

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award

Raphaël Confiant is one of Martinique’s leading men of letters and a global intellect. He is co-author of Éloge de la Créolité (“In praise of Creoleness”), a critical manifesto of the Créolité movement, which advances the rich mixture of Caribbean peoples and the cultures they produce. Confiant is the author six books in Martinican Creole and at least forty-eight books in French across genres of fiction, scholarly, and social-theoretical works. He taught at the University of the French West indies and Guiana (UAG), at which he was Dean of Arts and Sciences from 2013 to 2016. In addition to his work in and on Créolité, his fiction and research mark crucial events in Martinican history. He has won many awards for his work. In 1993 he received the Prix Casa de las Americas and the Prix Jet Tours for his childhood memoires, Ravines du devant-jour (1995). He was awarded the Prix des Amériques insulaires et de la Guyane for his novel La Panse du Chacal (2004).

The notification of the award, which Confiant received on the 1st of January 2025, states that the committee selected him “not only for the theoretical richness of [his] writings on creolization and créolité but also for the philosophical richness of [his] creative writings and [his] role as a public figure and, through [his] efforts to articulate the diversity of humankind, [his] commitment to the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”

In the words of Professor Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:

Confiant’s novels bring the history and culture of Martinique to life, offering his readers the details of circumstance, setting and character that give us indelible insight to the wide range of perspectives, experiences, and historical impact of Antillean cultures. His work is a tremendous gift to the world. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with this award.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award

Rico Speight is an independent producer/director/writer of film and theatre; he is also a film and video editor and educator. The Committee selected Speight for the fine films he has produced and his work as a public artist committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom. His production credits include documentaries, narratives, television productions, web productions and live theatre. His documentary, Who’s Gonna Take the Weight?, the first installment of a two-part series on the parallel lives of African American and Black South African young people was released in 1997; in 1999, that documentary screened at the 52nd Cannes International Film Festival. In 2007, Speight released a follow-up production titled, Where Are They Now?, that is a sequel to Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? In 2007, Where Are They Now? was broadcasted nationally in South Africa on South African Broadcasting Corporation television. In 2010, he produced and directed Aimé Césaire’s A Season in the Congo at the Lion Theatre at Theatre Row in NYC. Watch the trailer HERE.

Speight’s narrative film credits include Choices, an original narrative short starring Samuel L Jackson, which premiered at “Prized Pieces” Fest in Columbus, Ohio in 1992, and Defiant, an adapted narrative short based on the classic The Defiant Ones that premiered at Roxbury Film Festival, Boston, MA in 2001. Watch Choices HERE. Watch Defiant HERE.

In 2003, Speight traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to shoot a short documentary called New Generation which chronicled developments in the Congo from the period when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power in 2003 until the Congo’s first democratic elections in four decades held in 2006. Watch New Generation HERE.

In 1990 and again in 1993, Speight was awarded artist fellowships by the New York Foundation for the Arts, in film and video respectively. In 1998, he was honored by the Black Filmmaker’s Hall of Fame for his original short narrative entitled Deft Changes featuring musicians, Mark Whitfield, and Freddy Waits.

Speight recently completed a feature documentary on Frantz Fanon, entitled Rediscovering Fanon. Learning of his selection for this award, the Reverend Nana Carmen Ashhurst (former president of Def Jam Records, former Advisor for the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada, and the Music Supervisor for Rediscovering Fanon), offered this statement:

Liberation movements from the African diaspora need both a philosophical foundation and protests from the people seeking liberation, both philosophers and warriors. Connecting these two needs can be a struggle in itself. Rico Speight has forged a career making films that make the philosophical foundation for struggle clear to those who experientially know oppression and provide motivation for their activism. His films have become tools for liberation fighters in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.

The Awards Committee agrees. In the letter sent to Speight on January 1st , he was informed that he is selected for this award “for the fine films [he has] produced [and] for [his] work as a public artist committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.”

Adds Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association:

Rico Speight has spent a lifetime offering audiences penetrating accounts of antiblack racism as it impacts the lives of people and their communities. Speight is a filmmaker, documentarian, visual artist, scholar and teacher who gives us penetrating insight into the lived worlds of the people and communities confronting and responding to the violence and brutality of antiblack racism. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize his lifetime of achievements with this award.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Achievement Award

Professor Tendayi Sithole is a Political Theorist whose work on Black intellectuals and political thought in South Africa transcends disciplinary reductivism and national borders as he creatively conjoins not only ideas from thinkers in South Africa and the African Diaspora but also methodological frameworks from the study of politics to those in literature, the arts, and varieties of media. He does so with a focus on destitute and other forms of subaltern communities. As his award letter states, he is receiving this award not only for his outstanding writings as a political theorist and a scholar connecting political thought with film, photography, and literature but also for his work as a mentor and public intellectual committed to the plight of the proverbial Damned of the Earth and the importance of shifting the geography of reason in the quest for dignity, liberation, and freedom.

A son of Johannesburg, South Africa, Sithole is currently a Professor in the Department of Political Science in the University of South Africa (UNISA) and a former Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. In 2022, he was a writing fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg, and also a 2024 visiting scholar at the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Sithole’s poetry collection is entitled The Life and Music of Zimontology (East London: Poetry Printery, 2018). He is also the author of Hortense J. Spillers: Subject, Abject, and Insurgent in Black Radical Thought (2024), Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania (2024), Refiguring in Black (2023), The Letter in Black Radical Thought (2023), Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania (2022),  The Black Register (2020), and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (2016). He is currently at work on two projects that include a poetry collection entitled “The Last Trumpet of Mongezi Feza” and a book length manuscript provisionally titled “Hands on the Tape Deck: Techno, Spectrality, and Black Sonic Imagination.”

The 2015 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Laureate Mabogo P. More states:

This Guillén Batista Outstanding Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association is a highly fitting and well-deserved acknowledgement and testament of Professor Tendayi Sithole’s voluminous work output. Professor Sithole is in my opinion one of, if not the most, prolific and productive young South African intellectual to date. A brilliant mind indeed, with nine published books and two in press to his credit. I definitely anticipate more from him in the years to come.

President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Jacqueline Martinez adds:

Tendayi Sithole’s scholarship offers a penetrating and sustained examination of Black existence as it is lived within the brutality of South African “post-apartheid.” His work brings together Black thinkers from across continents and temporalities to offer a sober and penetrating examination the relationality of power as it has functioned in a past that is also present, and always with the commitment to creating a truly liberatory future. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted to recognize Tendayi Sithole with this award.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Dans la Polyphonie d’une Île

Caroline Déodat, Dans la Polyphonie d’une Île : Les fictions coloniales du séga mauricien. Paris, Fr: Éditions B42, 2024.

In Dans la polyphonie d’une île: Les fictions coloniales du séga mauricien, Caroline Déodat builds upon the racial and colonial genealogy of the Mauritian musical tradition known as sega. She critically examines how these songs, music, and dances, born in communities of fugitives during slavery, become spectacles for tourists? Inviting readers to enter the agonistic circle of a sega, Déodat probes the construction of the colonial fictions that constituted this practice as an object of knowledge and a symptom of a diminished humanity. She then untangles the threads of “intervocality” at work in the poetics of Ségatieres, which were shaped in response to forms of violence that denied Mauritian people’s experience. Déodat offers the archives of this oral tradition through the excavation of voices, reactivated afterward by using transdisciplinary tools where ethnopoetics rubs shoulders with the moral and political philosophy of Saidiya Hartman, Elsa Dorlin, and Judith Butler, as well as the critical postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha.

“I am amazed at how this book fulfills the theoretical program of shifting the geography of reason and aesthetics,” writes one of the anonymous reviewers, who adds:

...The book shows how all attempts to re-install Séga’s lost African origin are doomed to fail, but how fiction and existential narration serve as an inexhaustible supplement to this absent identity. The notion of creoleness bears a very different meaning in the context of the Indian ocean, and the book does a wonderful job at showing how the repressed memories of Blackness and enslavement affect and condition the Mauritian experience of creolization. It offers a novel and decentered perspective on some of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s main preoccupations....

President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Jacqueline Martinez notes:

Dans la polyphonie d’une île: Les fictions coloniales du séga Mauricien is a tremendous achievement. It advances our understanding of the tight imbrications of colonial and racist hierarchies sustained even as they are resisted. Déodat’s excavations of these tight imbrications reveals the spaces where the polyphonic expressions of the sega performers of Mauritius have not been fully foreclosed by colonial and racist discursive structures but can be discerned and cultivated. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Déodat’s work with this award.

Caroline Déodat (1987, FR/MRU/BE) is a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher. Holding a PhD in ethnography and social anthropology from EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), she completed her study with a Post-diploma in Art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. At the same time, she trained in contemporary dance and performance with Salia Sanou, Seydou Boro, Germaine Acogny, Anne Collod, Batsheva Dance Company, among others. Déodat envisions voices through images. As an artist and anthropologist, she intertwines these practices to follow in the footsteps of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which, as a writing method, combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. In connection with her thesis on Mauritian séga, a poetic ritual of dance and song inherited from African enslavement, her films serve as attempts to transgress the order of the visible, transparency, and appropriation at work in Western modernity. They resist and displace, as much as possible, the violence inherent in colonial archives by the convocation of haunted memories, secret and speculative narratives.

Déodat’s work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, in international festivals such as Jih.lava International Documentary Film Festival, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, at the Musée Théodore Monod–IFAN in Dakar, at the 14th Bamako Encounters and soon at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. She was a Fellow of the Villa Médicis – French Academy in Rome (short Residency Program). Her work is part of prestigious collections (KADIST Fondation, Frac île-de-France).

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures Across the Indian Ocean

Sayan Dey, Performing Memories and Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures Across the Indian Ocean. Anthem Press, 2024.

This book examines the evolution, movements, and shifts in the often-overlooked Indian Ocean World (IOW) slave trade. Despite the existence of diverse archival documents from at least 600 BCE to the late 19 th century on the IOW trade activities, dominant narratives on the IOW, to a vast extent, have been shaped by Western/colonial historians, who have imaginatively constructed the IOW within separate geographical, cultural, epistemological, and ontological enclaves. Based on these socio-historical concerns, Performing Memories and Weaving Archives unearths how Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa preserve their ancestral memories through spiritual, culinary, and musical practices on the one side, and generate creolized socio- cultural spaces of collective decolonial resistance and well-being on the other.

This anonymous reviewer elaborates as follows:

This timely book starts with a crucial question: Are our identities fixed, or do they travel across races, communities, religion, economies, geographies, cosmologies, epistemologies and ontologies? In the process of addressing the question, the book takes us on an excursion of the geographical, cultural and topographical features that have marked the journey of Africans in India and Indians in Africa.

The book...tackle[s] topics such as porosity, spiritual memories, music, dance, culinary memories and finally concluding with a [discussion of] the archipelagos of resistance, where the string of islands between Africa and India speak to the histories of this migration and the embodied experiences that tell the testimonies of time.

At the core of the book is the unpeeling of the Indian ocean’s ancestral dispersal and transportation of culture and identity between India and Africa. Dey offers insight into what many of us located on the African continent wake up with: a dream that stems from a place where many of our Indian ancestors come from, the sound of musicality known to our bones, and a memory that we cannot always place but know is part of our ancestral make-up as we wake up on African soil. As our day continues, sounds from the surrounding filter in, smells from cooking on the braai or the cluttered kitchen and the garden fill our nostrils, while churches, mosques, and Hindu temples sound out reminders of our relationship with the African continent and the Indian subcontinent. In our ancestral dreams, colonisation has not managed to interfere or disrupt the threads of our ancestry. Performing Memories and Weaving Archives brings to the reader a sense of home, but also a sense of belonging to places where our senses, or dreams, our rhythm stems from, and from which we cannot flee—they are all embedded in what we call identity, with all its historical nuances. . . .

Dey captures the visual as well as the murmurs of memory that meander in and out of the lives of our [African East Indians], often times identified by those who see further than our freckled faces or our [Indian African] accents, our culinary cousins playing joyfully with green chillies on top of the mountain of fish curry and rice, and the way we use our hands in speech and in the intimacy of pleasure, as sauce rolls down our fingers, tickling the wrists that bind us.

Dey is not afraid to address class and caste, religion and its roaring resistance from reluctant worshippers, nor the spirituality that is practiced by the Gujaratis in Durban, determined to retain their Indianness with spoonsful of pap from their African identity.

....The creolization between India and the African continent, especially South Africa, speaks to a diaspora that is alive and well and bursting with unwritten knowledge, begging for continued interpretation and engagement. The author has offered us a precious gift with this book: it is rich, savoury, and draws one into the soul of the politics of race, empire and coloniality while offering the much-needed written nuances of neglected histories that bring a smile, a tilted head of satisfaction and a deep breath of contentment.

“Performing Memories and Weaving Archives greatly advances our understanding of the complex interplay of space, geography, and culture in what comes to be expressed as a human sense of self,” adds President Jacqueline Martinez. She adds:

Dey’s work shows us how the geography of the Indian Ocean constitutes a rich site of Indian and African diasporic communities whose everyday practices of relating through dance, music and culinary practices, carry forward ancestral knowledges that survive, ironically, through the colonial interventions in India and Africa. The Caribbean Philosophical Association is delighted recognize Dey’s work with this award.

Sayan Dey is a Bengali. He was born and brought up in Kolkata, and he traces his ancestry to different parts of Bangladesh. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor (Department of English Studies) and Vice-chair (The Committee for Research, Innovations, Consultations, and Training), at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest), Oman. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship with Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2021–2023). He is also an Associate Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada, a Critical Research Studies Faculty at The NYI Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York, and an Affiliated Member of the Global Posthuman Network. His latest monographs are Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (2022), Performing Memories, Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (2025). His research interests are posthumanism, decolonial studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, critical diaspora studies, culinary epistemologies, and critical diversity literacy.

Nicolás Guillén Philosophical Literature Prize Previous Recipients