1. Framing themes: circumscribing the topic
Early in his masterful Introduction to Africana Philosophy,
Lewis R. Gordon defines his subject in a deceptively simple way that
both anticipates important complexities and sets some basic
boundaries. Africana philosophy, he says, is “as an area of
philosophical research that addresses the problems faced and raised by
the African diaspora” (Gordon 2008, 13). The references to
problems and to the diaspora immediately point to two vital framing
themes for the field.
1.1 Africanaity
The first theme has to do with the threshold metaphysical and
socio-anthropological assumptions that underwrite the use of
“Africana” as a modifier. Things that earn this
modifier—people and practices most clearly, institutions and
material objects somewhat less so—are supposed to be
interestingly connected to the continent of Africa and, therefore, to
each other. This raises obvious questions. What kind of connections
count for this purpose? How strong do they have to be?
Arguments about how to account for the unity of the Africana condition
comprise one of the recurring subjects of Africana philosophy. This
has often taken the form of debates about “Africanity,”
the key contours of which have been helpfully chronicled by Souleymane
Bachir Diagne
(2001).[1]
Unfortunately, that concept is ambiguous between studies of African
commonalities—of what, say, Ghanaians and Eritreans share that
Britons of African descent may not—and studies of African
diasporic continuities. In deference to the distinctiveness of the
concerns animating these studies and of the conclusions they often
reach, I will reserve the notion of Africanity for studies focused on
the continent and introduce the notion of Africanaity to
indicate an interest in wider diasporic connections.
This is not the place to consider in detail the threshold questions of
Africanaity. Luckily it is a fairly intuitive concept, rooted in
widely—if often dimly—understood facts about the social
and political history of Africa and its peoples over the last several
centuries. One can debate the precise meaning of these facts or the
limits of the intuition underwriting the Africana idea. But the basic
intuition, even for critics of its extended application in, say, a
Pan-African politics, is provisionally useful as what Lucius T. Outlaw
Jr. calls a “gathering notion,” used to capture the same
insight that underwrites locutions like “of African
descent,” and to prepare that insight for extension, critique,
and elaboration (Outlaw 2004, 90).
1.2 Problematicity
The notion of Africanaity draws out the part of Gordon’s quick
definition of Africana philosophy that focuses on the diaspora. But
what about the rest? What does it mean to refer to the problems that
the diaspora faces and raises? And why dwell on these problems as a
way of framing this study?
Additional language from Gordon may be helpful. He explains:
Since there was no reason for the people of the African continent to
have considered themselves African until that identity was imposed
upon them through conquest and colonization in the modern era …
this area of thought also refers to the unique set of questions raised
by the emergence of “Africans” and their diaspora…
. Such concerns include the convergence of most Africans with the
racial term “black” and its many connotations. (Gordon
2008, 1)
Gordon’s point is that taking Africanaity seriously means asking
about the conditions under which the concept came to have something to
refer to. And to ask about these conditions is to explore a handful of
social, methodological, and broadly philosophical problems, and to
consider certain oddly robust links between these problems and the
Africana condition.
I’ll refer to this constellation of problems and their
connection to the Africana condition as problematicity. This second
framing theme sets three vital tasks for the field.
First, it is important to grapple responsibly with the very real
problems that face Africa and its diaspora. There are many obvious
examples, from imperial incursions and forced migrations to asymmetric
integration into the world economy and authoritarian post-independence
governance. Philosophical inquirers may take these conditions as their
subject matter, but they will also have to grapple with the way these
conditions shape and constrain the prospects for intellectual
work.
Second, it is equally important, if not more so, to call out and
correct for the tendency to assume that Africana communities
don’t just face problems but are also somehow inherently prone
to them. The thought here is that the condition of Africanaity is not
simply about facing problems, but also, in a way, about being
a problem. I’ve borrowed this way of putting it from a germinal
formulation by one of the canonical figures of Africana thought. Early
in his career, W.E.B. Du Bois famously invited his readers to consider
a puzzling question on behalf of people racialized as Black: how
does it feel to be a problem? (Du Bois “Of Our Spiritual
Strivings” [1903] 1986, 363). That is (in part) to say: how does
it feel to move through life as a living representative of a
society’s ethical lapses and epistemic incapacities, and to
contend with the social pressure to think of oneself as the source of
these problems? In light of the substantial overlap between
Africanaity and Blackness, the tendency “to view Black people as
a problem people” is very much at issue for Africa and its
diaspora (West 1999, 104).
The phenomenological depth of this second mode of problematicity
points to a third mode, which involves not simply facing or being a
problem, but also raising problems. We’ve already seen
this at work to some degree, in the way the Africana idea prompts
questions in metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. But Africanaity
also raises deeper problems of method and world-view and, in some
senses of the word, ontology. The discursive event that V. Y. Mudimbe
(1988) dubs “the invention of Africa” complicates or, one
might say, short-circuits certain standard modern modes of
philosophical comportment—or, better put, forces philosophical
Euro-modernity to misrepresent and perhaps misunderstand its actual
animating imperatives. This complication leads Hegel to extrude Africa
from his staging of world history while doing considerable violence to
actual history and to geography. It leads figures like Thomas
Jefferson and John Locke to mirror the contradictions of modern
political thought in their works and their lives. It leads Fanon (in
another germinal contribution to Africana thought) to note that reason
walks out of the room when he walks in. Thoughts like these have
inspired Gordon (2000) and others to organize a great deal of fruitful
philosophical work around the epistemological challenges of
“shifting the geography of reason” and of bringing the
human sciences to bear on populations whose members are often only
tenuously regarded as
human.[2]
(To be clear: the claim here is not that African-descended people and
cultures are somehow problematic by nature. Sober reflection
on the empirical evidence and on plausible meanings of “by
nature” cannot sustain that thought. The claim is that a)
Euro-modernity was in some ways built on the conviction that
African-descended people are inherently problematic, and that b)
philosophical interventions that resist this conviction become
problems, render themselves problematic, for hegemonic approaches to
philosophy.)
The point of starting with these framing themes is to mark certain
vital contexts for Africana philosophical reflection. To study
Africana philosophy is, first of all, to do the things one does in
other areas of philosophy: consider a range of characteristic
questions and problems, study a cohort of canonical figures and texts,
participate in living debates organized around familiar tropes and
moves, and so on. But it is also to do these things in contexts
defined by foundational questions—about, for example, the nature
of philosophical inquiry, the structure and impact of concrete
mechanisms for knowledge production, and even the humanity of the
inquirers—to a degree that is fairly unusual. As an emblem of
this, consider that the establishment of African philosophy as a
respectable subject of study—in a sense of
“respectable” to be fleshed out below—began with
debates over a single, simple, now-obsolete question: can Africans
even do philosophy?
Having worked through the themes that emerged from Gordon’s
deceptively simple definition of Africana philosophy, we are now in a
better position to receive a similar but more elaborate definition.
Outlaw describes “Africana philosophy” as “a
third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept… . [T]he name
does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system,
method, or tradition” (Outlaw 2017, §1, par. 1). It refers
instead to a field of study that emerges from the distinctive
conditions that produce and implicate Africa and its diaspora, that
takes seriously the experiences and reflections of the peoples who are
most directly affected and implicated by those conditions, and that,
as a result of the first two factors, tends to feature certain
recurring preoccupations or themes. Some of those preoccupations and
themes appear above, and will receive more attention, alongside
several additional themes, in the sections to come.
(Outlaw also identifies a number of “key heuristic
presumptions” that can help to ward off easy misconceptions
[Outlaw 2017, §1, par. 2]. The most important of these
presumptions are that a) there are responsible ways to account for the
unity and distinctiveness of the phenomena that bear the predicate
“Africana”; b) these accounts do not presuppose uniformity
and homogeneity among Africana peoples and cultures, and they need not
aspire to or prescribe such uniformity; and c) “contributors [to
Africana philosophy] need not be persons African or of African
descent” (Outlaw 2017, §1, par. 5). As noted above, this
entry will not delve any further into these presumptions. Readers
seeking reassurance about these issues may consult the foundational
texts that Outlaw (2017) and Gordon (2008) explore in their overviews
of the field.)
2. Framing conditions: coloniality, heterodoxy, and historicity
Studies of Africana philosophy and its subfields routinely begin by
acknowledging that these became recognized areas of professional
scholarly study only recently. These acknowledgments implicate three
framing conditions that are crucial for understanding the field.
The first condition has to do with a version of what Elena Ruíz
calls “epistemic imperialism.” This is her name for states
of affairs in which hegemonic modes of epistemic practice
“reproduce interpretive conditions favorable to the dominant
assumptions.” Philosophical activity under these conditions
“creates and maintains interpretive spaces in philosophy that
are self-confirming rather than culturally open and plural,” and
also “clears the way for the devaluation of non-dominant
intellectual traditions through tacit methodological
assumptions” (Ruíz 2018, 52–53). What this means is
that oppressive conditions exclude their victims from knowledge
production not simply by preventing people with certain bodies,
backgrounds, beliefs, or other distinguishing features from entering
the institutions charged with knowledge work, but also by engineering
the conceptual and theoretical tools to promote epistemic numbness and
turn exclusion into erasure.
Issues of epistemic imperialism bear on Africana philosophy because
hegemonic institutions have historically recognized, and to a
considerable degree still recognize, philosophic interventions as
achieving scholarly respectability by appeal to standards calibrated
to colonial and apartheid imperatives. One very short version of this
story is that the most influential university systems in the
contemporary world—including in Africa and the
Caribbean—started as the creations and tools of European
colonial powers or settler colonial authorities. (This is only one
version of the story because it is not, of course, a story simply
about university systems. It is also a story about, among other
things, publishing houses, dictionaries, the word
“philosophy,” and the baggage that European elite cultures
attached to all of these things. Outlaw and Gordon also tell this
story well.) Consequently, and not surprisingly, it was only in the
years after colonized peoples won formal independence and apartheid
regimes formally embraced democracy that these institutions began in
any thoroughgoing way to credit research programs and curricular
initiatives not animated by assumptions about African backwardness,
savagery, or barbarism.
The fact that it took many, many years for hegemonic Euro-modern
inquirers to begin to disentangle epistemic norms from colonial and
apartheid imperatives highlights the second contextual consideration,
call this “the condition of heterodoxy.” Much of the work
that sets the agenda for Africana philosophy was produced largely
outside of the forums that elite European-influenced intellectual
cultures considered respectable. In some cases, this meant that
African-descended scholars worked in alternative, often racially
segregated, institutions and shared their research in alternative
spaces. In other cases, it meant that these scholars worked on the
margins of mainstream institutions, enjoying or enduring highly
constrained interactions with the people who under different
circumstances would have been their colleagues and interlocutors. In
the vast majority of cases, it meant that people in African and
African-descended communities refined and employed their own
mechanisms for producing knowledge. In all of these cases, it meant
that Africana intellectual work was importantly heretical or
heterodox.
Africana philosophy’s relatively recent arrival on the scene of
“respectable” knowledge production points to the third
framing condition for the field, its manifest historicity. The
field’s unavoidable status as an artifact of evolving
sociopolitical conditions puts historical dynamics at issue here in a
way that other fields (outside of the history of philosophy) can
usually evade. Because of this, a study of contemporary activity must
begin by attending to the development of the field over time, on at
least three levels. It is important to attend to the development of
certain ideas and to the canonization of certain texts and figures, to
consider the evolving social and institutional conditions under which
Africana philosophers did their work, and to credit the degree to
which reconsiderations of the history constitute a thriving area of
contemporary study.
3. History in contemporary perspective: guiding principles
Intellectual and institutional histories are unusually central to
Africana philosophy, and are intertwined to an unusual degree, but
this is not the place to explore the institutional histories in
detail. The next section will provide a contemporary intellectual
history, in order to establish the structural elements and thematic
preoccupations that organize a great deal of the contemporary work
we’ll soon consider. Still, it is important to organize the
discussion in a way that makes room for responsible institutional
histories and accommodates their insights.
Accordingly, three principles will guide the discussion to come.
First, this study will focus on Africana philosophy as a
field. This means that the contributions of individual
thinkers, however provocative or insightful, will be relevant here
largely insofar as they bear on the networks of intellectual exchange
and institutional credentialing that invite description with terms
like “discipline” and “tradition.” It also
means observing a distinction between the history of Africana
philosophy as an enterprise and the history of African-descended
philosophers as a cohort. Many members of this cohort have of course
made valuable, germinal contributions to the field, beginning with
towering figures like Alexander Crummell, whose establishment of the
American Negro Academy was an early exercise in building these
networks. But many others, as Stephen C. Ferguson II points out,
“need not (and have not) exclusively engaged the Africana
experience as an area of inquiry” (Ferguson 2009, 23). The
former will be part of the story told here; the latter will not.
Second, this study will focus, to some degree, on
professional academic work. Philosophical activity outside of
the academy—in other institutional spaces or prior to the
emergence of contemporary universities and their professional
scholars—will not be peremptorily excluded here, but will be
relevant insofar as it bears on the work that happens or might happen
in or near the academy. The academy is of course not the only site for
responsible attempts at knowledge production, but it is a mechanism
for systematically enshrining certain of these attempts as resources
for more work. That is the aspect of Africana philosophy that I mean
to take up here.
Third, the discussion will approach the field as a
paradisciplinary formation, which is to say that it will
focus on work that happens or might happen in and near philosophy
departments. In speaking here of proximity to philosophy departments,
I mean principally to capture two overlapping categories of thinkers:
scholars who take up recognizably philosophical themes or resources
in, say, departments of English or political science; and historical
figures without the sort of departmental affiliation that registers
for scholars now, but who make the kinds of moves and noises that
encourage philosophers to invite them into their narratives of the
field. Which is to say: if philosophy of social science can have
Clifford Geertz and philosophy writ large can have Hume, Kierkegaard,
Emerson, and Jane Addams, then Africana philosophy can have Patricia
Hill Collins and Alexander Crummell (both of whom will return
below).
It is important to remain in the orbit of the academic discipline of
philosophy for at least three reasons: to preserve space for
reflection on the distinctly philosophical questions that Africanaity
puts in play, to cultivate distinctly philosophical resources for
treating those questions, and to credit the contributions and career
trajectories of the few African-descended philosophers who did their
work before the field established itself as a going concern. At the
same time, though, focusing just on work by card-carrying philosophers
would be unduly restrictive. For one thing, the discipline and the
profession have long been hostile both to sustained reflection on the
issues that define the field and, in quite concrete ways, to the
humans who attempted to undertake this reflection. As a result, much
of this reflection has happened and continues to happen in other
places—in political theory, sociology, literary theory, artistic
practice, and more. In addition, and as a related matter, Africana
philosophy has in practice long been remarkably ecumenical, as the
contributor lists for key reference works makes clear. Excluding the
political theorists, sociologists, Black studies scholars, and others
who have worked, often in conversation with professional philosophers,
to advance the field would not only needlessly limit the available
resources but would also run counter to ongoing practice.
With these guiding principles in place, and in deference to the
framing conditions of historicity, coloniality, and heterodoxy, the
next section will present a swift history of Africana philosophy.
Constructing historical narratives is always, to some degree, a
presentist exercise: it is an attempt to read the past while guided by
contemporary concerns and informed by contemporary resources. This
reading will lean into that aspect of the exercise—it is, in
effect, a reading of the history as seen in contemporary perspective,
and is therefore also a way of wading a bit further into the
contemporary preoccupations that are the subject of this entry.
This presentist orientation recommends sorting the history into two
broad stages. The first is a long pre-history of the
paradisciplinary formation under scrutiny here, a period, prior to the
establishment of the field in hegemonic epistemic communities, during
which many key themes, issues, texts, and figures emerged. The second
is a shorter, more recent stage, itself composed of three shorter
periods, during which the field established itself, achieved
consolidation, and moved into the contemporary moment.
4. Stage one: emergence
Like other areas of philosophical study, Africana philosophy emerged
and matured as its practitioners identified and continued to explore a
set of core elements. Of the texts, figures, debates, movements,
schools, and themes that have come to organize conversations in and
contributions to the field, many came into focus during the first
stage of Africana philosophy’s history. Some had long careers
outside the academy as resources for political mobilization,
existential sustenance, aesthetic experience, and critical
edification, while others were the product of explicitly scholarly
reflection. (And some were both.) Whatever their origin, many of these
early heterodox elements have made or are making their way into an
academic world that long wanted little to do with them, and they
continue to set the agenda for contemporary work.
Precisely locating the start of this early period once more raises
potentially knotty metaphysical and empirical puzzles. Before the idea
of Africa as a unitary entity gained sufficient traction (precisely
when this happened is the empirical puzzle), nothing interestingly
identifiable as African or Africana philosophy existed. There was a
great deal of philosophizing in the place that would come to be called
Africa, and there may be reasons to link those early activities to the
self-consciously African-oriented reflections that would emerge later.
But Gordon is surely right to say that reading ancient Egypt or Kush
as what some scholars call a classical African civilization
“must … be a modern imposition onto the past”
(Gordon 2008, 15). He is also right to point out that we typically
allow this imposition, often without comment, in other
contexts—in studies of Asian philosophy, for example, or in
assuming the organic coherence of western philosophy from Greece to,
say Germany.
Origin puzzles aside, the long run-up to Africana philosophy’s
arrival as a professional paradisciplinary formation yielded a number
of themes that figure prominently in accounts of the field. Section
4.1 will introduce some of these characteristic themes, while Section
4.2 will consider the question of thematic unity across regions,
introducing some of the core thinkers along the way.
4.1 Characteristic themes
After noting the framing themes of (1) Africanaity and (2)
problematicity, as discussed above, we might follow Gordon (2008) and
Outlaw (2017) in noting additional preoccupations like the
following:
- Philosophical anthropology (because the question of the human of
course looms large for people whose assumed status as subhuman is one
of the foundation stones of European modernity) - Liberation (for obvious reasons, beginning with the ethical and
existential burdens of living in oppressive circumstances and of
finding the balance between justifiable resistance and unethical
overreach) - Meta-reflections on reason (because the meaning of reason looms
large for people typically assumed to be emotive, sensual,
non-rational brutes, people whose life chances were constrained by,
among other things, powerful forms of what we now call epistemic
injustice) - Identity and self-consciousness (because epistemic injustice often
hampers the pursuit of self-knowledge, and raises the ethical and
existential stakes of responsibly constructing the self) - Theoretical archaeology (this is Dotson’s (2017) term for,
as Outlaw puts it (2004), the recovery of underappreciated
contributions by African-descended individuals and cultures)
These themes are not at all the exclusive preserve of Africana
thinkers. The key to Africana thought is the way these themes converge
on and grow out of the condition of Africanaity, which is bound up
with distinctive modes of racialization and rooted in a particular
universe of overlapping but distinct histories, geographies, and
cultural practices.
Africana philosophy of course puts many more themes in play than these
few. But extending the list and reducing the space available for
explaining what the list means is at this point less useful than
considering what it means for this enterprise to be rooted in
overlapping sociohistorical contexts. This requires shifting from a
study of unifying themes to a reflection on the centrifugal forces
that pull Africana philosophers in the direction of distinctive
regional and methodological preoccupations.
Before moving on to these narrower considerations of region and
method, though, a final overarching theme requires mention. Adeshina
Afolayan and Toyin Falola conclude their introduction to the excellent
Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy by identifying a
newly pressing need that informs their editorial approach. African
philosophers have, they say, long focused on consolidating their
professional standing and navigating intramural scholarly debates.
However understandable that was, it is time, Afolayan and Falola
suggest, for “African philosophy to get on the street and get
their theories dirtied by the predicament on the continent”
(Afolayan and Falola 2017, 12). In other words, African philosophy
should embrace its status as what Outlaw (2017), following Leonard
Harris (following Frederick Douglass), calls a “philosophy born
of struggle.” This is clearly one of the overriding themes for
Africana philosophy as a whole, and should be added to the list.
- Philosophy born of struggle (because philosophical reflection is
not a leisure exercise devoted to unwinding abstract puzzles, or it is
not just or always or most crucially that. It is (among other things)
a practice of bringing philosophical impulses and resources to bear on
certain pressing problems of life, and of exercising philosophical
impulses unrelated to those problems—impulses related instead,
say, to beauty, or to the theory of knowledge—despite the
burdens of frequently problematic situations)
4.2 Regional continuities and discontinuities
Scholars routinely distinguish three broad regional approaches to
Africana philosophy, one for the continent of Africa and two for the
regions where the vast majority of participants in the diaspora
reside: the Caribbean and the Americas. These regions are not just
geographically distinct but also have importantly different histories
and constellations of cultures, not least because of the internal
complexities that complicate region-wide generalizations. In addition,
these different regions occupy different places in global networks for
mainstream knowledge production, which gives them different, and
differently weighted, opportunities for publishing and scholarly
exchange. In light of these conditions, it is not surprising that the
occupants of each region often find themselves taking up distinctive
questions and problems, and pursuing them using modes of philosophical
reflection and generic touchstones—specific texts and
figures—that are to some degree regionally specific.
Regional specificity notwithstanding, the condition of Africanaity
means in part that important thematic continuities stretch across the
regions. Some concern the role of violence in anti-racist struggle,
the meaning of African roots for people in the diaspora, and the
tensions between race-based, class-based, and gender-based approaches
to social justice that call forth talk of intersectionality and
related concepts. Others are importantly rooted in the overarching
themes noted above, with special emphasis on decolonization,
anti-slavery agitation, and anti-imperial struggle.
Despite these continuities, concerns that distinguish the regions are
not far to seek. For example, Gordon (2008) reasonably suggests that
the question of the modern might be one of Africana philosophy’s
unifying themes. But each region tends to adopt its own approach.
African thinkers often explore the relationship between modernity and
tradition, sometimes linking the prospects for liberation to the
prospects for modernizing Africa, while at other times complicating
the easy distinction between the traditional and the modern and the
easy conflation of modernization with civilization and of both with
Europe. Afro-Caribbean thinkers, by contrast, tend to be less
interested in a distant “traditional” world than in the
world that resulted from the collision of forced migrants, indigenous
peoples, and settler colonists. This approach eventuates in, among
much else, Edouard Glissant’s (1989) studies of
creolité. In the Americas, finally, different
demographic conditions and historical trajectories led many (but of
course not all) prominent figures to turn the question of tradition
into debates about racial uplift and racial integration.
4.3 Complications
The period of emergence set the stage for contemporary work in
Africana philosophy by establishing many of the key elements that
would come to define the field. Careful study of the period, however,
reveals some important challenges that continue to confront
contemporary work.
One important complication is the overlay of bias that constrains
standard notions of what counts as an intellectual contribution and of
who counts as a contributor. The standard notions tend to focus on the
written output of elite men, even in studies of populations, cultures,
and societies that are not at the top of the relevant social
hierarchies. Considering the reasons for these biases is beyond the
scope of this piece, though we can say that some reasons are better
than others. (To be sure, writerly output—literature—is
easier to track and preserve than orature. But even the
written contributions of women are routinely ignored or
excluded from the economies of writerly production.)
Suffice it to say for now that one of the recurring challenges of
Africana thought in its philosophical modes has to do with crediting
the philosophical labor that goes into assembling a responsible life
under absurd conditions, when the laborers don’t look or act
like standard-issue philosophers. For recent thinkers like Fred Moten
(2017) in his study of artist Thornton Dial, this is sometimes a
question about the philosophical significance of aesthetic
productions. For others, as we’ll soon consider further, it is a
question about the philosophical content of political activism or of
vernacular cultures. It is almost always, of course, a question about
crediting the work of women and people without wealth, high incomes,
homes, and other markers of high socioeconomic status.
A second important complication is rooted in a simple question: what
happens to local or national traditions if one focuses on broadly
regional approaches to Africana philosophy? One way to ask this
question is to focus on the differences between, say, Haiti and
Jamaica, and on the differences between Antenor Firmin and Marcus
Garvey. Another way is to insist on the integrity and importance of
distinct national traditions of recognized and recognizably
philosophical activity, as Teodros Kiros (2004) and a number of
scholars do in relation to figures like the 17th century
Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob.
There are two things to say about this possible tension between the
regional or transnational and the local or national. First, it is
eminently possible for analyses at different scales to co-exist. The
question is just whether there is sufficient warrant to sustain an
analysis at each level. One of the main aims of the early stages of
professional Africana philosophy, as we’ll soon see, was
precisely to show that there was a transnational enterprise related to
Africanaity that required—and had long
provoked—philosophical reflection. This in no way precludes more
local studies. Second, one of the central claims of Africana
philosophy is that local contexts are often profoundly informed by
broader dynamics. Whether those dynamics matter in specific cases is a
matter to be settled by appeal to the details of the cases. One
undeniable feature of the modern world is the way globe-spanning ideas
about things like race, reason, and civilization have shaped the life
chances of large swathes of humanity for generations. This would seem
to have some bearing on philosophical activity in African communities
and communities in its diaspora.
5. Stage two: establishment and consolidation
The first phase of Africana philosophy’s emergence eventually
gives way to a period of establishment and consolidation for the field
as a field. During this time the themes and concerns from the earlier
philosophies born of struggle, inflected by regional concerns, make
their way into the orbit of professional philosophy. Along the way,
they get translated into the distinctive vocabularies of the
discipline’s subfields and methodological schools, creatively
expanding those vocabularies in the process. (Or they acknowledge the
possibility of this translation and resist or complicate it.)
We can say that the first phase ends and emergence gives way to
establishment when the field begins to get traction among teachers and
researchers in academic philosophy. Kwasi Wiredu explains in his
classic Companion to African Philosophy that this
didn’t begin to happen in African universities until the middle
to late sixties, as independence ushered in “significant numbers
of post-independence African academics” (Wiredu 2004, 2).
Similarly, Outlaw points out that the field has become more
established as “successive generations of persons of African
descent have entered the profession” in the wake of anti-racist
liberation struggles, and as these persons organized conferences and
other mechanisms for networking and scholarly exchange, often across
national and regional boundaries (Outlaw 2017, §10, par. 2).
If establishment begins with the arrival of Wiredu’s and
Outlaw’s academics, it reaches its apex in the 1980s. This is
the point at which a number of germinal contributions make their way
into print. Think here of Richard A. Wright’s African
Philosophy: An Introduction (1984), Cornel West’s
Prophesy Deliverance! (1982), Angela Davis’s Women,
Race, and Class (1983), the first edition of Leonard
Harris’s Philosophy Born of Struggle (1983), V. Y.
Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa (1988), and Edouard
Glissant’s Caribbean Discourses (1989).
The 1990s and early 2000s were the years of consolidation. This is the
point at which a wave of more securely positioned scholarly
professionals produced work destined for wider influence than the work
of the previous era. Think here of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In
My Father’s House (1993), Charles W. Mills’s The
Racial Contract (1997), Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.’s On Race
and Philosophy (1996), Lewis R. Gordon’s Bad Faith and
Antiblack Racism (1995), Paget Henry’s Caliban’s
Reason (2000), Kwame Gyekye’s Tradition and
Modernity (1997), the first edition of Patricia Hill
Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990), and the
revised edition of Bernard R. Boxill’s Blacks and Social
Justice (1992).
As Africana philosophy becomes a professionally recognized field (as
opposed to a vibrant but heterodox enterprise or tradition,
overlapping only slightly with mainstream knowledge production), the
work begins, one might say, to riff on the discipline’s accepted
movements and schools. Africana professional philosophers put
mainstream professional resources into conversation with many of the
concerns and innovations that animated the earlier philosophies born
of struggle. Far from simply applying sophisticated resources to
pre-philosophical raw material, this exercise at its best blends two
modes of philosophical reflection. One enjoys mainstream recognition,
while the other benefits from testing and refinement by application in
areas that its counterpart ignores; and each can, in principle,
compensate for shortcomings in the other. What results is work that
often—as Moten, following Robinson, says of Black radical
Marxism—involves both “retention and disruption,
originality and response” (Moten 2017,
9–10).[3]
(It is also what one might say of the difference that Afro-diasporic
musical practices made in and to European traditions, producing new
forms like samba and jazz along the way. Hence the appeal to
“riffing.”)
Understanding this transformative, improvisational relationship is a
precondition to properly locating the contributions to the periods of
emergence and consolidation. With this in mind one can acknowledge
that Davis and Outlaw both contribute to and draw from the tradition
of critical theory, without diminishing either their originality or
their traditional fluency. In similar ways, West and Harris riff on
the pragmatist tradition, Mudimbe and Glissant creatively appropriate
and employ post-structuralist resources, Gordon and Henry, following
William R. Jones and
others,[4]
develop an Africana form of existential phenomenology, and Appiah and
Boxill represent Africana thought in an analytic key.
I’ll somewhat arbitrarily nominate 2003–2004 as the cutoff
between the period of consolidation and the contemporary moment. These
years saw the publication of Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman’s
Companion to African-American Philosophy and Wiredu’s
Companion to African Philosophy. I would say of both volumes
something like what Afolayan and Falola say of the Wiredu volume: that
they constitute “a significant nod to the appearance of
African[a] philosophy in … global academe” (Afolayan and
Falola 2017, 1).
6. Reading the contemporary—structure
Contemporary Africana philosophy builds on the periods of emergence,
establishment, and consolidation in four broad ways. Some thinkers
work to fortify and expand the field’s store of germinal texts
and figures. Others continue to improvise on the defining traits of
the mainstream schools and movements. Still others complicate and
broaden the map of regional preoccupations. And interventions of all
three types push new themes and debates, or new takes on older themes
and debates, toward the center of the field. The first three will be
the subject of this section, while the fourth will be the subject of
Section 7.
6.1 Fortifying and expanding, tentpoles and theoretical archeology
One benefit of the long run-up to the contemporary moment in Africana
philosophy is that a tradition of thought has emerged with core
figures, texts, and questions. The tradition itself then becomes grist
for the mill of philosophical activity. Some of this activity goes to
identifying and shoring up (what some people think of as) the
historical foundations of the field, while some goes to expanding the
edifice that has been built atop those foundations.
One version of what I’m referring to as fortification or shoring
up is the outcome of a heightened focus on a few high-profile
icons—call this the “tentpole approach.” These are
notables like Cooper, Du Bois, and Fanon, the touchstone
figures—Gordon refers to them as the pillars of African American
philosophy—with the clearest prima facie cases for canonical
status. As more philosophers examine the work of these figures and
produce more commentary on them and each other, subfields start to
grow up around them. This gives Africana philosophy that familiar
subdisciplinary shape, whereby anyone who knows anything about the
area must have something to say about a handful of towering figures.
One clear and influential example of this sort of intervention is
Robert Gooding-Williams’s (2009) magisterial In the Shadow
of Du Bois.
The tentpole approach is useful not just for fortification but also
for expansion. The expansionist version focuses on iconic figures that
have yet to receive the sort of attention from philosophers that
they’ve received elsewhere. The aim here—sometimes
explicitly undertaken as an exercise in Africana thought, sometimes
simply as an exercise in responsible scholarship—is to give
figures like James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine
Hansberry, and Audre Lorde the kind of attention that Gordon’s
pillars have received. Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry’s
(2018) volume on King and Imani Perry’s (2018) study of
Hansberry exemplify this tendency.
An alternative to the tentpole approach, also with expansionist and
fortificationist varieties, focuses less on iconic figures than on the
broader sweep of the tradition that has grown up around the icons. The
fortificationist approach here involves recovering the figures and
ideas with which the icons were in conversation, thereby recovering
not just the work of individual thinkers but also their environing
epistemic communities and discursive contexts. This is the spirit in
which Brittney Cooper’s (2017) Beyond Respectability
recovers the work of Fannie Barrier Williams with the National
Association of Colored Women at the turn of the twentieth century. The
expansionist version of this approach studies neglected texts or
figures, either to mine them for philosophical insight or to fill in
otherwise piecemeal histories. In this spirit, John H. McClendon III
and Stephen C. Ferguson II (2019) offer their remarkable new volume
African American Philosophers and Philosophy to press for the
recovery of card-carrying academic philosophers of African
descent.
6.2 Transforming schools and movements
A second broad category of activity in contemporary Africana
philosophy involves something like the improvisational approach
discussed above. Here we find scholars creatively reinventing
mainstream philosophical traditions, schools, and methods using
resources from Africana thought. For reasons of space, I can only
mention a few examples here, and must do so swiftly, on the way to
covering this category with nowhere near the depth or breadth it
deserves.
The clearest examples of this transformative tendency often carry the
same misleadingly simple adjectival labels as Cedric Robinson’s
Black Marxism. Consider Gordon’s pioneering efforts, in
Existentia Africana (2000) and elsewhere, to define an
Africana and decolonial mode of existential phenomenology, and to
build what has become a globe-spanning intellectual community around
it. Or consider what Gordon calls “African-American
pragmatism,” which has continued to grow and develop in the wake
of the germinal interventions by West and Harris (Gordon 2008,
93–99). Eddie Glaude (2007) in particular makes clear that this
work is not simply about Black people appropriating canonical
philosophic resources (or, less kindly, about canonical theory
“in blackface,” as it were). Very much in the spirit of
Robinson’s intervention, it is about the way Africana
intellectual traditions sometimes anticipate and improve upon the
moves that define our artificially circumscribed mainstream
traditions, and about contemporary scholars putting these traditions
into mutually enriching conversation.
What Gordon calls “African American analytical philosophy”
(2008, 110) deserves special mention here, as it brings tools from the
dominant philosophical paradigm in the Anglophone world to bear on
Africana thought’s distinctive themes, issues, and figures.
Mills and Shelby, who join Gordon in the top tier of Africana
philosophy’s most visible and influential figures, work squarely
and creatively in the ethico-political wing of this tradition,
building on the work of founders like Boxill and Appiah with results
that will receive further consideration below. Similar inroads are
becoming apparent in aesthetics (Taylor 2016), epistemology (Dotson
2017), philosophy of language (Anderson 2015), and other fields.
6.3 Shifting geographies
A third broad focus in contemporary Africana philosophy reimagines the
regional mapping discussed above. The common tripartite division
between the continent, the Caribbean, and the Americas is reasonable,
as far as it goes. But some newer work emphasizes the areas that this
scheme leaves out.
One area of focus refuses to reduce the diaspora to the Caribbean and
the United States, and explores relatively underappreciated Africana
communities. One approach here, championed by Chike Jeffers (2012),
Peter James Hudson and Aaron Kamugisha (2014), and others, considers
the prospects for specifically Canadian forms of Africana thought.
Another approach focuses on the diaspora in Europe. Alanna
Lockward’s (2013) BEBoP (Black Europe Body Politics) curatorial
project is one striking example of this work, as are the contributions
by Barnor Hesse (2009) and others to the volume Black Europe and
the African Diaspora.
A second area focuses on certain internal complexities of the standard
racialized geography. This is the spirit in which a growing cohort of
thinkers is taking up the question of Africa’s white
inhabitants. These descendants of the settler colonial populations
have come of age at some remove from the colonial incursion, were born
on the continent, and, especially in South Africa, have their fortunes
and senses of themselves bound up in complicated ways with
Africa’s prospects. It is unsurprising, then, that their place
on the continent and, as we’ll see below, in the discipline, has
become a subject of philosophical reflection. Samantha Vice’s
(2010) germinal essay, “How Do I Live in This Strange
Place?”, anchored a version of this discussion in South
Africa.[5]
7. Reading the contemporary—evolving themes
While the three broad categories of activity discussed so far explore
themes that bear on the structure of Africana philosophy as a field,
the fourth category reflects more directly on the field’s
evolving thematic emphases. A number of contemporary interventions
update these defining themes in light of evolving conditions, debates,
and conceptual resources. Several suggestive examples follow.
7.1 Gender and sexuality
One of the key areas of contemporary interest in Africana
philosophy—the study of gender and sexuality—is both
promising and difficult to summarize. In fact, describing it as a
single area would be unforgivably misleading were it not for the
expository constraints of this exercise and for all of the
qualifications that will soon follow. It is less an area than an array
of topics and issues that have yet to come into focus as a subfield in
Africana philosophy in the way they have elsewhere. A detailed study
of the reasons for the field’s elusiveness are beyond the scope
of this entry, but it is worth noting that the most obvious
factors—the existence of structures that have historically
discouraged or openly excluded the study of these issues or the
participation of the people most likely to take an interest in
them—are among the subjects that researchers in this area take
up.
These difficulties notwithstanding, studies of gender and sexuality
are becoming increasingly prominent in Africana philosophy, thanks in
part to a thaw in the historically constraining structures mentioned
above. The issues driving these studies are not new, however, so one
way to choose a path through this sprawling territory involves simply
tracking the impact of some germinal texts and influential authors
from earlier periods. Proceeding in this way will require speeding
past a version of the important question posed by Saba Fatima and her
colleagues (2017): how do the various fields that might implicate or
transect Africana studies of gender and sexuality—fields like
decolonial feminism, Black queer theory, women of color feminism,
third world feminism, Black feminism, and so on—relate to each
other? Treating this difficulty with the care it deserves is beyond
the scope of this project. I will simply stipulate to two assumptions:
that the categories “Black” and “Africana”
overlap sufficiently to justify treating studies of Black gender and
Black sexuality as relevant for Africana thought; and that expanding
the zone of overlap to include thinkers who might self-identify with
one of the other categories (decolonial, third world, etc.) will
reveal some useful continuities in the various projects.
One influential text to consider is Collins’s Black Feminist
Thought. The editors of the journal Ethnic and Racial
Studies introduce an anniversary symposium on the book by noting
that its publication “can be seen as a turning point in the
study of the intersections between race, class and gender… .
Indeed, in terms of books on race and ethnicity that have been
published over recent decades, few, if any, have surpassed it in terms
of its reach as well as its influence” (Bulmer and Solomos 2015,
2314). This influence extends well into philosophy, as indicated by
the two philosophers, both black feminists, who participated in a 2015
symposium otherwise made up of (theory-oriented) social scientists.
Focusing briefly on their work will provide useful windows onto
emerging developments in the field.
Kristie Dotson and Kathryn Belle testify eloquently in word and deed
to Collins’s impact on their work, and thereby to Collins’
impact on the field. Dotson describes Black Feminist Thought
as “one of the most comprehensive treatments of knowledge
problems and the oppression of black women in the USA to date,”
and praises the way it “highlights epistemological failures as
an important layer of oppression” (Dotson 2015, 2323).
Dotson’s research (2012, 2017) draws this (and many other
influences) out in the direction of (among much else) a political
epistemology that engages vigorously with the conditions that have
both excluded Black feminism from philosophy and obscured the
coherence and relevance of Black feminist intellectual traditions.
This scholarly production is continuous with Dotson’s efforts in
other spheres, like her work with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s
African American Policy Forum and the trainings she offers on feminist
pedagogy.
While Dotson focuses on the epistemological dimensions of
Collins’s exercises in “critical social theory”
(Collins 1989, xiv), Belle focuses on its existential and
phenomenological dimensions. She explains that Collins’s work
“underscores the importance of safe spaces for Black women to
speak freely as a necessary condition of resistance and
empowerment” (Belle 2015, 2345). This orientation to agency,
voice, and discursive community clearly informs Belle’s work as
a scholar (Davidson, Gines, and Marcano 2010). But it also shapes her
work as an institution-builder, most clearly as the driving force
behind the Collegium for Black Women Philosophers, which since 2007
has aimed, as she puts it, “to create a safe space for Black
women philosophers … to support, encourage and learn from one
another” (Belle 2015, 2345).
If the opportunity to “inherit” the work of Patricia Hill
Collins (as Dotson [2015] puts it in the title to her piece on
Collins) has inspired two influential figures in contemporary U.S.
Black feminist philosophy, the issues at the heart of another
author’s germinal text help drive another strain in Africana
philosophical studies of gender and sexuality. Nigerian sociologist
Oyeronke Oyewumi’s The Invention of Women (1997) helped
make her, as Azille Coetzee and Annemie Halsema put it, “one of
the most famous and at the same time contested scholars in African
feminist thought” (Coetzee and Halsema 2018, 179). Douglas Ficek
explains that her “central claim is that gender is not an
indigenous organizing principle in Yorùbáland, that the
‘body-reasoning’ and ‘bio-logic’ of the West
are present neither in the language nor in the epistemology of the
Yorùbá” (Ficek 2006, 543). This view immediately
inspired considerable pushback, including sustained scrutiny from
multiple contributors to the special African feminisms issue of
Quest: A Journal of African Philosophy that appeared in
2006.[6]
Oyewumi’s arguments still help frame contemporary efforts to
rethink the role of gender in African life, as evidenced by her
prominent role in the articles on gender and feminism in the recent
Palgrave Companion (e.g., du Toit and Coetzee 2017).
Legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw has provided another
cornerstone for ongoing contemporary reflection on gender and
sexuality, but has important (and underappreciated) implications well
beyond these areas. In two germinal articles from 1989 and 1991, she
introduced an account of intersectionality that inspired “the
kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement” that
“[v]ery few theories have generated” (Carbado et al. 2013,
303). She says in the second of these articles that she began using
the notion of intersectionality “to denote the various ways in
which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of
Black women’s employment experiences” (Crenshaw 1991,
1244).[7]
A cottage industry of commentary and analysis has grown up from this
simple beginning, with scholars, artists, critics, and activists
debating the meanings and proper uses of
“intersectionality” nearly as much as they employ it.
Intersectionality remains a hotly contested notion in part because it
raises a variety of deeply philosophical questions. Scholars have
asked, for example, what intersectionality means for theories of
personal identity, whether it adequately captures the complexity of
human experience, how it bears on the prospects for coalition
politics, why this notion stands out from a family of related, older
notions in social theory that do similar work, whether standard
approaches to intersectionality take Black masculinity seriously
enough, and much more besides.
The best way to close this section would be to discuss queer
theory’s growing impact on Africana philosophy, but there is
frustratingly little to say. Many studies outside of philosophy
exhibit considerable philosophical depth, starting with the pioneering
work of Cathy Cohen in political science and continuing with the work
of figures like C. Riley
Snorton.[8]
I have to this point been willing, on the principled grounds noted
above, to put card-carrying philosophers into conversation with
thinkers outside the discipline; but the size of the gap between work
inside and outside the field is so stark in this case that it deserves
special comment.
Africana philosophy has yet to take up in earnest the challenge that
has roiled Black studies and related fields over the last decade and a
half. Dwight McBride stated this challenge clearly in 2007:
Telling the truths of Black life in the United States requires a
multiplicity of voices. It takes voices invested in the stories and
experiences of Black men and women; Black heterosexuals and Black
gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender folk … Black single
parents … and so very much more. When we allow ourselves to be
summed up by sanitized versions of Black life in adherence to a form
of Black respectability, we tell only part of our story. (McBride
2007, 438–439)
McBride offers these remarks on the way to calling for a “new
Black Studies” that attends more carefully to issues of
intra-racial diversity. Some version of this call is surely relevant
for Africana philosophy. For this reason, forthcoming work by V.
Denise James and Anika Simpson is particularly welcome in the U.S.
context. (I’ll leave it to commentators with more intimate
knowledge of other contexts to comment on the promising developments
elsewhere.) James is working on a philosophical treatment of Audre
Lorde, and Simpson is preparing a study of the way a responsible
engagement with single black motherhood requires a queering of
standard philosophical approaches to family, sexuality, gender, and
political
life.[9]
7.2 Critical ethnophilosophy
The notion of ethnophilosophy arose in the context of debates about
African philosophy’s proper content and methods, and was most
commonly deployed, most prominently by Paulin Hountondji, “as a
kind of negative characterization of … the traditionalist
approach to African philosophy” (Wiredu 2004, 3). Hallen
describes the worrisome version of this approach:
Ethnophilosophy presents itself as a philosophy of peoples rather than
of individuals; in African societies one is therefore given the
impression that there can be no equivalent to a Socrates or to a Zeno.
Ethnophilosophy speaks only of Bantu philosophy, Dogon philosophy,
Yoruba philosophy… . Ethnophilosophy’s sources are in the
past, in what is described as authentic, traditional African …
prior to ‘‘modernity.’’ These are to be found
primarily in products of language: parables, proverbs, poetry, songs,
myths… . [E]thnophilosophy therefore tends to portray African
beliefs as things … that are somehow timeless … placing
minimal emphasis upon the rigorous argumentation and criticism that
are prerequisites to the … search for truth. (Hallen 2004,
122)
I refer to this as the worrisome version of traditionalism because
Hountondji and others have made room for the possibility of a less
worrisome, more critical form of traditionalism. Paget Henry, for
example, has reclaimed the notion of ethnophilosophy to denote an
historically and culturally rooted corrective to overly abstract
accounts of the unity of Africana philosophy. He puts it this way:
“In spite of the controversy that has raged over the practice of
ethnophilosophy, I think it is a necessary component … of all
Africana-oriented philosophies” (Henry 2000, 154).
Henry here joins Appiah (1993) in calling for a kind of
critical ethnophilosophy, which excavates the insights of
Africana cultures and makes them philosophically cognizable without
insulating them from critical scrutiny or freezing them in the
precolonial
amber.[10]
The prospect of this sort of work continues to draw attention and
inspire researchers. One of the clearest examples of this, apart from
Henry’s approach to Afro-Caribbean philosophy, is in the growing
literature seeking to bring specifically African philosophical
concepts into contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy.
The notion of ubuntu is probably the most frequent and prominent
recipient of this treatment, in ways that have generated considerable
controversy (to which we will return). But there are many other
examples. Consider, for example, Mbih Jerome Tosam’s (2014)
study of the philosophical underpinnings of Kom proverbs or Adebola B.
Ekanola’s (2017) examination of the Yorùbá
conception of peace. Outside of the continent, and alongside
Henry’s redeployment of traditionalism, one finds a growing
number of pieces like Lindsey Stewart’s (2017) study of Hoodoo
love rituals as models for the practice of freedom.
An important set of debates in critical ethnophilosophy grew up around
the study of ubuntu in South Africa, and around the role of white
philosophers in this work. Thaddeus Metz (2007) and Mogobe Ramose
(2015) have been perhaps the clearest spokespersons for the positions
that, for current purposes, are the keys to the
debate.[11]
On one side are scholars who aim to treat the concept of ubuntu as
another resource for the work of ethics and political philosophy, and
who regard this approach as an expression of respect for indigenous
African resources. On the other side are scholars for whom the sudden
“mainstreaming” of African concepts is extremely
suspicious, often for reasons very much like the ones that motivate
worries about the misappropriation of cultural practices related to
aesthetic experience. A short, gentle version of the worry might go
like this: In a majority black country with a majority white
philosophy professoriate, a country in which the professoriate assumed
its shape over time not by dint of natural forces or by accident but
thanks to the careful hoarding of resources and opportunities along
racial lines, it is unseemly and perhaps blameworthy for white
philosophers to start mining resources from African cultures without
first transforming its institutional structures to grant substantive
access to people from those cultures (and, Ramose [2015] points out,
often without learning the relevant languages the way they would learn
Greek to study the Stoics in earnest). There are of course ways to
develop this worry and ways to respond to it; the point right now is
simply to mark debates around it as an example of an area of recent
interest in and around Africana philosophy.
7.3 Political thought in context
A third theme in contemporary work also has obvious roots in older
trends. As an enterprise “born of struggle,” Africana
philosophy attends with unusual frequency and consistency to the
ethical and political issues facing its inquirers. The ethical
implications of studies in nearly every area, including metaphysics
(related, say, to the concept of the person) and epistemology
(related, say, to issues of testimonial injustice), are rarely far
from view. But straightforward political philosophy remains as lively
an area of investigation as it was when Odera Oruka famously
identified “nationalist-ideological” theorizing as one of
the four major areas of African philosophical activity (Oruka 1981,
n.p.).
Africana philosophies of politics constitute much too massive an area
to cover responsibly in anything like the space available here. In
addition, this is an area in which regional and local differences loom
particularly large, thereby complicating any broad generalizations.
Nevertheless, three trends are worth nothing.
First, commentary on iconic figures remains a common undertaking,
though the range of figures available for this treatment has of course
changed over time. The iconic figures in each region remain live
options for study, as evidenced by recent special issues of the
Journal on African Philosophy on Nkrumah and Azikiwe,
persistent interest in a variety of venues in Du Bois and Cooper, and
recent attempts to rethink the legacies of Senghor and
Cesaire.[12]
The contemporary difference is that this work now more often shares
space with studies of people like C.L.R. James, Huey Newton, Lorraine
Hansberry, and bell
hooks.[13]
Second, and similarly, while scholars continue to undertake
context-sensitive investigations of particular, local issues, those
issues have changed in the wake of certain epochal, geopolitical
shifts. The sheer range of issues in play here is particularly
daunting, but Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo provide a helpfully capacious
frame. They suggest three roughly ten-year stages in the development
of post-independence African philosophy. The 1970s, they say, were
about the ethnophilosophy debates, while the 1980s were about
criticizing African modes of cultural production, from traditional
practices to elite intellectual work. The 1990s, meanwhile, took up a
new challenge:
This new phase … is both a response to and an attempt to
theorize the crisis of the postcolonial African state, and it
coincides with the emergence of economic, social, and environmental
problems that were not imagined to be possible in the utopian worlds
of newly independent nations. (Karp and Masolo 2000, 2, as quoted in
Afayolan and Falola 2017, 9)
Karp and Masolo’s (2000) description of this new, post-utopian
phase tracks important dynamics unfolding in Africana communities
across the world. In some places it often took the form of reflections
on the disappointments of post-racialism, in many places focused
intently on the exaggerated optimism and subsequent disappointments of
the Obama era. Elsewhere it took the form of reflections on
neoliberalism or on the imperatives not of anti-colonial struggle or
post-colonial critique but of decolonial transformation. Central to
all these cases, though, was the challenge of adapting Africana
philosophical resources to evolving political conditions in the wake
of the Cold War, in the throes of a global war on terror and a
multipolar scramble for post-imperial influence.
A third trend shaping Africana philosophies of politics is simply that
a variety of new theories and concepts have come into play. Some of
these come, as we have seen, from exercises in critical
ethnophilosophy, like the ubuntu debates in South Africa. Others
result from creative conceptual engineering by attentive scholars
grappling with their social worlds. Consider here the notion of
Afropolitanism, first authoritatively theorized in the early 2000s by
Achille Mbembe, who used it to argue that “the meaning of
‘being African’ had to be dislodged from race … and
be opened to the flows of global networks and worldly
hybridities” (Balakrishnan 2017, §4, par. 5). Or consider
Tommie Shelby’s introduction and refusal of the “medical
model” of social theorizing in relation to urban
“ghettos” (Shelby 2016). Or, finally, consider the
continuing reverberations from Mills’s enormously influential
racial contract argument (1997).
Mills and Shelby are particularly noteworthy in this connection. Until
their early work earned the attention it now enjoys around the world
and across academic disciplines, it was easier to worry that analytic
approaches to Africana thought did relatively little with the
transformative potential that Africanaity brings to professional
philosophy (see Taylor 2009, Gordon 2006). But both have
recently called explicitly for “black radical” approaches
to standard political-theoretic positions like egalitarianism and
liberalism (Mills 2017, Shelby 2016). And both have backed up this
call by reinventing core theoretical resources from one tradition in
light of the other. For example, Mills (1997) reworks the social
contract tradition by examining it from the perspective of (a kind of)
decolonial or black radicalism, while Shelby (2005) uses elements of
Rawlsian contract theory to rework the black nationalism of figures
like Crummell, Du Bois, and Karenga.
7.4 Black life and social death
A final theme in contemporary Africana philosophy brings us full
circle, in a way. It reflects the imperatives of a philosophy born of
struggle, it draws out and builds on the core idea of problematicity,
and it reflects the ongoing effort, just discussed, to find ever more
adequate conceptual tools for engaging deep problems. This
theme—call it a focus on Black life and social
death—unites several different currents of thought and activism,
all radically distinct but all interested in the ethical and
existential stakes of Black life in a world that remains anti-Black
not just at the level of individual prejudices but also at the level
of sociopolitical, epistemic, axiological, and ontological
structures.
One approach to this work eventuates in the Afro-pessimism of Frank
Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, and others, or in the debates about the
view between its advocates and those who decline to claim it, like
Moten. This is a notoriously difficult approach to pin down, in small
part because a very different view, much more prominent in
international relations than in political theory and philosophy, goes
by the same
name.[14]
With respect to the philosophical view that is our concern here,
Jared Sexton, quoting Bryan Wagner, describes it as “among other
things, an attempt to formulate an account of [Black] suffering
… ‘without recourse to the consolation of
transcendence’” (Wagner 2009, 2, as quoted in Sexton 2016,
par. 8). Elsewhere in this remarkable essay, aimed at clearing away
the misconceptions and misguided criticisms that swirl around the
view, Sexton explains:
Afro-pessimism is not an intervention so much as it is a reading or
meta-commentary… . It is a reading of what is gained and lost
in the attempt—the impulse—to … delimit the
“bad news” of black life, to fix its precise scope and
scale, to find an edge beyond or before which true living unfolds.
(Sexton 2016, par. 16)
The content of and motivation for this reading involves “both an
epistemological and an ethical project” (Sexton 2016, par. 15).
The ethical project involves resisting a lazy, bad faith optimism that
bases struggle and activism on hope rather than on a clear-eyed
confrontation with the challenges of Black life in an anti-Black
world. The epistemological project involves finding the tools for
achieving this clear-eyed confrontation. In the hands of figures like
Hartman and Christina Sharpe, this means enacting certain vital
conceptual reorientations, like insisting on the afterlife of the
transatlantic slave trade in contemporary modes of social
organization.
A second way of engaging black life and social death philosophically
crystallizes in the various organizational forms and
anti-organizational tendencies that constitute the Black Lives Matter
movement. This is of course not an academic enterprise, but it grows
from many of the same roots, intellectually and ethically, as much of
the work under consideration here. The driving forces behind the
movement—people like Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors-Khan, and
Opal Tometi, the authors of the phrase-cum-social media archiving tool
that gives the movement its name—take up expressly philosophical
questions about, for example, the requirements of justice, the role of
the state (and the legitimacy of state violence), the workings of
power, and the meaning of the human. What’s more, they often do
so in ways informed by figures like Fanon, Audre Lorde, Steve Biko,
and Cedric Robinson. This is philosophy in action: it is “about
finding, articulating, and promoting answers to philosophical
questions” as well as about “modeling a kind of
philosophical responsiveness to the conditions of human
striving”—call this a robustly engaged version of the art
of living well (Taylor 2019,
297).[15]
A third approach to the questions of black life and social death
actually runs through both of the approaches mentioned so far. The
study of Black aesthetics and of African-derived cultural practices
have become scholarly growth areas thanks in part—but only in
part—to the central role that aesthetic practices play in the
work of antiracist resistance. I say “only in part”
because some of the most interesting work in this area prominently
resists the temptation to reduce aesthesis to anti-racism. Life in
communities of African-descended persons and others racialized as
Black, like life everywhere, has its irremediably aesthetic dimensions
and resources. These resources are sometimes invested in defensive
efforts, warding off assaults on Black or African humanity. But they
are much more often invested in celebrations of life, reflections on
community, parables of love, provocations for the mind and senses, and
so on. In fact, a plausible reading of the transnational,
transhistorical tradition of Black aesthetics suggests that this work
routinely circles around the tension between responsibly facing
life’s problems and celebrating and enjoying life’s
possibilities (Taylor 2016). This tension motivates Albert
Murray’s charges against Toni Morrison (and others), it inspires
West’s critique of Du Bois, and it runs through, without quite
defining, Moten’s refusal of Afro-pessimism.
The contemporary concern with aesthetics in and near Africana thought
extends a long tradition. Frederick Douglass, for example,
complemented his achievements as a writer and orator with vigorous
efforts to construct his public image through photography, thereby
making a germinal contribution to modern transatlantic visual culture
(Gates 2016). The U.S. “New Negro” movement (usually
associated with the Harlem Renaissance), the Negritude movement, and
the various Black arts movements around the world were all animated by
philosophical commitments, and in the first two cases prominently
featured philosophers (Alain Locke and Leopold Senghor, to start).
Moving closer to the present, the companion volumes that marked
Africana philosophy’s establishment feature contributions on art
and aesthetics by Nzegwu (2004) and others. Contemporary thinkers
follow in their footsteps with special issues on race and aesthetics,
symposia on Black aesthetics, and studies of the philosophical import
of memorials and monuments in racialized
spaces.[16]
8. Conclusion
To discuss studies of black life and social death in the context of
this entry is to return to one of the recurring tensions in the field
of Africana philosophy. It is a field not just born of struggle but
also emerging from the crucible of racialization. Africana philosophy
is importantly related but not reducible to a responsible
philosophical race theory: it is a constellation of views, approaches,
traditions, problems, debates, and figures that owes its existence as
a somewhat unitary enterprise at least in part to the practices of
race-making, but that reaches deeper into the lives of particular
communities than race theory can, with results—like studies of
the Yoruba conception of peace—that in no way depend on
race-theoretic analysis for their import.
This study of course leaves out much more than it includes. There is,
for example, nothing here about Nkiru Nzegwu’s innovative
institution-building efforts with the International Society for
African Philosophy and Studies
(ISAPS)[17]
and the Africa Knowledge Project, or about Sylvia Wynter’s
impactful interventions in decolonial and Afro-Caribbean
philosophy.[18]
Nor will there be space to explore Achille Mbembe’s studies of
necropolitics, George Yancy’s remarkable reinvention of critical
phenomenology, the long shadow of Molefi Asante’s Africology,
the innovations of Tommy Curry’s Black male studies, Anita
Allen-Castellitto’s insightful studies of privacy and her
eloquent commentaries on the profession, or the dynamic Afro-futurism
of figures from Sun-Ra to Janelle Monae.
Silences and oversights are inevitable in a short study of a sprawling
constellation of related areas of inquiry. For that reason it is
fitting to end with language from Outlaw’s version of a similar
study. One might say of this entry what Outlaw says of his: that it
“is not meant to be exhaustive,” but instead
“provides examples and solicits additional contributions in
order to make the account more comprehensive and accurate”
(Outlaw 2017, §2, par. 23).read more
