Paget Henry

Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He received his PhD in sociology from Cornell University in 1976, though he also has a longstanding interest in philosophy. (As an undergraduate, he won the Frederick Sperling Award in philosophy at City College in 1970.) His specializations are dependency theory, Caribbean political economy, the sociology of religion, the sociology of art and literature, Africana philosophy and religion, race and ethnic relations, post-structuralism, and critical theory. Before coming to Brown, Henry taught at SUNY Stony Brook, the University of the West Indies (Antigua), and the University of Virginia. He is the author of dozens of articles and three books: Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction, 1985); Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (Routledge, 2000); and Shouldering Antigua and Barbuda: The Life of V.C. Bird (Hansib, 2010). Together with Carl Stone he co-edited The Newer Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), and together with Paul Buhle he co-edited C.L.R. James’s Caribbean (Duke UP, 1992). A collection of his writings, Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), was put together by Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts. Henry’s Caliban’s Reason is now regarded as a classic, and in 2002 he was one of the key founders of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, a Global South–oriented organization whose theoretical mission it is “to shift the geography of reason,” and that holds annual meetings and awards annual book prizes to further this goal. He is the editor of The CLR James Journal and The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books.