UMass Boston

Ancient and contemporary political theory, decolonial theory, critical theory, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, critical philosophy of race, poststructuralism, settler colonial critique

PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst
MA, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Fall 2022: NO Office Hours:

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Recently, he was the Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna/Duke University (2018-2020), and the Karl Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College (2014). His research seeks to rethink the relationship between politics and aesthetics in relation to gender-differentiated colonial logics of capitalist accumulation. While focused on that question, he has reimagined the relationship between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, settler colonial critique, and poststructuralism. His book manuscript, Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press 2021), criticizes the theoretical reception of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, in democratic theory, queer and feminist theory, the theory of biopolitics, and the theory of deconstruction, by foregrounding the settler colonial logics of capitalist accumulation by which subject-positions are aesthetically distributed in the play and its theoretical reception. Currently, he is working on two additional research projects: White Masochism (in progress) and The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (under contract with Rowman & Littlefield). His research has also been published in Settler Colonial Studies, Theoria, Theory & Event, Representation, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia, among others.

List of publications include:

Books

2022. The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

2021. Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Context.New York: SUNY Press. 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

2022     “Towards a Black Radical Critique of Natality: Beyond Hannah Arendt’s Biopolitics.” Critical Philosophy of Race 10 (1): 90-105.

2021     “Ontological Captivity: Toward a Black Radical Deconstruction of Being.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 32 (3): 85-113.

2020 “Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A Political Reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s Ethical Turn.” Settler Colonial Studies 10 (1): 94-109. 

2019 “Queering Lucrezia’s Virtú: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Radical Machiavelli.” Theoria 66 (1): 51-75.

2018  “Nietzsche and Haiti: The Post-Colonial Rebirth of Tragedy.” Theory & Event 21 (2): 358-381.
2017  “Teaching to Transgress’ Death Drive, or bell hooks as Educator.” La Deleuziana. Special Issue: Milieux of Desire 6 (1): 145-157.
2017  “The Crack in the Mask, the Wound in the Flesh: Political Representation as Symptom.” Representation 53 (1): 55-65.
2017  “Slavery in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and the Militant Intellectual from the Global South.” Theatre Survey 58 (1): 86-107.
2016  “Who Says ‘I’m Undocumented’: Theatrical Strategies in the Politics of Undocumented Immigration.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Special Issue on Resistance and Stillness 12 (3): 1-17.
2015  “Can the Subaltern Smile? Oedipus Without Oedipus.” Contemporary Political Theory 14 (4): 315-334.
2013  “Antigone claimed: ‘I am a Stranger!’ Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger.” Hypatia: Special Issue ‘Crossing Borders.’ 28 (2): 307-322.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

2020 “Whose Tempest? Performance Philosophy and/as Decolonial Cacophony.” In Cull, Laura and Lagaay, Alice (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 53-60. 

2019 Co-Authored with Ashley Bohrer. “A Global People’s History of Police Exchanges: Settler Colonialism, Capitalism and the Intersectionality of Struggles.” In Koram, Kojo (ed.). The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line. London: Pluto Press, 141-155.

2019 “Between Nothingness and Infinity: Settlement and Anti-Blackness as the Overdetermination of Human Rights.” In Chowdhury, Elora and Srikanth, Rajini (eds.). Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice. New York: Routledge, 50-64.

2019 Co-Authored with Henrik Ernstson. “‘Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!’ The Politics of the Anthropo(bs)cene.” In Ernstson, Henrik and Swyngedouw, Erik (eds.). Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-Obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities. Oxford: Routledge, 69-87

2017  “Asphyxia: Naming Police Violence as Street-Level Sovereignty.” In Brigham, John and Marusek, Sarah (eds.). Street Level Sovereignty. Lanham: Lexington Books, 107-124.
2015  “From the “Bio” to the “Necro”: The Human at the Border.” In Wilmer, Stephen and Žukauskaitė, Audronė (eds.). Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies, New York: Routledge, 237-253.

Reviews

2019 “Oedipus at the Border: A Review of Simon Critchley’s Tragedy, The Greeks, And Us, and Demetra Kasimis’s The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy.” Public Books, November 11.
2017  Cull, Laura and Alice Lagaay (eds.). Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. And Chow, Broderick and Alex Mangold (eds). Žižek and Performance. Series: Performance Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016
2014  “Antigone and Democratic Theory – (B.) Antigone, Interrupted” In The Classical Review 64 (2): 606-608.
2014  “Postmodern Antigones – Wilmer (S. E.), Žukauskaitė (A.), (edd.) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism” In The Classical Review 64 (2): 608-610.

Articles for Palabras al Margen (Words at the Margins) Selected Sample.

2018  March “El hedor del neoliberalismo” (The Stench of Neoliberalism)
2017  September “La política de las huellas” (The Politics of the Traces) 
2017  March “El dieciocho brumario de Donald Trump” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald Trump)
 

You can find his website at:

http://works.bepress.com/andres_fabian_henao_castro