The Caribbean Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Sylvia Marcos is one of the 2024 recipients of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sylvia Marcos
The selection of recommended recipients is made annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Awards Committee. The committee consists of all prior recipients of the Frantz Fanon, the Nicolás Guillén, and the Stuart Hall Awards, two appointed senior scholars, and two appointed junior scholars. For more information, please consult:
The Caribbean Philosophical Association is honoring the recipients for the importance of their work for the association’s ongoing project of “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” In the words of 2014’s Guillén Lifetime Achievement Laureate Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o:
[We] celebrate the new recipients of the awards; sisi kwa sisi (we for us/for one another/from us to us), we used to say in Kiswahili.
Unusually, this year’s Frantz Fanon achievement awards include two psychologists and a theoretical physicist. Their contributions speak to Fanon’s legacy as a philosopher, scientist, clinician, and freedom-fighter. Similarly, this year’s Guillén lifetime achievement award winners speak to Guillén’s legacy as a philosophical poet and social critic. The careers of all address their namesakes’ legacies as activist intellectuals.
Sylvia Marcos is a psychologist and scholar committed to Indigenous and feminist movements throughout the Americas and across the globe. She works at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos. She was founder of the CIDHAL Documentation Center in 1974, and Professor of Psychology at the Benemérita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP). Her research and publications contribute to the fields of feminist critical epistemology, Mesoamerican religions, and women within Indigenous movements, while promoting an antihegemonic-feminist practice, theory, and hermeneutics. Her recent book is entitled Una poética de la insurgencia zapatista (AKAL, 2024), and her many other books such as Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Brill, 2006), El libro Dialogo y Diferencia: retos feministas a la globalización (2008), Mujeres , Indígenas, Rebeldes Zapatistas (2011),Cruzando Fronteras: mujeres indígenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda (Quimantú, 2017). For a full list, please consult the bibliography on her website.
Dr. Marcos has participated in many social and critical movements. She was part of Ivan Illich’s Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), a proposal of the early 1970s with a critical anti-institutional analysis of churches, schools, and medical establishments. She was a colleague of Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, and her political theoretical thought is inspired by her work among Zapatista women and that entire movement. Her intellectual work includes Mayan thought, particularly the duality of equal and complementary mutual interconnectedness and interdependence of feminine and masculine life. She is also a contributor to thinking epistemologies beyond hegemonic and centrist models from the global north.
In 2023, Dr. Marcos was honored by the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) with the founding of La Cátedra Sylvia Marcos (the Sylvia Marcos Chair).
Dr. Jacqueline Martinez, President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, observes that:
Sylvia Marcos is the embodiment of our highest ideals of intellectual work that is intricately interwoven with the daily life needs and aspirations of communities who are objects of colonial oppression in all of its forms. She stands as an exemplar of courage and conviction lived in projects that elevate the health and well-being of people and communities whose humanity is most at risk within the Euromodern colonial systems of thought.
The awards will be formally conferred by the Chair of the Awards Committee at a special ceremony at the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting, which will take place this June 27–30th, 2024 in Quintana Roo, Mexico.