Francio Guadeloupe

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Dr. Francio Guadeloupe, a social & cultural anthropologist and development sociologist by training, is the President of the University of St. Martin in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten on the bi-national island of Sint Maarten & Saint Martin (Dutch and French Caribbean). Guadeloupe's work can be described as a scholarship of possibilities seeking to undo the guiding fictions of "race", sexism, and the naturalization of class hierarchies that have become entrenched in our thinking, behavior, and institutional arrangements. His method is best captured in this axiom translated from a Dutch article published in the journal Sociale Vraagstukken in 2012:

I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on not doing. Let me explain this slowly, I do not do the good I want to do (creating the good of a raceless society in its historically constituted terms, so, practically speaking, doing Dutch society's reality of race differently), but the evil I do not want to do (which is thinking and doing in terms of race)—this I keep on not doing (so not doing race at all).^[1]

Guadeloupe's Via Negativa mode of doing anthropology is influenced by his training at the Radboud University in the Netherlands. There under the guidance of Gerrit Huizer, he was introduced to an unorthodox understanding of the link between Liberation Theology and Marxism. In private conversations, Huizer taught Guadeloupe to appreciate Liberation Theology as Marxism decorated with the best of Christian redemptive politics. Conversely, in accordance with a materialist interpretation of Hegel, Marxism was Christianity finally returning to its radical roots. Guadeloupe resolved these contending definitions in Caribbean fashion by radicalizing both traditions. In Guadeloupe's reading, Christianity and Marxism are both products of planetary creolization: the clash of the peoples of the earth leading to agonistic borrowings and transpositions, as such they are cosmopolitan rather than European and Middle Eastern traditions. Marxism and Liberation Theology are common names for the Social Question and the continuous interrogation of Being and Becoming that meet other traditions such as those concerned with racism and patriarchy. All this is connected to Guadeloupe's predilection for the American pragmatist tradition.

One finds a succinct expose of Guadeloupe's philosophy of science in his video message on the Wake UP call interview ^[2] and its translation in a book on nation building on Sint Maarten^[3]