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I use the conceptual umbrella – A Caribbean Poetics of Forgetting – to think through the temporal and spatial aspects of world-making as it arises out of the Caribbean diaspora. The ‘forgetting’ in this ethics of forgetting is not a disavowal of multiple axes of violence that found this diaspora. Rather, I attempt to use an ethics of forgetting to name Caribbean practices of clearing that condition something like a Kierkegaardian leap of faith – into a future; toward the miracle work of making roots in blood-soil; and for the work of making a way out of fragmented history/ruptured time. In the main, this exploration is grounded in Dionne Brand’s poetic cartography (in Map to the Door of No Return), and Edouard Glissant’s twinned account of the oral and the opaque (in Poetics of Relation and Caribbean Discourse).

Bio: Kris F Sealey is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. She graduated from Spelman College in 2001 with a B.Sc. in Mathematics, and received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Memphis. Dr. Sealey served as the book review editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy from 2011 – 2022. From 2018 – 2021, she also directed PIKSI-Rock (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute), a summer immersion experience at Penn State for under-represented undergraduate students with an interest in pursuing a doctorate in philosophy. Dr. Sealey’s areas of research include Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and decolonial theory. Her first book, Moments of Disruption: Levinas, Sartre and the Question of Transcendence, was published in December 2013 with SUNY Press. Her second book, Creolizing the Nation, published in September 2020 with Northwestern University Press, was awarded the Guillén Batista book award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2022.