Introducing this collection of essays, Fran癟oise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary
academic disciplines—suggests a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem separate today emerged from
overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic
studies programs and “French theory” emerged from decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also
postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source
of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of
colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chanc矇, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In the
essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. �douard Glisssant links the
extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold
intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities.
