Introducing Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg with Drucilla Cornell and Jane Gordon

“I Have A Thousand More Things I Want To Say To You.”

An introduction to Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg with
Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon, moderated by Bernabe S. Mendoza

Session One of a six part series.

Rosa Luxemburg is unquestionably the most important historical European woman Marxist theorist of the last century. Significantly, for the purpose of creolizing the canon, she considered her continent and the globe from an Eastern Europe that was in constant flux and turmoil. From this relatively peripheral location, she was far less parochial than many of her more centrally located interlocutors and peers. Indeed, Luxemburg’s work touched on all the burning issues of her time and ours, from analysis of concrete revolutionary struggles, such as those in Poland and Russia, to showing through her analysis of primitive accumulation that anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles had to be intertwined, to considerations of state sovereignty, democracy, feminism, and racism. She thereby offered reflections that can usefully be taken up and reworked by writers facing continuous and new challenges to undo relations of exploitation through radical economic and social transformation Luxemburg touches on all aspects of what constitutes revolution in her work; the authors of this volume show us that, by creolizing Luxemburg, we can open up new understanding of the complexities of revolution.

DRUCILLA CORNELL Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University; JANE ANNA GORDON, University of Connecticut

Sessions Moderator: BERNABE S. MENDOZA, Department of Comparative Literature, Rutgers University