Bio
Max Hantel's research intertwines feminist and Afro-Caribbean philosophy to explore alternative political and ecological imaginaries of humanism. His dissertation, "Revolutionary Humanism and Geographies of Survival in Afro-Caribbean and Feminist Thought,” traces a distinct materialist tradition borne of the Caribbean's history as a site of both intense violence and creolization, often mobilized around the distinction between different kinds of humanity and between humans and nonhumans. He looks especially to sites where who counts symbolically is a matter of life and death and the environment impinges on the supposed sovereignty of the human: "natural disaster" zones like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the Mississippi flood of 1927. Finally, he addresses the increasing importance of the discourse of the "Anthropocene," the idea that humanity is not longer just a biological agent but a geological agent. Broadening out from the Caribbean, he argues that thinkers from the Global South have continually developed survival tactics in the face of these dangerous interpenetrations of colonial power, economic exploitation and environmental destruction (conditions faced throughout the world since at least the fifteenth-century) and generated new ways of making livable worlds.
