Congratulations to William Paris for winning the Canadian Philosophical Association’s (CPA) 2026 Book Award for Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025). By analyzing the writings of historical figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and James Boggs, Paris combines historical Africana philosophy and contemporary critical theory in a novel conversation where he seeks to understand utopia apart from fantasies of perfection.
In the book, Paris aims to “develop the hypothesis that racial domination is at bottom the domination of time by one group over another and thus emancipation must entail delivering the control of time out of the hands of one set of agents and into another’s.”
“Paris’s study squarely puts the question of racial injustice front and center as the core problem of social and political theory,” says colleague Willi Goetschel.
“Rather than providing a justificatory argument for the necessity of Black liberation, or a moral argument based on tenets of liberal humanism, this book explores the oppressive temporal regimes underpinning and sustaining the systems of economic exploitation and social exclusion that are both grounded and found in their exemplary expression in racial injustice,” he adds.
“I am really grateful that Race, Time, and Utopia has found an audience in Canada. I’m honoured to be in good company with the other winners,” says Paris. “I appreciate that people have been willing to go along with my blending of Africana philosophy and contemporary critical theory. I hope more people will get something from the work!”
Awarded every three years, the CPA Book Awards were also given out to Jonathan Ichikawa for Epistemic Courage (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Pierre-Alexandre Fradet for Le désir du réel dans la philosophie québécoise (Nota Bene, 2022).
Tarek Dika also received an honourable mention for Descartes’s Method: The Formulation of the Subject of Science (Oxford University Press, 2023).
In 2022, former U of T professor of Philosophy and Law Sophie Moreau received the CPA book Prize for Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (Oxford University Press, 2020).
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