Spotlight on African-American Philosophy
Double-Consciousness
Double-consciousness is a concept in social philosophy referring, originally, to a source of inward “twoness” putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society. The concept is often associated with William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who introduced the term into social and political thought, famously, in his groundbreaking The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Its source has been traced back from there, by recent writers, to the development of clinical psychology in the nineteenth-century North Atlantic, and to trends in idealist philosophies of self—to the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It is thus indirectly related to other nineteenth- and twentieth-century riffs on Hegelian themes, such as false consciousness and bad faith. In our day it continues to be used and discussed by numerous commentators—philosophical and otherwise—on racialized cultures, societies, and literatures, by cultural and literary theorists, and by students and investigators of Africana Philosophy. Recent philosophical debates center on the significance of the concept for Du Bois’s thought overall, its theoretical coherence, and its relevance for current social conditions.
*From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Strivings of the Negro People," W.E.B. Du Bois, The Atlantic
"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes—foolishly, perhaps, but fervently—that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development."
ProQuest African-American Philosophy Feed
Overview of African-American Philosophy
"African-American philosophy is largely represented by a body of social and political thought related to the advancement of African Americans as a group.Cornel West takes up the question of whether European and European-American philosophy can contribute to our understanding of the African-American experience.He combines the orientations of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and JohnDewey to offer a definition of African-American philosophy as “the interpretation ofAfro-American history, highlighting the cultural heritage and political struggles, whichprovides desirable norms that should regulate responses to particular challenge spresently confronting African Americans.” His critical examination of four distinct historical traditions of black thought – vitalist, existentialist, rationalist, and humanist –all of which he finds problematic, leads him to endorse the humanist view because of its emphasis on the “universal human content of African-American cultural forms.”According to West, ideal types represent distinct conceptions of black people as either passive objects of history, or as active subjects; the former implying a pervasive denigration of African Americans and the latter suggesting their striving for self-respect. There are strong and weak versions of the doctrine associated with each tradition. Vitalists laud the uniqueness of African-American culture, making – in the stronger case ontological, in the weaker one sociological – claims for African-American superiority. The rationalists view African-American culture as pathological, while the third tradition, existentialist thought, is a derivitive of these two, viewing African-American culture as restrictive, constraining, and confining. West rejects the existentialist emphasis on eccentricity and nonconformity in favor of the fourth, humanist, tradition, which affirms the humanity, while emphasizing the distinctiveness, of African-American culture.West’s focus on a narrow strand of African-American existentialist thought is in stark contrast with Lewis Gordon’s claim that existential questions permeate the whole range of black thought. Gordon distinguishes between existentialism as a fundamentally European historical phenomenon and the questions concerning freedom, anguish, responsibility, and embodied existence as “the lived-context of concern.” He cites DuBois’s interrogation of the meaning of black suffering and compares Toni Morrison’s exploration of tragedy and ethical paradox with Kierkegaard’s call for keeping faith.Because the question of race is “a source of anxiety pervading the New World,” Gordon believes the appeal of Christian, Marxist, Feminist, and Pragmatic thought derives from what each contributes to “theorizing the existential realities of blackness."
1. Lott, T. L., & Pittman, J. P. (Eds.). (2006). Introduction. In A companion to African-American philosophy (pp. 3–4). essay, Blackwell.
Introductory Material
A Companion to African-American Philosophy by Call Number: Online Resource (Wiley Online Library Online Books)ISBN: 9780470751640Publication Date: 2007This wide-ranging, multidisciplinary collection of newly commissioned articles brings together distinguished voices in the field of Africana philosophy and African-American social and political thought. Provides a comprehensive critical survey of African-American philosophical thought. Collects wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, newly commissioned articles in one authoritative volume. Serves as a benchmark work of reference for courses in philosophy, social and political thought, cultural studies, and African-American studies.
African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions by Call Number: B936.A37 1997ISBN: 9780415916400Publication Date: 1996“This book brings together twelve outstanding essays by distinguished scholars in the field of African-American philosophy. This work is now available to a wider readership through its publication in book form.” --From back cover
African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations by Call Number: B944.A37 A37 1998ISBN: 9780415921008Publication Date: 1998African-American Philosophers brings into conversation seventeen of the foremost thinkers of color to discuss issues such as Black existentialism, racism, Black women philosophers within the academy, affirmative action and the conceptual parameters of African-American philosophy.
African American Philosophers and Philosophy by Call Number: 2019001953 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 9781350057951Publication Date: 2019This book presents the first introduction to African American academic philosophers, exploring their concepts and ideas and revealing the critical part they have played in the formation of philosophy in the USA. The book begins with the early years of educational attainment by African American philosophers in the 1860s. To demonstrate the impact of their philosophical work on general problems in the discipline, chapters are broken down into four major areas of study: Axiology, Social Science, Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science. Providing personal narratives on individual philosophers and examining the work of figures such as H. T. Johnson, William D. Johnson, Joyce Mitchell Cooke, Adrian Piper, William R. Jones, Roy D. Morrison, Eugene C. Holmes, and William A. Banner, the book challenges the myth that philosophy is exclusively a white academic discipline. Packed with examples of struggles and triumphs, this engaging introduction is a much-needed approach to studying philosophy today.
Reflections: An Anthology of African American Philosophy by Call Number: 99049165 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 0534573932Publication Date: 1999This anthology provides the instructor with a sufficient quantity, breadth, and diversity of materials to be the sole text for a course on African-American philosophy. It includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes which instructors can effectively employ to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the "nationalist" focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.
Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness by Call Number: 2015010784 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 9781137549969Publication Date: 2015In this ground-breaking book, Stephen C. Ferguson addresses a seminal question that is too-often ignored: What should be the philosophical basis for African American studies? The volume explores philosophical issues and problems in their relationship to Black studies. Ferguson shows that philosophy is not a sterile intellectual pursuit, but a critical tool to gathering knowledge about the Black experience. Cultural idealism in various forms has become enormously influential as a framework for Black studies. Ferguson takes on the task of demonstrating how a Marxist philosophical perspective offers a productive and fruitful way of overcoming the limitations of idealism. Focusing on the hugely popular Afrocentric school of thought, this book's engaging discussion shows that the foundational arguments of cultural idealism are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. In turn, Ferguson argues for the centrality of the Black working class--both men and women--to Black Studies.
History of African-American Philosophy
African American Philosophizings Born of Struggles
The United States of America is one of several New World diasporic contexts of focus for these recovery and study efforts that are being conducted under the heading of “African American philosophy.” What follows is a historically contextualized discussion of several instances of the emergence of philosophizings born of struggles. However, it would be an ethical travesty and a case of epistemological presentist imperialism to require that thoughtful, critically reflective articulations by African Americans considered as instances of philosophizing worthy of the critical attention of professional philosophers first meet rigorous, formal standards for “right reasoning” settled on by professionals in the discipline during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For the contexts in which folks of African descent were compelled to reflect on and reason about their first-order lived experiences were substantially conditioned by the agendas and social logics of projects of White Racial Supremacy and constitutive invidious anthropologies of raciality, ethnicity, and gender, not agendas governed by the academic logics of abstract formal reasoning. The pressing exigencies of daily, cross-generation life under racialized enslavement and oppression were what compelled reflective thoughtfulness, not leisured, abstractive speculation. Again, what has to be witnessed and appreciated across the historical and hermeneutical distances of centuries of history and life-world experiences structured by contemporary personal and social freedoms are the natures of the lived experiences and situations of those whose articulations, whose philosophizings, are considered as having been born of struggles.
Much psychic energy had to be expended by New World African and African-descended peoples contending with the institutionalization of their enslavement and oppression otherwise that was racialized, thereby naturalized, and thoroughly sanctioned and justified by every enterprise of deliberate, normative thought and aesthetic expression—law, science, theology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, and secular “common sense.” (For a historical account of African-American life in the United States see Franklin and Moss, Jr. 2000.) In each case a primary resource was the foundational metaphysical and ontological “unit idea” of a hierarchical Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1964) on which each race was believed to have a fixed and determining place. Accordingly, as living property it was encumbered on enslaved Africans and their descendants to live so as to make good on the investments in their purchase and maintenance by engaging in productive labor, without compensation, and to endure and reproduce as ontological slaves in order to sustain and justify the institution of their imprisonment. According to this supposedly divinely sanctioned philosophical anthropology, African and African-descended children, women, and men were defined as constituting a category of being to which none of the normative moral and ethical notions and principles governing civilized life applied. Pressed into an ethically null category, they were compelled to live lives of social death stripped of defining webs of ennobling meaning constituted by narratives of previous histories, renewing presents, and imagined and anticipated futures of flourishing, cross-generational continuation.
On the whole, they did not succumb to the requirement to become socially dead, certainly not completely, though many thousands did. Always there were those who cultivated strengths of body, mind, soul, and spirit and exerted these in defense of the preservation of senses of themselves and of their peoples, of their “race,” as having worth beyond the definitions and valuations set on them by rationalizations of institutionalized enslavement and oppression. Always there were those who, in the cracks, crevices, and severely limited spaces of slave life and constricted freedom, preserved and shared fading memories of lives of beauty and integrity before the holocaust; who found, created, and renewed nurturings of imaginings of better life to come through music-making, dancing, and creative expression in the artful fashioning and use of items of material culture, and in the communal and personal relations, secular and spiritual, that the slaves formed, sustained, and passed on.
Nurtured by these efforts, they resisted the imposition of ontological death and nurtured others in resisting. They reflected on their existence and the conditions thereof; conceived of and put into practice ways to endure without succumbing, ways to struggle against enslavement and the curtailment otherwise of their lives and aspirations; and conceived and acted on ways to escape. They studied carefully their enslavers and oppressors and assessed the moral significance of all aspects of the lives enslavers and oppressors led and determined how they, though enslaved and despised, must live differently so as not to follow their oppressors and enslavers on paths to moral depravity. They conceived of other matters, including the terms and conditions of freedom and justice; of better terms and conditions of existence and of personal and social identities; of how to resist and endure while creating things of beauty; how to love in spite of their situations; conceived of their very nature as living beings.
For a full historical breakdown from the 1600s to the 2000s, see Stanford Encyclopedia's "Africana Philosophy" article, specifically sections 6-10: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/africana/#AfriAmerPhil
1. Outlaw Jr., L. T. (2017). Africana philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/africana/#AfriAmerPhil
African American Philosophy with John McClendon III and Stephen Ferguson II (Podcast)
Seminal Texts
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies by Call Number: 93024168 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 0940450798Publication Date: 1994Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presents the only authoritative edition of all three autobiographies by the escaped slave who became a great American leader. Here in this Library of America volume are collected Frederick Douglass's three autobiographical narratives, now recognized as classics of both American history and American literature. Writing with the eloquence and fierce intelligence that made him a brilliantly effective spokesman for the abolition of slavery and equal rights, Douglass shapes an inspiring vision of self-realization in the face of monumental odds. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), published seven years after his escape, was written in part as a response to skeptics who refused to believe that so articulate an orator could ever have been a slave. A powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born, it brought him to the forefront of the anti-slavery movement and drew thousands, black and white, to the cause. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass expands the account of his slave years. With astonishing psychological penetration, he probes the painful ambiguities and subtly corrosive effects of black-white relations under slavery, and recounts his determined resistance to segregation in the North. The book also incorporates extracts from Douglass's speeches, including the searing "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" Life and Times, first published in 1881, records Douglass's efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality during Reconstruction. John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe all feature prominently in this chronicle of a crucial epoch in American history. The revised edition of 1893, presented here, includes an account of his controversial diplomatic mission to Haiti. This volume contains a detailed chronology of Douglass's life, notes providing further background on the events and people mentioned, and an account of the textual history of each of the autobiographies.
The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Call Number: 2013050007 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 9780823254552Publication Date: 2014This volume assembles essential essays--some published only posthumously, others obscure, another only recently translated--by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1894 to early 1906. They show the first formulations of some of his most famous ideas, namely, "the veil," "double-consciousness," and the "problem of the color line." Moreover, the deep historical sense of the formation of the modern world that informs Du Bois's thought and gave rise to his understanding of "the problem of the color line" is on display here. Indeed, the essays constitute an essential companion to Du Bois's masterpiece published in 1903 as The Souls of Black Folk. The collection is based on two editorial principles: presenting the essays in their entirety and in strict chronological order. Copious annotation affords both student and mature scholar an unprecedented grasp of the range and depth of Du Bois's everyday intellectual and scholarly reference. These essays commence at the moment of Du Bois's return to the United States from two years of graduate-level study in Europe at the University of Berlin. At their center is the moment of Du Bois's first full, self-reflexive formulation of a sense of vocation: as a student and scholar in the pursuit of the human sciences (in their still-nascent disciplinary organization--that is, the institutionalization of a generalized "sociology" or general "ethnology"), as they could be brought to bear on the study of the situation of the so-called Negro question in the United States in all of its multiply refracting dimensions. They close with Du Bois's realization that the commitments orienting his work and intellectual practice demanded that he move beyond the institutional frames for the practice of the human sciences. The ideas developed in these early essays remained the fundamental matrix for the ongoing development of Du Bois's thought. The essays gathered here will therefore serve as the essential reference for those seeking to understand the most profound registers of this major American thinker.
A Voice from the South by Call Number: CARLI eBooks from Ebook CentralISBN: 9781469633312Publication Date: 2017Published in 1892, A Voice from the South is the only book published by one of the most prominent African American women scholars and educators of her era. Born a slave, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper would go on to become the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree. Cooper became a prominent member of the black community in Washington, D.C., serving as principal at M Street High School, during which time she wrote A Voice from the South. In it, she engages a variety of issues, including women's rights, racial progress, segregation, and the education of black women. Cooper also discusses a number of authors and their representations of African Americans, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgee, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, and Maurice Thompson, reaching the conclusion that an accurate depiction had yet to be written. A DOCSOUTH BOOK. This collaboration between UNC Press and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library brings classic works from the digital library of Documenting the American South back into print. DocSouth Books uses the latest digital technologies to make these works available in paperback and e-book formats. Each book contains a short summary and is otherwise unaltered from the original publication. DocSouth Books provide affordable and easily accessible editions to a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers.
The Works of Alain Locke by Call Number: Ebook Central University PressISBN: 9780199795048Publication Date: 2012With the publication of The New Negro in 1925, Alain Locke introduced readers all over the U.S. to the vibrant world of African American thought. As an author, editor, and patron, Locke rightly earned the appellation "Godfather of the Harlem Renaissance." Yet, his intellectual contributions extend far beyond that single period of cultural history. Throughout his life he penned essays, on topics ranging from John Keats to Sigmund Freud, in addition to his trenchant social commentary on race and society. The Works of Alain Locke provides the largest collection available of his brilliant essays, gathered from a career that spanned forty years. They cover an impressively broad field of subjects: philosophy, literature, the visual arts, music, the theory of value, race, politics, and multiculturalism. Alongside seminal works such as "The New Negro" the volume features essays like "The Ethics of Culture," "Apropos of Africa," and "Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy." Together, these writings demonstrate Locke's standing as the leading African American thinker between W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. The foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the introduction by
James Baldwin: Collected Essays by Call Number: PS3552.A45 A6 1998bISBN: 9781883011529Publication Date: 1998James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro.' Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published.
The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr. : "I Have a Dream" and Other Great Writings by Call Number: EBSCOhost eBook CollectionISBN: 9780807033043Publication Date: 2013A collection of the most well-known and treasured writings and speeches of Dr. King, available for the first time as an ebook The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr. is the ultimate collection of Dr. King's most inspirational and transformative speeches and sermons, accessibly available for the first time as an ebook. Here, in Dr. King's own words, are writings that reveal an intellectual struggle and growth as fierce and alive as any chronicle of his political life could possibly be. Included amongst the twenty selections are Dr. King's most influential and persuasive works such as "I Have a Dream" and "Letter from Birmingham Jail" but also the essay "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," and his last sermon "I See the Promised Land," preached the day before he was assassinated. Published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr. includes twenty selections that celebrate the life's work of our most visionary thinkers. Collectively, they bring us Dr. King in many roles, philosopher, theologian, orator, essayist, and author, and further cement the most powerful and enduring words of a man who touched the conscience of the nation and world.
The Angela Y. Davis Reader by Call Number: 97037880 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 9780631203612Publication Date: 1998For three decades, Angela Y. Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s (or as a political icon for militant activism) she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis. The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - "Prisons, Repression, and Resistance", "Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism", "Aesthetics and Culture", and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism. Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies.
Where We Stand by Call Number: OnlineISBN: 0415929113Publication Date: 2000Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.
- Being a Black Woman Philosopher: Reflections on Founding the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers
By Kathryn T. Giles
"Although the American Philosophical Association has more than 11,000 members, there are still fewer than 125 Black philosophers in the United States, including fewer than thirty Black women holding a PhD in philosophy and working in a philosophy department in the academy.(FN1) The following is a "musing" about how I became one of them and how I have sought to create a positive philosophical space for all of us." --From abstract
Prophesy Deliverance! by Call Number: 82013483 (I-SHARE)ISBN: 9780664244477Publication Date: 1982Examines the history of Afro-American philosophy, discusses the traditional responses of Blacks to racism, and argues for a fusion of Christianity and progressive Marxism.
