The present world seems lost to its future. Climate change, wars, the ongoing and renewed oppression of diverse peoples and ideas call for resistance and something more. McBride seeks to provide more by showing how philosophy and art can find a way to stand outside the circle of our benighted moment to imagine possible futures. Creative Rebelliousness and Pragmatism delivers what Leonard Harris's insurrectionist philosophy demands: 'the sort of spirit/ethos needed to escape conceptual backwaters and asylums, retain a sense of hope, negate conventional categories and valuations, and “leap into an abyss.”' McBride shows the potential of philosophical pragmatism to contribute to critical efforts to understand the legacy of colonization and racism and to imagine new categories, valuations, identities, communities and cultures that may help the world find its way.

Scott L. Pratt, Professor and Department Head of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, US

Tracking the subversive freedoms that underwrite creative worlds, Lee A. McBride offers a theory of poetic departure-one that centres the black aesthetic vocabularies that move us through and beyond normative scholarly and epistemological methods.

Katherine McKittrick author of Dear Science and Other Stories

“Exquisitely written and painstakingly argued, Creative Rebelliousness and Pragmatism
establishes that poiesis is itself a window of opportunity for arriving at
warranted insights. McBride's arguments make poiesis and moral imperatives
compatible without the sinkhole of metaphysics and dogmatic moral imperatives
standing on its opposite shore . . . This is a tour de force that gives terms like naturalism,
empiricism and pragmatism a welcomed new meaning.”

Leonard Harris, Joyce and Edward E. Brewer Chair in Applied Ethics, Purdue University, USA