Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon 135034379X, 9781350343795

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Also available from Bloomsbury
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
PREFACE: WHY YES, WHY NOW, TO THIS PROJECT?
A POETIC FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORKS OF LEWIS R. GORDON
Sayan Dey on Contextualizing Gordon’s Relevance to Decolonial Thinking in India
Rozena Maart on Gordon’s Influence in Europe and Africa
From the Caribbean to Palestine, Asia and the South Pacific
About the Chapters
Weaving the Thread
PART I BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND AFRICAN APHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER 1 A RECENT REFLECTION ON AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER 2 REASONING IN BLACK: AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY UNDER THE WEIGHT OF MISGUIDED REASON
CHAPTER 3 RACE IN THE DIALECTICS OF CULTURE
CHAPTER 4 RACISM AS A FORM OF BAD FAITH
CHAPTER 5 CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THREE POPULAR TROPES IN THE STUDY OF WHITENESS
The Notion of White “Privilege”
Victimization as a Condition of Oppression—a Critique
Normality and Normativity
Social Construction of Race—a Critique
CHAPTER 6 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF BIKO’S BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS
CHAPTER 7 THEORY IN BLACK: TELEOLOGICAL SUSPENSIONS IN PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE
CHAPTER 8 SEX, RACE, AND MATRICES OF DESIRE IN AN ANTIBLACK WORLD
CHAPTER 9 RACIALIZATION AND HUMAN REALITY
CHAPTER 10 LETTER TO A GRIEVING STUDENT
CHAPTER 11 ROCKIN’ IT IN BLUE: A BLACK EXISTENTIAL ESSAY ON JIMI HENDRIX
PART II DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER 12 DISCIPLINARY DECADENCE AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
CHAPTER 13 DISCIPLINING AS A HUMAN SCIENCE
The “Human Problem”
Phenomenological Dialectics or Dialectical Phenomenology
Decolonizing Disciplines
Pedagogical Imperatives
Disciplinary Power
Conclusion
CHAPTER 14 THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN THEOLOGY
History
Religion and History
Africans in America
Black Religions and Theology
Concluding Considerations on Historical Redemption and Contingency
CHAPTER 15 RARELY KOSHER: STUDYING JEWS OF COLOR IN NORTH AMERICA
CHAPTER 16 JEWS AGAINST LIBERATION: ANAFRO-JEWISH CRITIQUE
Afro-Jews and White Jews Reflecting on Pesach
Why Do I Say This?
Black Dream, White Dread
Rejecting Idols, Embracing Ethical Life
CHAPTER 17 LEWIS GORDON’S STATEMENT FOR JACQUELINE WALKER’S DOSSIER, 2018
CHAPTER 18 SHIFTING THE GEOGRAPHY OF REASON IN AN AGE OF DISCIPLINARY DECADENCE
CHAPTER 19 DECOLONIZING PHILOSOPHY
Not Only European
Colonial Philosophy
Africana Philosophy
Disciplinary Decadence
Theodicy of Market Colonization
Philosophical Purity
What of Liberation?
CHAPTER 20 A PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVE OF PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVES
CHAPTER 21 JUSTICE OTHERWISE: THOUGHTS ON UBUNTU
Modernity, Modernities
Modern Ubuntu Because Ubuntu is Modern
A Concluding Thought
CHAPTER 22 TELEOLOGICAL SUSPENSIONS FOR THE SAKE OF POLITICAL LIFE
Decadence, Disciplinary and Otherwise
Rule Over Politics
Shifting the Geography of Reason, Shifting the Geography of Action
Concluding Remarks
CHAPTER 23 LABOR, MIGRATION, AND RACE: TOWARD A SECULAR MODEL OF CITIZENSHIP
PART III INTERVIEWS
CHAPTER 24 ARE REPARATIONS POSSIBLE? LESSONS TO THE UNITED STATES FROM SOUTH AFRICA
CHAPTER 25 HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE: THINKING ART IN A DECOLONIAL WAY
CHAPTER 26 BLACK ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY: GORDON AND DA SILVA ON BRAZIL AND AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER 27 DOUGLA: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN DALITNESS AND AFRO-BLACKNESS
CHAPTER 28 FREEDOM, OPPRESSION, AND BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN GET OUT
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE

i

Also available from Bloomsbury: A PHILOSOPHY OF STRUGGLE by Leonard Harris ETHICS AND INSURRECTION by Lee A. McBride III REVOLUTIONARY HOPE AFTER NIHILISM by Saladdin Ahmed THE POLITICAL WRITINGS FROM ALIENATION AND FREEDOM by Frantz Fanon

ii

BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE WRITINGS OF LEWIS R. GORDON

Edited by Rozena Maart, Sayan Dey, and Lewis R. Gordon

iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Lewis R. Gordon, Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey, 2023 Lewis R. Gordon, Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Jess Stevens All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3503-4376-4 978-1-3503-4377-1 978-1-3503-4379-5 978-1-3503-4378-8

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Lewis R. Gordon. © Marisa Murgatroyd, 2000. Reproduced with permission.

v

vi

CONTENTS

Preface: Why Yes, Why Now, to This Project? A Poetic Foreword Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Acknowledgements Introduction: Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge in the works of Lewis R. Gordon Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey

ix xiii xiv

1

Part I. Black Existentialism and Africana Philosophy 1

A Recent Reflection on Africana Philosophy

17

2

Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason

23

3

Race in the Dialectics of Culture

35

4

Racism as a Form of Bad Faith

51

5

Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness

57

6

A Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness

75

7

Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture

85

8

Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World

101

9

Racialization and Human Reality

113

10 Letter to a Grieving Student

123

11 Rockin’ It in Blue: A Black Existential Essay on Jimi Hendrix

125

Part II. Decolonizing Knowledge 12 Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge

139

13 Disciplining as a Human Science

149

14 The Problem of History in African American Theology

163

15 Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America

177

16 Jews Against Liberation: An Afro-Jewish Critique

187 vii

Contents

17 Lewis Gordon’s Statement for Jacqueline Walker’s Dossier, 2018

195

18 Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence

199

19 Decolonizing Philosophy

209

20 A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives

227

21 Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu

237

22 Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life

251

23 Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship

261

Part III. Interviews 24 Are Reparations Possible? Lessons to the United States from South Africa

271

25 Histories of Violence: Thinking Art in a Decolonial Way

285

26 Black Issues in Philosophy: Gordon and Da Silva on Brazil and Africana Philosophy

291

27 Dougla: Intersections between Dalitness and Afro-Blackness

301

28 Freedom, Oppression, and Black Consciousness in Get Out

305

Selected Bibliography Index

313 327

viii

PREFACE: WHY YES, WHY NOW, TO THIS PROJECT?

A group of scholars contacted me in the late 1990s through early 2000s to consider organizing a Lewis R. Gordon reader. I respectfully declined because I was very young (in my thirties), and I wasn’t supportive of such a project because I don’t regard my work as “finished” or “complete” but, instead, perpetually in progress. In existential fashion, this would be the case even after I join the ancestors because my “work,” as I see it, is part of a community greater than myself. When I write, it is a project of learning through communicating, which means I learn from the published writings through how others read and provide critiques of them. Although “I” won’t be among those who continue that project when I pass on, those who choose to continue engaging and developing ideas to which I’ve devoted much of my life would, in similar fashion, articulate the value of such thought as they see fit. Although always a global intellectual, that commitment took a different form for me since that period. I became involved in political and scholarly work on every continent except Antarctica. This became acute first through my role as the first president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (from 2003 to 2008), even though my work in the 1990s with varieties of left groups through my co-leadership of The Black Graduate Network in New Haven, Connecticut, and then with the Radical Philosophical Association, which led to me founding the journal Radical Philosophy Review, was already marked by a commitment to building public alternatives to privatized models of globalization. The first decade of the 2000s involved me directly meeting with communities of organic intellectuals dedicated to de facto democracy across the globe, although with particular attention to what has become known as the Global South. Beyond the many countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America in which I was and continue to remain active, two countries loom large: South Africa and India. A third, Senegal, emerged through my collaborations with Hady Ba and Souleymane Bachir Diagne over the past several years, but it is the first two that are most pertinent to this prefatory reflection. In the first, there is the biographical element of my having been involved in the South African anti-Apartheid struggle from the early 1980s. That commitment continued after 1994 in my relationships with family, colleagues, students, and ground-level activists in that country. It became such that each visit was met with the greeting, “Welcome home!” from Mabogo More, Chabani Manganyi, and Rozena Maart as well as Mømø Khosi, Simone Levy, Tshepo Madlingozi, Sabelo Mcinziba, Mpho Matsipa, Richard Pithouse, Michael Neocosmos, Zandi Radebe, and Tendayi Sithole, to my cousins Vashna and Rahul Jagarnath-Pithouse, and Sarah Nighthawk, and relatives through marriage to my wife Jane, who include her parents Jean and John Comaroff, cousins Claudia Gastrow,

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Preface: Why Yes, Why Now, to This Project?

Chris Ouma, and Nava Gastrow-Ouma, and so many others. From Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Workers College in Durban to the Black House Collective in Soweto, the Biko Centre in Ginsberg, The New Frame and the Forge in Johannesburg, the Padkos Churchland group in Pietermaritzburg, the Lemba (Southern African Jews of northern South Africa and southern Zimbabwe), NUMSA (The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa), and on to the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity (CCRRI) at UKZN (University of Kwazulu-Natal), the uBuntu Project in Venda, the Decolonial Summer School in UNISA (the University of South Africa), and the Centre for Diversity Studies at Wits (The University of the Witwatersrand), as well as my time as The Nelson Mandela Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Rhodes University during which I taught courses on Theory from the Global South and Frantz Fanon, which inspired an extraordinary group of student and community activists in Makanda (formerly Grahamstown), along with so many others across the country, the greeting continues to ring true. India became more than an ancestral part of my life when I visited Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), the capital of Kerala, in a meeting co-organized by Abdul JanMohamed, who, as well, was there for the first time despite his Indian ancestry. He, a Kenyan, and I, a Jamaican, began our relationship with Prafulla Kar, the dedicated humanist and past Director of the Forum on Contemporary Theory, which continues to this day. I opened my talk at that 2009 meeting with the story of boarding my flight from New York City to Abu Dhabi as a Black person. An elderly Tamil couple sitting next to me on my flight for Trivandrum from Abu Dhabi looked me over and then smiled. The husband asked, “Coming home for the holidays?” Landing in Trivandrum, everyone I encountered in customs addressed me in Tamil. Exiting the airport, I went over to the taxi booth. The gentleman at the counter looked me over and then asked: “Are you Arab?” “Why do you ask?” I responded. “I’m sorry. I thought you were Arab.” At my talk, I added the punchline: All those designations were true. I am Black, Tamil, Arab, and more (Chinese, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Filipino, Irish, Jewish—Mizrahi and Sephardi—Palestinian, Liberian, Panamanian, Scottish, Syrian). As I was born in Jamaica, there is another punchline: I’m typically Caribbean. The meeting in Trivandrum was followed by years of activities in India that took me across the country, from Gujarat to Punjab to Rajasthan to Telangana and many other parts. Crucial throughout was an increased realization of converging affinities, which are marked primarily by my relationships with two groups: Sikhs and Dalits. The former came about through my time in Chandigarh, at which I met Jaspal Kaur Singh, Sukhdeep Ghuman, and a crew of other Sikh women whose friendship is an enduring feature of my visits and intellectual collaborations. The Dalit dimension was there in my writings and political commitments before I visited India, but the literary and activist importance of Chandramohan S., Manoj Kumar Panda, and Suraj Yengde (among others) is worth mentioning here. And, of course, this is not to say that we were not joined by Hindus committed to struggles for social justice and health among historically derided peoples. x

Preface: Why Yes, Why Now, to This Project?

They include Nimrata Tiku, Renu Nanda, Bini Babu Sudha, Mandakini V. Jha, in addition to, of course, Prafulla Kar. Imagine, then, when the convergence of South Africa and India came in the form of the philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst, and Black consciousness activist Rozena Maart and the decolonial pedagogue, historian, and cultural critic Sayan Dey posing the possibility of a collection of my writings to be available in a single volume for their students, comrades, and similar communities across the globe. Both Maart and Dey are, like me, globally oriented. In them, there are the meetings of many continents, and their work exemplifies constructive, radical Black and decolonial critique matched by activism to build possibility for the proverbial Damned of the Earth. They understand why my commitments take me not only to South Africa and India but also exemplifications of the Damned wherever they are. There are proverbs that tell tales of appropriate times at which one should answer the knocking at one’s door. Those are appropriate for this moment. Only a fragment of what I’ve written could be included in this volume. I was surprised to learn from Maart and Dey that my publications are now in the millions of words. Many ideas have come to print since those early solicitations of going on three decades ago. They occasion a short reflection on what my work, for the most part, is about. I have argued over the years that adhering to disciplinary identities often leads to decadence of thought. Because I don’t write from a discipline, the result is my work being located among many, although my doctorate in philosophy leads many to refer to me as a philosopher. I always say I am also a philosopher. In that regard, my work is animated by philosophical, ethical-aesthetic, and political concerns. The philosophical is the human being’s relationship to reality. The ethical-aesthetic comes from the many unfortunate ways we attempt to avoid reality, which includes our obligations to one another and understanding of what it means to live livable lives. The political addresses the responsibilities we have and the possibilities of what we can build from our species’ capacity to curtail and produce power. The existential dimension of my thought emerges from all this happening through the lived-reality of building relationships and meaning for a livable world. I call that human reality. It is not that there aren’t other kinds of realities. It is that “we,” with whom we communicate and build meaning, live the human one. Efforts to evade human reality, to hide from our responsibilities to one another and life on our planet, take forms of coercion, dehumanization, and privatization of power. They militate against dignity, freedom, love, and respect. They are often cruel. I hate cruelty. As a result, even from childhood, my “work,” so to speak, has been a long battle against cruelty. In political terms, this has taken the form of a battle against dehumanization and fascism. This commitment brings an additional resonance to the “now” in “why now?” Our times are marked by an epic battle of forces of dehumanization and privatization against the value of human and other forms of life on our planet. The negative side of that effort proffers an isolated self, notions of godlike subjects without responsibility or concern for others. What such a view wants us all to forget is that, in the end, all we have beyond oxygen for breath, water for thirst, food for nourishment, is one xi

Preface: Why Yes, Why Now, to This Project?

another with whom to build lives worth living. We could impose upon one another narcissistic impositions of the self. Or we could let go of our egos and open our hearts to the freedom and possibility of life. I call that radical love. It’s not a term I coined. It’s simply my take on it. I regard the two intellectuals, also committed teachers, who have prompted this volume to be exemplars of radical love. They asked for this volume not for themselves nor for me but, instead, for others, many of whom are communities to which they would give their last breath. So, why now? Because it’s for the right reasons. I thank them for that. The readers can judge if our efforts are worth their time. Lewis R. Gordon

xii

A POETIC FOREWORD Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Meet me in St Louis, once sang Judy Garland When Njeeri and I finally hearkened to the call We met Lewis and Jane Gordon at St Louis Conducting a choir of seekers of wisdom From the four corners of the wind Shifting the geography of reason From self-proclaimed centers in the North To the whole globe as the real geography of reason Proclaiming that any point in the globe Can be the center of the globe Or, rather, the real center is that which connects And Frantz Fanon was watching the geography of reason widen And Frantz Fanon was watching the geography of reason widen Or maybe Lewis and Jane had chosen St Louis For the awards of cognition and recognition From the Caribbean Philosophical Association As a hint that the rhythm of the jazz and blues Was born of the blue waters of the oceans That know no borders and boundaries And Nicolas Guillen was watching the geography of reason widen And Nicolas Guillen was watching the geography of reason widen In the sounds of the trumpet and guitar and keyboard In the poetry of the grey-haired man singing blues under the arch In the hearts that beat with the drum beats In the bodies that swayed to the united rhythm of different instruments There, you see, Lies the center of the new geography of reason And Gabriel Garcia Marquez was watching the geography of reason widen And Gabriel Garcia Marquez was watching the geography of reason widen Shifting The ground Of Knowledge xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is book is a result of multiple levels of interactions that we (Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey) had with Lewis R. Gordon. We are highly indebted to him for permitting us to compose this reader and thinking us enough capable to do it. We are also grateful to Paget Henry, Jaspal Singh, Sonia Dayan-Herzburn, Prafulla C. Kar, Jaspal Kaur Singh, Jane Anna Gordon, Thomas Meagher, and others who have taken out their time to read through the reader and share their valuable feedback. We are also grateful to our students and colleagues at the University of KwaZulu Natal and the University of Witwatersrand for their support. The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the below list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Part I. Black Existentialism and Africana Philosophy 1. Africana Philosophy (original article) 2. Lewis Gordon. “Reasoning in Black.” I Am Because We Are: Readings in Africana Philosophy, edited by Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), pp. 281-293. Used with permission of University of Massachusetts Press. 3. Lewis Gordon.“Race in the Dialectics of Culture.” In Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class and Caste, edited by Abdul JanMohamed. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011. Pp. 55–79. Used with permission of Lewis Gordon and Routledge India. 4. Racism as a Form of Bad Faith (original article) 5. “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness.” In What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. By George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 173–193. Used with permission of Routledge UK. 6. Lewis Gordon. “Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness.” Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, edited by A Mngxitama. Palgrave Macmillan. Material from: Lewis Gordon, Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness, published in 2008 by xiv

Acknowledgements

Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Customer Service Centre. 7. “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture,” in Qui Parle Critical Humanities and Social Sciences vol. 18, no. 2., edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, pp. 193-214. Copyright, 2010, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu 8. Lewis Gordon. 1997. “Sex, Race and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-black World.” Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Used with permission of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 9. Lewis Gordon. 2018. Racialization and Human Reality. The Philosopher. Link: https:// www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/racialization-and-human-reality Used with permission of The Philosopher. 10. Letter to a Grieving Student (original article) 11. Lewis Gordon. “Rockin’ It in Blue: A Black Existential Essay on Jimi Hendrix,” Discourse 39, no. 2 (Spring, 2017): 216–229. Used with permission of Discourse, Wayne State University Press.

Part II. Decolonizing Knowledge 12. Lewis Gordon, “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development 39, no. 1 (2014): 81-92. Used with permission of CODESRIA. 13. Lewis Gordon. “Disciplining as a Human Science,” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal, n° 3 (2016): http://quaderna.org/disciplining-as-a-humanscience/. Used with permission of Quaderna: a multilingual and transdisciplinary journal. 14. Lewis Gordon. 2014. “The Problem of History in African American Theology.” Oxford Handbook of African American Theology. Edited by Katie G. Cannon and Anthony B. Pinn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Used with permission of Oxford University Press. 15. Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America. Copyright © 2016 The American Jewish Historical Society. This article first appeared in American Jewish History, Volume 100, Issue 1, January 2016, pages 105-116. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 16. Lewis Gordon. “Jews Against Liberation: An Afro-Jewish Critique.” Contending Modernities, March 26, 2021. Link: https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizingmodernities/afro-jewish-critique-liberation/. Used with permission of Lewis Gordon and Contending Modernities. 17. Lewis Gordon’s Statement for Jacqueline Walker’s Dossier 2019 (original article) xv

Acknowledgements

18. Gordon, Lewis. (2011). Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World. 1. 96–104. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/218618vj. 10.5070/ T412011810. Used with permission of Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, University of California. 19. Gordon, Lewis. (2019). Decolonizing Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy. 57. 16-36. 10.1111/sjp.12343. Used with permission of The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Wiley-Blackwell. 20. Gordon, Lewis. (2010). A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives. Thresholds in Education. XXXVI. 27–35. Used with permission of Thresholds in Education, Academy for Educational Studies. 21. Lewis Gordon. 2014. “Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu.” Ubuntu: Curating the Archive, edited by Leonhard Praeg and Siphokazi Magadla. UKZN Press. Used with permission of UKZN Press. 22. Lewis Gordon. “Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life,” Social Alternatives 37, no. 4 (2018): 12–17. Used with permission of Social Alternatives. 23. Lewis Gordon. “Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Mode of Citizenship” published in Journal of Contemporary Thought 32 (Winter 2010, pp.157-165). Used with permission of Journal of Contemporary Thought, Forum on Contemporary Theory.

Part III. Interviews 24. Lewis Gordon. 2019. “Are Reparations Possible?” International Dialogue: A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs, vol. 9, issue. 1. https://doi.org/10.32873/uno. dc.ID.9.1.1176. Used with permission of International Dialogue: A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs, University of Nebraska Omaha. 25. Thinking Art in a Decolonial Way: An Interview with Philosopher Lewis R. Gordon by Brad Evans. 2019. Link: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/thinking-art-in-adecolonialway-an-interview-with-philosopher-lewisrgordon/9155. Used with permission of Conversations.e-flux. 26. Lewis Gordon. Gordon and Da Silva on Brazil and Africana Philosophy. APA Blog. November 27, 2018. Link: https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/11/27/black-issues-in-philosophygordon-and-da-silva-on-brazil-and-africana-philosophy/. Used with permission of Lewis Gordon and APA Blog Online. 27. Dougla: Intersections between Dalitness and Afro-Blackness (original article) 28. Lewis Gordon. Freedom, Oppression, and Black Consciousness in “Get Out”. Aesthetics of Birds. April 5, 2018. Link: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2018/04/05/freedom-oppressionand-black-consciousness-in-get-out/. Used with permission of Aesthetics of Birds. xvi

INTRODUCTION: BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORKS OF LEWIS R. GORDON Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey

As co-editors of this collection, Rozena Maart from South Africa and Sayan Dey from India, our introduction to this volume shows various shifts between each of our knowledge of Lewis Gordon’s contributions to global scholarship on Black existentialism and decolonizing knowledge and the socio-political locations from where we each write. The introduction also briefly describes the two streams in which the chapters in this book have been distributed and why, along with many scholars around the world, we consider the work of Lewis Gordon important enough to be published as a volume of this kind. Lewis Ricardo Gordon was born in Jamaica in May 1962. Three months later, on August 6th, Jamaica claimed its independence from British rule, which it endured for 300 years. On his mother’s side of the family, his lineage is Jewish from Palestine and Ireland, Tamil Indian from Pondicherry, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Liberian, and Scottish. On his father’s side, his lineage is Chinese from Guandong, West African, and Scottish. Lewis started school at the age of three, and since his mother was a working mother, he navigated his route to school upon being guided from home to the school building for the first time by her, and thereafter undertook the route on his own. Various relatives have shared, when one of us attended the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual gathering in Kingston, Jamaica in 2007, how Lewis entertained himself on the way home, often stopping to build structures in the sand, wandering about the streets thinking through things that interested him, such as space ships and the whereabouts of the stars in the sky, which at night he lie gazing at when everyone was asleep. Once he got home, he would draw, write stories, and read whatever he could lay his hands on. Before commencing school, he had great-grandparents, great aunts and younger maternal aunts who took care of him during the day when his mother was at work, and these interactions brought forth a wealth of knowledge, he later realised. His early upbringing in Jamaica was filled with three generations of women family members taking care of him, talking to him as a baby, passing him from one aunt to another, and showing him the kind of affection that laid the foundation, we believe, for his confidence as a speaker, a listener, a thinker, and a community builder. Research shows us that boy children who are nurtured by loving women in their household develop sensibilities that boys who are robbed of this experience do not acquire—not readily anyway. As a young boy Lewis was carried on the shoulders of his father, who enjoyed the loving friendship and camaraderie of Bob Marley and the Wailers. By all accounts, Gordon comes from a generation of Caribbean radical thinkers who were schooled by the material conditions of their existence, and as such by what most western thinkers construct as poverty, overcrowding, rebellion, and revolt without reflecting on the love, care, nurturing, undeclared mentorship, freedom of 1

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

thought and ideas, spirit and confidence, and speech as crucial to the development of consciousness of being in the world (which began when he was three months old). It is hardly a surprise to find the contributions of Paul Bogle, Samuel Sharpe, and Marcus Garvey so strongly evidenced in Gordon’s work. These men were in fact revolutionaries, anti-colonial and decolonial thinkers, who shaped the lives of the previously enslaved in Jamaica and speak directly to the impact that they had on Gordon’s thinking, through the efforts of both his maternal and paternal family. We note the above with an acute awareness of the narratives of “discovery” we have heard from a number of scholars who claim that they brought decolonial scholarship to African Americans, South Africans, and to Indians in the subcontinent, among others. Gordon’s place of birth, Jamaica, is not a twenty-first-century newcomer to decolonial thought; its inhabitants resisted British colonialism from the onset, and their written texts, music, and dance along with the food they cook and take pleasure in, and their internationally revered prowess in track and field offer strong evidence of their plight. Lewis Ricardo Gordon is a phenomenal scholar. He writes fiction, plays the drums and piano as well as several other musical instruments, most of which he taught himself to play by the age of seven, and often plays music with his youngest son or his contemporaries in blues and jazz ensembles in public venues. He is a public intellectual; he writes, teaches, mentors, and lectures in Black existentialism, decolonizing knowledge systems, philosophy, Africana studies, Jewish studies, anthropology, education, history, law, musicology, physics, political economy, psychology, sociology, and contemporary social and political thought. His philosophical arguments on Black existentialism and decolonizing knowledge thoroughly interweave practical experiences with theoretical dimensions. Though his works emerge from personal and collective experiences, they can be positioned within diverse geopolitical spaces across the globe. To elaborate, his arguments on decolonizing the education systems, political institutions, habitual social experiences, art practices, racial hierarchies, and communal relations from Black existentialist perspectives encompass varied experiences of the postcolonial societies across the globe. Our next two segments, by Sayan Dey and Rozena Maart respectively, will further reflect on the epistemological and ontological diversities of Lewis Gordon’s global scholarship.

Sayan Dey on Contextualizing Gordon’s Relevance to Decolonial Thinking in India Let me briefly reflect on Lewis Gordon’s works in the context of India. As a co-editor located in India, I address the issue of canon formation in the universities of India and how British rule continued in India even after the British withdrew in August 1947 following three hundred years of usurpation and colonization, where the subcontinent was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The term “withdrew” is here used with intent, and with an acute awareness of the contention that the term still carries. British colonial rule continued not only through the preference of 2

Introduction

English as the language of instruction and as such the medium of knowledge production, but also by upholding an English imperial mindset among the colonially trained highcaste Hindus through adopted hierarchical social behavior set on maintaining class and caste, Eurocentric body gestures that convey social distance and generates snobbery, linguistic patterns, food habits, an ethics of physical attire and dress, and last but not least political ideologies that perpetuate and reproduce imperial-thinking. The latter is exactly what Lewis Gordon calls disciplinary decadence and epistemic dependency. According to Gordon, disciplinary decadence is a “phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its own limitations, to a deontologized or absolute conception of disciplinary life” (Gordon 2014: 86). Through the failure to appreciate the existential diversity of the society in precolonial India, the high-caste Hindus acknowledged the implosive regulations and the self-devouring methodologies of deontologized ethics as an absolute form of Eurocentric disciplinarity. In India, and widely in South Asia, the diverse worlds of literary and philosophical theories are introduced to students as early as their undergraduate years of study. However, what is problematic is how notions of the “diverse world” of literary and philosophical theories are played out within the parameters of British imperial education to uphold and reproduce the very mechanisms of Eurocentric thinking that the subjugated Indian and colonized masses sought to dismantle. In the university system in India, introductions to theories and philosophies are widely governed by the hierarchically structured social, cultural, racialized, gendered, economic, geographical, and topographical philosophies of the high-caste Hindus (Rukmini 2019; Datta 2021). Such philosophies, which are maintained and reproduced within the patriarchal and colonial conceptual frameworks of the institutions of higher education, gradually collapse into a state of what Lewis Gordon in his paper titled “Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life” (2018) identifies as “epistemological solipsism” (12). Gordon further notes: “Where such thought becomes the world, then the absence of an outside creates the illusion of omniscience. The discipline becomes godlike. As such, its precepts and methodological assumptions become all its practitioners supposedly need to know” (12). The institutions speak directly to the ways in which the system of White Western domination is perpetuated, maintained and reproduced. As a result, my theoretical and philosophical schooling was no different. The issue of blind epistemic dependency of the non-Eurocentric academic and research disciplines on the “Western philosophical canon” (86), as argued by Lewis Gordon in his paper titled, “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge” (2014), could be read in India through a specific set of scholars who exclusively belong to the privileged class and caste. Since the colonial era, they have been using their privileged experiences of university education in the West to exert their dominance on the lowercaste people of underprivileged communities (Rao 2021). The perpetuation of colonial thinking is the best form of ideological indoctrination where the colonizer is absent, but the hierarchical structures of divide-and-conquer fostered by the British continue to enslave, dominate, oppress, and subalternize the people. There is, as such, not only a hierarchy of identifying “voices of authority” as to who is “capable” of theorizing and philosophizing, but also one where decolonial and 3

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

postcolonial scholarship is being generated on a regular basis. The philosophical practices of Lewis Gordon, in the form of writings and lectures, make a concerted effort to interrogate and dismantle such practices of epistemological compartmentalization, tokenism, and knowledge trafficking across various spatio-temporal moments.

Rozena Maart on Gordon’s Influence in Europe and Africa For the purpose of charting my journey with the work of Lewis Gordon, it is important to note that it began at the latter end of my doctoral journey at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies [CCCS] at the University of Birmingham in the UK, which I undertook from 1993 until 1996. I am a woman who was born in District Six, the old slave quarter of the Cape, whose ancestors endured colonization by the Dutch, then the British, hence my last name Maart—named after the month of enslavement, as the third month of the year, indicative of Dutch enslavement at the Cape of my mother’s paternal Xhosa lineage. My mother’s maternal ancestors were enslaved, brought to the Cape by the Dutch colonizers as human cargo, and named September: their history is from Java and Bengal. As such, my accent and manner of speaking are steeped in the tradition of my upbringing and my schooling, neither of which can be explained without the other. During my tenure as a doctoral scholar at the University of Birmingham, an exchange student from the Sorbonne University, Jean-Paul Rocchi, brought me to the work of Lewis Gordon. Bad Faith and Antiblack racism (1995) and, shortly after, Her Majesty’s Other children (1997). These two books started the process of my familiarity with the work of Lewis Gordon. Little did I know at the time that Lewis had already been to South Africa and had been involved in anti-apartheid activism on the streets of Chicago and New York as a teenager and young adult, in addition to the years when he was a doctoral student in New Haven and was more than just a philosopher whose words drew me out as though they had been written to address my Black existential experience. Grappling with a dissertation on the tenets of Black Consciousness and the absence of the knowledge of White Consciousness in philosophical texts before the flurry of Whiteness studies made their appearance, Gordon, who had already back in the 1970s grappled with Biko when I as a teenager and introduced to Biko’s words, was able to offer particular insights into Black Consciousness and Black existentialism from the richness of his Caribbean thought that I had not envisaged. It was as a result of Lewis Gordon’s skillful and gracious public speaking and intimate seminar discussion in Paris a few years later that I was able to match the written words with the spoken voice, which over the course of a few days I saw many young scholars gravitate towards. I immediately realized the extent to which Black Consciousness as articulated by Bantu Stephen Biko had drawn from Trinidad-born Black Panther ideologue Stokeley Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, and what these interconnections meant in the broader structuring of Lewis Gordon’s body of work. But the connections did not end there, as I soon learnt, for as much as Biko referenced Fanon and Césaire, Lewis Gordon was able to point to the patterns that histories of enslavement and histories of coloniality evidenced in South 4

Introduction

Africa and countries of the Caribbean, what they had in common, how they showed their colonial cruelties in other parts of the African diaspora, whilst simultaneously connecting them to global coloniality of Indigenous communities. Over the course of the next three decades, I learnt why Lewis Gordon is considered one of the finest living global scholars, whose work we are privileged to enjoy. Since my first engagement with Lewis Gordon’s work on Black existentialism, Africana philosophy, and decolonizing knowledge systems in the middle of the 1990s, I was able to locate my enslaved, racialized, and gendered experiences in South Africa within a wider theoretical and phenomenological framework. Having travelled to the UK on a British Council scholarship to study toward my Master’s degree in 1987 and later towards my doctoral degree in 1993, I journeyed to the land of my colonizers with the erroneous belief that I would be taught by scholars who did not uphold the same apartheid formulations of teacher-White, student-Black, especially in philosophy departments, with which South Africa in the afterlife of Apartheid is still infested. Lewis Gordon’s connection to South Africa has many links, one of which includes his scholarly relationship with Professor Mabogo More, which started more than three decades ago. He has cousins in South Africa, family on his wife Jane Anna Gordon’s side, and collegial relationships that have spanned many decades, for example, such as with Professor Mogobe Ramose, one of South Africa’s most renowned and senior living philosophers. Born, raised, racialized, socialized, conscientized, and politicized at the Cape, I have lived in the city of Durban for the past eleven years. I joined the University of KwaZuluNatal [UKZN], located in Durban (with one campus in Pietermaritzburg) in May of 2011 as the Head of Gender Studies and, by the end of 2012, I took up the position as the Director of the Centre for Critical Research on Race and Identity [CCRRI]. Durban is not only a city of predominantly Zulu-speaking residents but also home to sizeable Congolese, Malawian, Zimbabwean, Nigerian, and Cameroonian communities. As I was building up CCRRI with a host of weekly seminars and invited guests from around the country, I was fortunate to be able to have Lewis Gordon offer a seminar at the Centre to the larger Durban community of scholars as he was en route to Rhodes University, located in Makhanda (previously known as Grahamstown) where he served as a Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies. At CCRRI students and community members were enthralled. Students who had left philosophy departments sickened by the paraphrasing of “but European philosophy is universal” now delighted in learning philosophical thought as Lembede, Sobukwe, Biko, and Fanon had intended: learning about the material conditions of their existence, with the tools that Lewis Gordon was able to impart, and that is a language of historical accuracy that unpeeled the history of the colonial subject to its core and revealed how the human experience of being in the world did not belong to those who dehumanized others in order to declare their humanity. It is also important to emphasize that when Lewis spoke at CCRRI during my tenure, scholars from Botswana, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Angola consistently joined us in person or via the online skype method, now zoom, to listen and engage with Lewis Gordon. These gatherings have 5

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

continued in person for the past ten years, despite the physical interruptions that that COVID19 pandemic fostered but which online zoom meetings permitted. More importantly, it is precisely the preparation of the library and archive space of CCRRI, which I organized with the assistance of postgraduate students, where copies of his papers where organized in boxes and from which we seem to run out rather quickly that I approached Lewis to consider a collection of his key papers. At conferences at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, I shared a platform with Lewis more than once and got to witness the extent to which his work is received. Lewis Gordon produces knowledge that has been engaged with across the globe. Not only is this evident by the invitations to speak in Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe but it also shows without a reasonable doubt that his work speaks to the contexts of scholars from the African continent in very particular ways. As for Europe: nothing quite transcends a moment of panic when realizing that scheduled speakers had not arrived at an event at the World Conference of Philosophy in Athens, Greece, in 2013 because of being denied visas. I was meant to chair. Lewis recommending not cancelling the session but, instead, announced that he would speak after the only scheduled speaker, a local philosopher from Athens. I was delighted that cancelling the session was not necessary, and I was overjoyed as young scholars were leaving their venues where sessions were in progress and inviting their peers into the large auditorium where Lewis Gordon had started to speak. The session became a standingroom event. In Europe alone, Lewis Gordon has spoken and engaged with communities of scholars in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Russia (among dissidents), Slovenia, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Corsica, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

From the Caribbean to Palestine, Asia and the South Pacific The extent of Lewis Gordon’s global scholarship is vast; he does not only visit countries to lecture but also communities of scholars, activists, and laypeople, which includes communities where Indigenous people have invited him to talk about the material conditions of their lived experiences. Decolonial knowledge systems have been part of Lewis Gordon’s body of work from the early stages of his activist work. And it is obvious to see, in the exchanges we have witnessed, why Lewis Gordon shines effortlessly. Lewis knows how to break bread with the elders—from Soweto to Dakar, and from the barrios of Colombia to the communes of China. Meeting with Indigenous communities has a regular social, political, and intellectual place in Lewis’ life, especially in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Tasmania, where he has travelled upon invitation, some of which he was most recently not able to take up in person due to the regulations of the Covid19 pandemic. Lewis is no stranger to Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Iran, or Pakistan either: he receives invitations from universities as well as community organizations regularly, including for book signings, such as for his recent book, Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). 6

Introduction

Global scholars, by definition, travel the globe because their work has already reached the location to which they travel. Lewis Gordon has travelled all over the Caribbean as a scholar, to Mexico and Canada and across the United States and in South America: to Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina, meeting with scholars and activists to share in their articulations of the lived experiences of being in the world. In Brazil, in particular, he has been applauded for contributing to ongoing discourses of Black existentialism not only among residents of the Bahia district, but also in major cities where the Black and Indigenous populations of Brazil have shown centuries of resistance to callous colonial cruelties. As editors of this volume, we have tried our best to develop the table of contents as inclusively as possible, with the understanding that an exhaustive compilation would not be possible. We are also confident that the inclusive and historical expansion of the themes of the chapters, as per their written history within each segment, is in tune with the philosophical trajectories of Lewis Gordon’s work and will be warmly received across the globe. Not only have we both seen Lewis Gordon at work within and across many different locations, but we also understand his work to be a political statement of the social justice activism into which his ideas offer insight; this book is, as such, an act of political activism for us as scholars and readers simultaneously. The following segment will reflect on the various chapters of this book.

About the Chapters The Lewis Gordon Reader is organized around two theme-based segments, which stem directly from the work Lewis Gordon has produced over the past three decades. Each theme is introduced here along with reference to the chapters that inform it. The first subsection is titled “Black Existentialism and Africana Philosophy.” This is an apt reflection of where Lewis Gordon began his written work. This segment contains eleven chapters, which range from his early works to some of the most recent. The chapters are “Africana Philosophy,” “Reasoning in Black,” “Race in the Dialectics of Culture,” “Racism as a Form of Bad Faith,” “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,” “Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness,” “Theory in Black,” “Sex, Race and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-Black World,” “Racialization and Human Reality,” “Letter to a Grieving Student,” and “Rockin’ It in Blue.” Chapters 1 and 2 (counted as per the TOC) reveal how Lewis Gordon understands Africana thought as a reflection of the human condition. Gordon traces the philosophical writings of key African scholars, and those that form part of the African diaspora. According to Gordon, the idea of Africana thought takes shape as the establishment of the transatlantic and East Indian slave trades emerge with the sole purpose, in terms of the Atlantic, of the usurpation and conquest of the Americas, and as such, marks the beginning of the Euromodern movement of Africana philosophy. The papers in this segment discuss Africana movements in North American, European, and African philosophy. 7

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

In the chapters 3, 4, and 5, Lewis Gordon argues how anti-black racism and the philosophy of race are crucial perspectives to engage with while talking about Black existentialism, Africana philosophy, and decolonization of knowledge. As scholars putting together this collection, one from South Africa and one from India, we are acutely aware of the construction of race in each of our locations, geographical regions, subcontinents, and continents, the nuances, the overlaps, and the distinct differences between and among the Francophone and Lusophone regions of the African continent, as well as how skin color hierarchies operate to subjugate and perpetuate injustices in the name of caste, both in India and South Africa among communities with high numbers of Indiandescent peoples. It is important to note that we understand the significance of caste, both in India and South Africa, where the largest number of people from Indian descent live. Caste is very much alive and well in South Africa in cities such as Durban with the highest population of Indian descent in the country, with attitudes towards the Dalits people making their appearance in South Africa just as much as known outside of India as within it (Meer 1969; Naidoo 2008; Hansen 2013; Baderoon 2014). This is of course not to suggest that hierarchies of skin color do not exist in other regions of South Africa, or other parts of the world. Histories of racialization in each of our locations is therefore an area of critique in both of our scholarly work, and Lewis Gordon’s immense contribution in this field has also enhanced and furthered our studies in this regard. We are both acutely aware of how conceptions of race and anti-black racism operate within the United Kingdom, other countries of Europe and Asia, in Australia, New Zealand, the Torres Straight Islands, the South Pacific Islands, for example, where Indigenous identities are part of the racialization process that started with the usurpation of native land. Lewis Gordon contends that racism, as part of a series of acts that form a continuum, requires the rejection of another human being’s humanity. Lewis Gordon has on many occasions noted that he prefers to focus on anti-black racism instead of white supremacy because, according to him, anti-black racism could exist without white supremacy. In chapter 3, Lewis Gordon socio-historically traces the etymological origin of the term “race” and how it has evolved across diverse segments of time and space. In this chapter, Gordon also explores the various factors that motivated the European colonizers to dismantle the notion of race as a diverse phenomenon, and distort it as a weapon of spreading White supremacy. In chapter 4, Gordon, from the Afro-Caribbean and Africana perspectives, talks about how racism is a form of bad faith. With regard to racism and bad faith, Gordon in his book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995) notes: “The Sartrean position raises the question of racism as a form of bad faith since it is a form of evasion of human reality” (92). This argument continues and gains a wider epistemological and ontological ground in chapter 5 of this section where Gordon questions the grammar of European colonization by locating and critiquing the various tropes that are being used to justify Whiteness across the globe and what are the various possibilities of decolonizing the colonial grammar. Chapters 6 and 7 show how Lewis Gordon’s work on Black consciousness emerges through his work on Africana existential philosophy, and the social and political philosophy in the United States, and the African continent, mainly. In this segment, we 8

Introduction

see Lewis Gordon trace Black consciousness in the United States, vis-a-vie the Black Panthers, the life and work of Frantz Fanon in France and Algeria, and the life and work of Bantu Stephen Biko. Gordon addresses Biko’s Black consciousness through phenomenology, which points to the formation of meaning as composed and established by consciousness. Black consciousness is, as such, a call to consciousness, in the South African sense, and that place where Fanon reaches within himself and calls out when confronted with a sense of debilitation upon discovering Jean-Paul Sartre’s inaccurate understanding of the work of Black poets in France, the Antilles, and Madagascar, as was revealed by the preface Sartre wrote, “Orphée Noir,” to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésienégre et malgache de langue Française (1948). In these two chapters, Lewis Gordon grapples with the broader, then zooms in on the intricate details, of how the conceptual framework of Black consciousness as a consciousness of politics unfolds, and why it remains important historically as a movement in South Africa, for example. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 argue that gender is a social construction that cuts across all aspects of our lives, and as such it is a cross-cutting critique that moves between and among all disciplines of study. The intertwined dynamics of gender, feminism, and Black existential consciousness is evidenced in a broad range of Lewis Gordon’s work. These three chapters also reflect on the aspects of elitism in universities, maternal ethics, diseases, sufferings, phenomenology, and anti-blackness. Chapter 11 engages with Lewis Gordon’s lived experience, growing up with a father who was a disjokey among musicians as well as being a musician himself has widely influenced his philosophy of music. Being a professional drummer and pianist: music, philosophy, race and existence are inseparable entities for Lewis Gordon. With respect to his social, cultural, religious, historical, and racial positionality, he argues that music, especially blues, jazz, hip-hop, and reggae, reflect upon the pluriversal philosophies of Black existence. He expresses this position not only in a theoretical manner but also through performing them. In order to dismantle the Eurocentric colonial order, it is important to remember, admit, and acknowledge the diverse forms of realities that exist across the globe. This chapter argues that in order to bring the histories and philosophies of blackness and black existence into the practices of real life, it is important to think, do, and breathe music. It is so because music has always functioned as a weapon of cultural assertion and resistance as well as an affirmation of life for Black people across the globe. This gets prominently reflected in contemporary India, South Africa, the United States, and other parts of the world with respect to the use of rap music as a weapon of protest against caste, class, and communal atrocities. The second subsection is titled “Decolonizing Knowledge” and the chapters that have been included in this section are “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Disciplining as a Human Science,” “The Problem of History in African American Theology,” “Rarely Kosher,” “Jews against Liberation,” “Lewis Gordon’s Statement for Jacqueline Walker’s Dossier 2019,” “Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,”“Decolonizing Philosophy,”“A Pedagogical Imperative 9

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge

of Pedagogical Imperatives,” “Justice Otherwise,” “Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life,” and “Labor, Migration and Race.” Through chapters 12 (starts with “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonizing of Knowledge”) and 13, Gordon asks, “What does it means to pursue knowledge?” and he interrogates the Euro-North American-centric methodological and disciplinary levels of knowledge production. He argues that the Eurocentric methods of knowledge encourage individuals not to think, and if individuals must, to think within the restricted corridors of methodological processes where we cannot produce new thought or new ideas. With respect to the question of race, Black existentialism, and expressions of blackness, as interrogated in the previous section, chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 address the issue of theodicy, which always functions as a crucial weapon for European colonizers to globally justify their ethics of whiteness, racism, and patriarchy against the existential practices of those they construct as non-whites. From Christopher Columbus’s “voyages of discovery” to the contemporary narratives of Islamophobia, Christian-centric theodicy has always reigned supreme. Some of the crucial themes that the chapters in this section cover are: the connection between religious and existential phenomenology; the relation between and among religion, scriptures, and the philosophies of secularism and the association of theology and history. It is also important to mention that the papers that have been selected in this section are highly relevant to the socio-religious scenario in contemporary India, South Africa, and the rest of the world. Through distortion, hegemonization, politicization, and exoticization of Hindu-centric beliefs and practices, the phenomenon of theodicy plays a pivotal role in successfully maintaining and executing violent social, cultural, political, and communal structures. Lewis Gordon’s engagements with religious philosophies weaves between and across several philosophies of religion, as well as one of his key areas of expertise—Jewish Studies. As such, this segment also focuses on his work in that field. Being Jewish himself, Lewis has experienced multiple forms of discrimination on a personal and a professional level since childhood. As a result, his understanding of the suffering and the liberation of Jewish people are not only shaped by general collective experiences, the study of the Torah, and a range of religious texts but also through his existential narratives. The papers in this segment forge a clear path in unpacking stereotypes as well as offering historical accounts that in their revelation connect points of convergence. While many are still unaware of the socio-historical existence of Black Jewish people, this segment offers readers much needed insight. These will allow readers to develop a good grasp of religious studies in general and Jewish studies in particular, and its merge with existentialism due to the diverse examples Lewis Gordon brings to his work. The chapters 18 and 19, are underlined with a fundamental question: Does postcolonialism mark the beginning of a socio-historical timeframe after colonialism or is it a continuation of colonialism into neo-colonialism? This question has been addressed through various philosophical dimensions to date: Kwame Nkrumah has analysed this transformation as an extension of the colonial octopus; Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak has redefined the contemporary postcolonial world as a postcolonial neocolonized world; 10

Introduction

Boaventura de Sousa Santos has understood postcolonialism as the replacement of the physical empire by the cognitive empire, etcetera. In a similar fashion, Lewis Gordon, through these two chapters, identify the contemporary era as the “age of disciplinary decadence” in which the colonially structured hierarchies have been re-configured and re-moulded through different knowledge disciplines. The colonial knowledge disciplines are preserved and expanded in the form of social, cultural, political, religious, economic, and academic institutions. Therefore, decolonization and decoloniality are regarded as two important phenomena of counter-resistance against the existing patterns of colonial thinking and doing in the contemporary era. The arguments that Lewis Gordon brings forth in these papers are also highly relatable to the experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality in India, countries of South and central America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand and in several other parts of the world where decolonial movements have been firm and fierce in the past decade. The chapters 20, 21, 22, and 23 engage with how different systems of knowledge across the globe continue to be governed by the Eurocentric ethical, moral, pedagogical, political, and philosophical patterns of thinking and doing. In these chapters, Gordon argues that the European colonial system of slavery not only enslaved the bodies of the people, but also attempted to, and in many cases successfully, enslaved their minds. This is why, in spite of the fact that most of the physical colonial empires have ceased to exist, the metaphysical colonial empires continue. Gordon also argues that the metaphysical empires are preserved by the minds and the bodies that were once enchained by colonization. These aspects show that the Euromodern ethics of colonization have been so firmly ingrained in the psyche of the colonized that it continues to function in a normalised pattern in the contemporary era. As forms of counter-resistance, Gordon proposes alternate forms of epistemic diversities like “pedagogical imperatives” and “ubuntu” among others in these chapters. The final sub-section is titled “Interviews,” and it consists of five interviews. The interviews cover a range of themes like politics, arts, Africana philosophy, intersections between Dalitness and Afro-Blackness, Black existentialism, and decoloniality. This subsection of the book amalgamates different themes in the form of conversations and interviews.

Weaving the Thread With respect to the brief descriptions of the chapters in this volume, Lewis Gordon’s arguments around Africana philosophy and decolonizing knowledge from Black existentialist positionalities remind us of the various transformations, diversities, and empowerments that the planetary decolonial movement has generated on the one side, and also the multiple forms of self-profiting enclaves of territorialization, communalization, racialization, and dehumanization that the paradigm of decolonization has created on the other. The chapters also invite us to think the various possibilities of decolonizing the 11

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systems of knowledge production within our respective geopolitical spaces without getting entrapped in the fallacies of assimilatory discourses. For instance, the works of Lewis Gordon on Africana philosophy may not address the issues of caste hierarchies in India directly, but his arguments about the subjugation of the Africana communities in the United States and other parts of the world deeply aligns with the issues of caste hierarchies in India and South Africa. In fact, socio-historically the Dalit (outcaste Hindu communities) movement in India was widely influenced by the activism of the Blank Panthers in the United States. The Black Panthers also widely influenced the rights and empowerment of the Indian indentured laborers in South Africa, who were mostly Dalits. When Lewis visited India in 2009 as a keynote speaker for one of the conferences organized by the Forum on Contemporary Theory in Kerala, he elaborately reflected on how the philosophies of anti-black racism is socio-historically related to the issues of caste and race in India. During the lecture, he also shared how the phenomena of racism and casteism are intertwined with each other. On a similar note, during his academic visits in South Africa, other parts of Africa, Europe, and Latin America, he talks about how his arguments on Africana philosophy, decolonizing pedagogical systems, Black existentialism, critical race studies, gender, sexuality, and hip-hop music that emerged in the United States connect with localized social, cultural, political and historical practices across diverse geopolitical locations. The purpose of sharing instances from India and South Africa is not to limit the scope of his works within selective geographical spaces, but to unpack how the editors from their respective geographical spaces are able to theoretically and thematically relate to his writings. As editors of this volume, we believe that through these chapters the readers would be able to connect their personal and collective experiences from multiple epistemological and ontological dimensions.

References Baderoon, G. (2014). Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid. Johannesburg: WITS University Press. Datta, S. (2021, May 20). “Trigger Warning: Mentions of Casteist Abuse and Suicide.” The Wire. https://science.thewire.in/education/seema-singh-iit-kharagpur-students-marginalised-castebackgrounds-higher-education-casteism/. Desai, S. and Kulkarni, V. (2008). “Changing Educational Inequalities in India in the Context of Affirmative Action.” Demography, 45, no. 2: 245–270. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. New York: Prometheus Books. Gordon, L.R. (2014). “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge.” Africa Development, 1, 81–92. Gordon, L.R. (2018). “Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life.” Social Alternatives, 37(4), 12–18. Gordon, L.R. (2022). Fear of Black Consciousness. London: Penguin Books. Hansen, T.B. (2013). Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Meer, F. (1969). Portrait of Indian South Africans. New York: Avon House. Naidoo, R. (2008). The Indian in Drum Magazine in the 1950s. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts Publishing. 12

Introduction Rao, P.V. (2021). Beyond Macaulay: Education in India, 1780–1860. London & New York: Routledge. Rukmini, S. (2019, September 10). India’s unequal university system. Live Mint. https://www.livemint. com/news/india/still-too-few-dalits-in-indian-colleges-1568013598781.html. Shobhana, N. (2017, March 23). In the Name of the Nation: Historicizing Caste in Indian Universities. The Companion. https://thecompanion.in/name-nation-historicizing-casteindian-universities.

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PART I BLACK EXISTENTIALISM AND AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY

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CHAPTER 1 A RECENT REFLECTION ON AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY

In An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), the second edition on which I am currently working, I argued that Africana philosophy is a modern philosophy emerging from the emergence of an African diasporic consciousness. This understanding preceded the rise of Euromodern society, since African people, understood as African peoples, were dispersed in various forms across the world from a variety of historical and political events ranging from African exploration and trades to the unfortunate impositions of colonialism and enslavement. Philosophical questions generated from those developments constitute Africana philosophy. I focused on those questions to avoid the pitfalls of an unfortunate fallacy from Euromodern thought—namely, the tendency to deintellectualize thought from the intellectual production of people designated African and Black. This fallacy involves treating African and Black thought as “applied” European thought to the study of African and Black peoples. In my earlier book, Existential Africana (2000), I referred to this phenomenon as “epistemic colonialism” and “epistemic dependency.” To articulate a philosophical understanding of Africana philosophy, including its intellectual history, requires posing the ideas and problems it addresses. Additionally, the fallacy of deintellectualization also involves tendencies to lock African and Black thought in “experience,” with theory being left to white European thinkers. Yet, as white European thinkers built their thought on their experiences, the consequence would be to center not only their thought but also their experiences. Ironically, the reduction of Africana and Black life primarily to experience undermines, when appealing through European thought, the legitimacy of that experience. This fallacy continues, as well, through to the biographical, where the African and Black thinker’s life is of more interest than what that thinker thought. Thus, to articulate Africana philosophy, it became crucial to state a set of problematics that would enable thinkers of any kind to engage the ideas Africana philosophy offers. I argued in the Introduction, that there were at least three central questions generated by the rise of an African diaspora under conditions of the concomitant rise of Euromodern global colonial efforts of enslavement and the epistemic rationalizations they developed. In that work, I focused on three: (1) What does it mean to be human? (2) what does it mean to be liberated and free? And (3) What does it mean to think when reason has been placed in crisis, when processes of justification have been undermined? Instead of focusing on the philosophical menus of thought offered by what has become known as “Western philosophy”—that is, concerns from metaphysics and ontology to epistemology to aesthetics to ethics—I raised the centrality of, correlatively, (a) Philosophical anthropology, (b) Philosophy of freedom, and (c) Metacritiques of Reason. That these concerns were 17

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central came from, again correlatively, (i) dehumanization, (ii) colonialism, enslavement, exploitation, and (iii) the use of “rationality” and “reason” to “justify” (i) and (ii). What happens to justification when justificatory practices go so far astray? Today, I would add the following consideration: (4) redemption. As is well known, given the suffering and carnage wrought from colonialism and enslavement, whether perpetrator or victim, an underlying question that follows is whether such catastrophic events were “worth” having. The familiar rationalizations of offering “civilization” and supposedly better forms of life for all are well known. That they are in bad faith is evidenced not only from the fact that we cannot say what the lives of all would be otherwise—and, of course, this would be especially so if so many had not suffered genocide—but also from the reality of internal critique from, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued there was no justification for enslavement. A more radical version of that critique was independently posed by the Fanti philosopher Ottobah Cugoano in the same century, and he did so with the added rigor of noticing, in his Thought and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1791), the theodicean appeal of redemptive narratives. After all, the ultimate redemption pertains to G-d. How could ultimate divinity tolerate or, worse, even “cause” such misery? The familiar appeals to the infinite wisdom of the divine or the responsible limitations of a weak humanity result in the rationalization of any system that poses itself as an idol. Yet, this appeal continues in various forms. Efforts to demonstrate the ultimate goodness of apparently wicked systems persist, and it is a task of Africana philosophy to unveil those efforts, especially since they require the logical conclusion of African and Black peoples ultimately deserving what was done to us. That it was not only African and Black peoples who were enslaved and racialized in the Euromodern world makes this problem expand from Africana philosophy out to what today is known as Global Southern thought. There are other problems to consider with redemptive narratives. A danger, for instance, is a conservatism in which an appeal to a form of authenticity in which one’s group is ultimately better than others by virtue of having suffered comes into play. It adds to the theodicy a form of triumphalism that avoids a basic insight: the fact of suffering does not entail its legitimacy. Put differently, oppression is not something to nurture; it’s something to get rid of. Africana philosophy, thus, addresses four central concerns that can be identified in the thought of thinkers over the past millennium from parts of Africa through to the global world today. Among them is the insight that there are forms of thought that, paradoxically, undermine thought. Euromodern capitalism, for example, offered its philosophical anthropology in the form of the isolated individual who stands, ontologically, like a god. That individual is grounded in a metaphysics premised on substance—a thing that can be what it is by itself—with a disdain for relations, connections, or forms of reality that it deems epiphenomenal. The real, in other words, is reduced to the ontological understood as substance, thing, or an individually, singular unit. This isolated individual works well for a Protestant view of the self and an eventual consumer-oriented and profiteer-oriented model of life. But existence, which always requires more than being, standing out and not reducible and closed, means that human 18

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life poses ways of living that, by virtue of being meaningful, are other than being. Put plain, in relation to the initial three problematics posed, this means constraining the human to being nonrelational, closing off freedom, and locking reason into a completed rationality. Africana philosophy, in effect, identifies Euromodern colonialism as creating lies about what it means to be human, free, justified, and redeemed. Euromodern colonialism offers a philosophical anthropology that reduces people to things. It proffers liberty—the absence of constraints—over freedom, which is a relational, lived reality of responsibility, sociality, and meaningful belonging. It attempts to constrain reason to instrumental, maximally-consistent rationality. By this, it attempts to cover the insight that a world of closed, law-governed consistency is not a human one, for in that world, one could be rationally consistent to the point of being unreasonable. The logic of being “complete” takes one out of relations and locks one into oneself. It is the erasure of others. At the heart of reasonability is accountability, the realization, in other words, of evidentiality, communicability, and one’s own limitations and incompleteness. Euromodern colonialism, wedded to the logic of closure, is also locked into that of purity and its correlative axiomatic modes of thought. This is one of the reasons that appeals to contraries under the guise of universalism dominate the hegemonic agents of that thought. Where there are universal contraries, there is a binary logic of all versus none. Without mediation, without interaction, the results, in concrete forms, are apartheid, segregated, or colonial societies. The violence needed to maintain separation reveals the flaws: interaction yields contradictions as what are being forced apart are the underlying realities of human beings. Frantz Fanon identified this problem beautifully in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). The title of that great work is often misunderstood as referring to black people wearing white masks. Fanon, however, was addressing the problems of Africana philosophy and, by extension, an indictment on Euromodern thought as follows. The “Black skin” to which the title referred is the logic of sealing black people into what he called “the epidermal schema.” It is to make black people into “things.” The “White masks” to which he refers, however, are the lies of white supremacy. It is the set of lies white people wear or put on to make themselves into idols. It is a lie that places them above humanity when it comes to race. If a group of people are pushed below and another above, where stands human beings? The anticolonial and antiracist struggle is to remind us that the so-called inferior and superior are, in fact, human beings that are neither. Fanon’s efforts revealed many of the important moves of Africana philosophy—for instance, the identification of colonialism even at methodological levels. If a socially produced system of meanings—a process he calls “sociogenesis”—is to maintain dehumanization, it must do so also at methodological levels. This means the methods must be brought into critical reflection. This, I have argued, is a phenomenological insight in which how we go about thinking and acting is brought to consciousness. Fanon radicalizes this critique into metacritique when he points out that when a black moves to Black—to being actively involved in thought—the Black encounters a conflict with unreasonable reason. That is when reason is treated as anathematic to Blacks. Fanon revealed an ironic situation of Africana and Black philosophy—namely, the challenge of having to reason with unreasonable reason 19

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reasonably. This existential aspect of Africana philosophy—the ongoing encounter with irony—is one often overlooked by practitioners of Africana philosophy who attempt to make it, in a word, behave according to the dictates of applied hegemonic philosophy. Fanon’s insight was anticipated by W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper in the United States, Anténor Firmin in Haiti, and Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, among others. There is a form of doubling in Africana philosophy, since the Africana philosopher must simultaneously address conceptions of philosophy imposed upon Africana peoples— versions that make us into “problems”—and those that animate from our critical realization of there being a problem of making people into problems. This critical insight, which Jane Anna Gordon subsequently called, in “Legitimacy from Modernity’s Underside” (2006), “potentiated double consciousness,” brings to the fore a dialectical insight that particularizing the false contraries facilitates potential for action. It is potentiated because of possibility, and that one is evident when a so-called problem people realize they are human beings upon whom problems are imposed. In other words, societies that make people into problems are sick societies. Realizing that one must change those societies makes one, in Fanon’s words, “actional,” and that actionality is a potentiality that is agential. For blacks, it transforms us into Blacks. But that transformation has correlations in all oppressed or dehumanized peoples, since the lie that accompanies their oppression is the supposed absoluteness, intrinsic, and naturalness of their abject station. Rejecting that requires interaction, communication, relations—in a word, involvement in the disclosing of possibilities that are features of human reality. In An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, addressing these issues led to exploring a plethora of thinkers across race, gender, and other lines. It should be borne in mind, however, that not all thinkers designated Africana philosophers think of philosophy and what they do in these ways. Yet, what is striking is that although they may not agree on how to do philosophy, I have yet to encounter any that don’t address in their own way the four problematics I have posed in this reflection. A final, though not exhaustive consideration. Once liberated from a closed double consciousness to a potentiated one, Africana philosophers can explore additional questions. These include examining what it means to be historical and modern. The historical question requires examining the African that preceded the historical forces that created the black and, in response, the Black. This leads to a different understanding of redemption through the possibilities of understanding an African past that is no less than the foundations of what we call “humanity.” The challenge is to do so without the idolatry of exceptionalism. That past is complicated, as well, by the challenges of times in which there were no morphological homo sapiens recognizable as what we know today as “whites.” This is so not only for those on the African continent but also for all homo sapiens across the planet until a mere eight thousand years ago. This critical question pertains, as well, not only to homo sapiens but also the variety of other hominins whose technological and artistic innovations disclosed realities we’ve inherited and now look back to through the lens of concepts open to communicate with, in a word, ancestors. Africana philosophy also raises questions of what it means to move forward. I argue in Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) that this effort requires the 20

A Recent Reflection on Africana Philosophy

decolonization of normative life. This means we shouldn’t be trapped with the set of normative terms or concepts that close off the possibility of different kinds of human beings to come. This is premised on a philosophical anthropology in which human beings are not properly beings but, instead, relationships of ongoing, dynamic, verboriented productions of meaning in which the goal is livable life or, pluralized, livable lives. This requires thinking differently about concepts from technology to art to love and more. It means to understand that human beings live in and through human worlds with the challenge of our contingency. Our reality did not have to exist, but once inaugurated, we produce, and thus not make accidental, what we live. But we should not delude ourselves that we are gods; attuned to not being full of ourselves, we can become actional as conditions of possibilities that simultaneously include and transcend us. As an activity of potentiated double consciousness, Africana philosophy offers a challenge, then, to philosophy. It asks philosophy to take the risk of transcending itself for the sake of reality, which means, also, an acknowledgment of our—humanity’s— relationship to what we cannot trap but what, instead, always transcends us. What is that also but the decolonization of thought in the spirit of and for lives worth living?

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CHAPTER 2 REASONING IN BLACK: AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY UNDER THE WEIGHT OF MISGUIDED REASON

To be black and reasonable should not be a problem. Yet, as many black intellectuals know, their situation makes normative a neurotic confession by the famed comedian Groucho Marx: It demands their rejecting membership in any club that would accept them as members.1 This predicament was studied well by W.E.B. Du Bois. He described it as the problem of being a problem.2 The standard response to the black, which in his day was called “the Negro,” was to treat the black as a problem instead of as a human being who faces problems. By problems, Du Bois meant difficulties occasioned by the world in which one lives. Problems for Du Bois are pragmatic and social. The problematic problems usually are material: one faces solutions that would surmount objective limitations with objective possibilities. Social problems were those in which the limitations and possibilities are societal on the macro, suprastructural level and intersubjective in the sense of human intercommunication and relations building meaningful bases of making decisions. Ordinary people face problems in the form of negotiating their choices with the options available. Where options are limited, their choices are forced inward. Where options are expanded, their choices reach outward without the significance of futility. A problem of being a problem, then, is that one faces a social world that, in effect, takes no responsibility for the options available. Frantz Fanon, the philosopher and psychiatrist who participated in the Algerian revolutionary struggle of the mid through late 1950s, put it this way: Overcoming being a problem requires becoming actional.3 Yet action without reason is, as is well known, blind. And to be such challenges the integrity of action as action itself. The question of reflection, then, of thought and reason behind deed becomes a consideration with which so-called problem people must contend. The path to traverse is, however, treacherous. As Fanon observed, reason had a nasty habit of evacuating the scene when he, representing the black, enters. Standards shift. Shuffling emerges. The setting loses its normality. In his words: “The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. I would say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.”4 In his own case, his being a psychiatrist and a philosopher made him a representative of science and reason with outstretched arms of a black body. The presupposition of illegitimacy, that science and reason were more at home in a white body than a black one, placed Fanon in an unreasonable situation: to engage in the life of the mind at the peril of his own flesh. But since that would mean leaving his self and the representing blackness he embodied behind when he enters the room of reason, he, as the black, faces the problem of establishing a relationship with 23

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reason. If reason continues to refuse him, he faces the contradictions of reason being, in a word, unreasonable. If he attempts to force reason’s submission, he will be subordinating reason, which would make him, in effect, unreasonable. He faces, then, the task of struggling with reason reasonably. The paradoxes of such struggles with reason are manifold. Among them is the added reflection of what occasions the struggle in the first place. The black is, after all, a being that has not always existed. That the black tends to be associated with Africans today is an additional anomaly. The ancestors of people who today we call Africans had no reason to think of themselves as either African or black prior to the emergence of a series of historical events that fell upon them as if out of the sky. These same events occasioned the people who today think of themselves as European and white. Although people noticed human differences from the moment such differences emerged, which, at least among Homo sapiens, is about 8,500 years ago, the meaning of those differences were not what we take them for today.5 Part of the difficulty for us is that we cannot understand what those ancient ancestors actually saw as difference. To perceive requires more than stimulated senses. It requires also the organization of signs and symbols that make objects meaningful. Thus, seeing something as dark, light, or in-between requires a point of reference from which to see it as anything at all. The same applies to spatial perceptions and locations. Place for our ancestors was much different than it is for us, and the organizing scheme through which we think of meeting each other from continents and islands is very different from their often horizon-governed concepts of places that are the beginning and the end of the world. The notion of ancient Africans and ancient blacks is, then, a projection onto the past. Yet it is one with much truth, since those of us who are African and black are descended from people whom we would call such today although those ancestors had no reason to recognize themselves as such and would not know what we are talking about with such ascriptions. Referring to them as a person from Kmt/Egypt, Nubia, Minoa, Thrace, and so forth may make more sense at least for those people in the Mediterranean regions of 1000 BCE. Yet the mediations that led to our designations of Africans, Europeans; blacks and whites did emerge in a way that makes our organizing anthropology partly a function of theirs, and that concept is, of course, race. The word “race” has etymological roots in Andalusia, the name of the Muslim colonial regions of the Iberian Peninsula, in the term raza, which referred to breeds of dogs and horses and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews.6 As Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews (many of whom were determined by fourth century Roman edicts limiting Jewish proselytizing and intermixing), represented a deviation from Christian normativity. The defeat of the Moors in Grenada in 1492 was followed by the Inquisition to assess the Christian authenticity of the remaining converted populations, a process which led to demands for demonstrations of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) best exemplified by individuals whose origins were “purely” Christian. The notion of purity here emerged from theological naturalism, where the natural was determined by its alignment with theological dogma. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological center, Moors and Jews stood as prototypical 24

Reasoning in Black

formulations of the anthropology that took a path through razza (Italian) to the modern term race, as used by François Bernier in his 1684 account, A New Division of the Earth. The initial period of the expansion of Christendom in the late fifteenth century, occasioned by Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas in October 1492, had led to Christian encounters with populations of people who were neither Moor nor Jew, although there were efforts to interpret them in such terms since after surmising that they were not Indian Muslims of the East, Columbus had thought that the people he encountered on those islands were the Lost Tribe of Israel.7 As subsequent conquest moved westward, which they thought was in effect reaching the East, the absence of expected mosques and synagogues challenged their presumptions. The enslavement and near genocide of the Native populations of the Americas that followed and Bartolomé Las Casas’s efforts to save them through appeals to the Papal authority and his famous debate with Gines de Sepúlveda on the status and suitability of the Native populations for slavery led to the Atlantic Slave Trade and increased encounters between light Christian populations and those who were neither Christian, Jewish, nor Muslim but certainly dark. The emerging secular explanations that developed by the end of the sixteenth century were in no small terms a consequence of meeting people; animals; and fauna not accounted for in the Bible, in addition to the changing worldviews from the emerging new science inaugurated by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon, to name a few. This new science demanded explanations, as Ernst Cassirer observed in An Essay on Man, without theological causality.8 The search for causation appealed within the human organism as part of a nexus rooted in nature itself. Of interest in the history of naturalistic accounts of race in this regard was the work of Carolus Linnaeus and that of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) offered a classificatory system, premised upon hierarchies of being, sometimes referred to as “the great chain of Being,” which serves as the basis of classifying living things to this day. Blumenbach, however, devoted his classification interests to divisions within the human species, racial divisions, correlated with the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, as these races tend to be known today, including the term “Caucasians,” which he coined, ironically with reference to a group of people who are not considered white enough today, to refer to Europeans.9 In all, by now the portrait of the organizing schema is evident. Although Africans as an ascription of people from the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea downward was used in the Middle Ages, the African as black emerged in the modern world, and with that the logic of the difference from those who designated the black as such and the correlated, continental difference of European and white. The move from Christendom and the land of heathens resulted in those of Europeans and whites versus the African and the blacks, and then the Indians and the Asiatics.10 Along the way, many of the South Pacific Peoples and those in the islands of the Indian Ocean were also brought into the schema, although with a separation of black from African.11 Thus we have the emergence of the black, a being mostly associated with the African but not necessarily such since also associated with, for example, the Australian Aboriginal.12 And there is the African, which mostly means the black, although by the fifteenth century fall of the Moors there were many descendants from the northern other side of the 25

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Mediterranean, whether by slavery or earlier Greek and Roman colonial rule, whose identity became African but certainly not black.13 These developments offered, as well, practices of justification and legitimation with their own naturalism culminating in what we could call modern naturalistic anthropology. The black thus faces an ironic existential situation, one that stimulates a peculiar melancholia. Black people are aliens of the world, the only world, to which they could belong. The paradox, in other words, is of not belonging where one belongs. That this is a neurotic situation is evident, but more, it raises additional problems of subject formation. For it produces that which wishes to have been produced otherwise. Melancholia, as I am using it here, refers to a subject-constituting attachment to a loss.14 For the black, born of the modern world, there is the formation of the self through foreclosed loss. Put differently, to be black in the modern world is to be a being who has never had something to which one feels entitled, namely, what it is to belong in an ordinary way of belonging. Exacerbating the situation is that the absence of that belonging renders even the feeling of entitlement illegitimate. It pushes the black into the realm of what Fanon aptly described as the zone of nonbeing. Elsewhere, Jane Anna Gordon and I have argued that the radicality of this zone is such that blacks become the quintessence of being manqué.15 What this means is not only the ascription of illegitimacy of black participation in the nonblack world, but also the failure of black effectiveness in the black world. Blacks, in other words, also fail at being black. To love the self, then, the black must learn to love those who do not belong and always fail, those who would become members of a club that would accept those who the modern world has deemed should not be accepted into the fraternity of human being. It is no wonder that the world of study for blacks took the iconoclastic trope of Caliban with the string of apparently contradictory motifs of Caliban studies or, as in the formulation of Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason. The question of Caliban’s Reason, of Reason in Black, as it were, demands interrogation of the anthropology by which it is meaningful as contradictory at worst and ironic at best. The emergent modern anthropology had with it a normative structure in which the black was positioned, at best, as an object of study but certainly not the agents of intellectual work. This is not to say that there were no people who were considered African and black who did not take charge of anthropological reflection. Exemplars include Wilhelm Amo in Germany in the eighteenth century and Anténor Firmin in the nineteenth.16 It is to say that what they faced—Amo’s eventually being forced out of the German academy and Europe itself to an outpost in Ghana because of antiblack deligitimation of his writings due to their authorship, namely, the labors of a black professor, and Firmin’s being ignored in spite of producing theoretical anthropological and historical anthropological work that presaged Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault—affirmed the problematic thesis that thinking, theorizing, and study require a white body through which to decode the epistemic status of black ones.17 The lived-reality of having to engage reason reasonably leads to problems of double consciousness.18 On one hand, the black intellectual must be aware of the impositions that make “black” and “intellectual” treated as an oxymoronic conjunction. This is the 26

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form of double consciousness in which one sees oneself through the eyes of hostile others. There is, however, another type of double consciousness where the contradictions of those impositions—that black intellectuals use reason to deal with such unreason— are expansions of realization, consciousness, and outward-directed inquiry. Whereas the former makes the black subject reject her or his existence by rendering the self intrinsically invalid through an inward-directed problematizing of the self through a presumed legitimacy of the system from which the self is expelled or in conflict, the latter challenges the legitimacy of the system. This challenge through the exploration of contradictions is dialectical and, in Paget Henry’s words, “potentiated.”19 Henry’s term has dual meanings as we think of its connection to potential and potency. It is empowering through the expansion of possibility. At this point, we may ask about the significance of this discussion for the theme of black European intellectual history, which occasioned the book for which these reflections were written. I hope it is clear by now that among the conjunctions that occasion these melancholic and phenomenological reflections is not only the black and reason but also the words “black” and “intellectual.” Similar problems are also occasioned by the words “black” and “history.” In one sense, a black European should be no more of an issue than determining either black people who were born in Europe or those who have migrated there and become culturally European. It is where “European” and “intellectual” are mediated by presuppositions of whiteness that “black European intellectual” falls into jeopardy. For the rest of this chapter, I will explore these concerns of black European intellectual history through discussion of some issues I faced in my effort to articulate the past millennium of Africana or African Diasporic work in what is considered the intellectual discipline par excellence, the discipline that is, as Karl Jaspers once reflected, a long “hymn on reason”: philosophy.20 I have always been struck by interpretations of the term “introduction” when the texts and fields in question study black people. In philosophy, especially when the context is work in the United States, the expectation is for a “beginners” text with summaries of arguments. By comparison, when Hegel wrote his introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit, Bertrand Russell his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and Edmund Husserl his Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, their European audiences knew that they were not receiving beginners guides but the introduction or, better, the introducing of an area of research in philosophical terms. It is with such models in mind that I had taken to writing An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Although “Africana philosophy” has been a formal subject of discussion in the academy since Lucius T. Outlaw discussed it as a preferred formulation in his article “African, African-American, Africana Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Forum in 1993, the field points to an intellectual history that precedes that development by more than 1000 years, and a good portion of that history is intertwined with European history and the presence of black thinkers there.21 Why and how this is so was what I aimed to show. Africana philosophy refers to an area of philosophy that grew out of intellectual challenges, ideas, posed by the African Diaspora in the modern world. Although it grew out of what was at times called “black philosophy,” my earlier discussion should make it 27

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clear that although “African” and “black” converge, they are also distinct. Africana philosophy includes blackness, but it also addresses other problems raised by the intellectual practices, sometimes characterized as colonizing epistemic practices, that led to the emergence of African Diasporic people. I will, however, focus here on the converging motif of Africana and black since the problem of intellectual history, especially black European intellectual history, is located there. A mistaken view of Africana philosophy and black thought is that they are parasitic of Western philosophy, and that they are so in a way that limits their legitimacy as areas of thought. This is one of the idols that must be broken in an effort to articulate such an intellectual history—namely, the tendency to de-intellectualize Africana and black intellectual history. Among the de-intellectualizing practices is the misconception often alluded to, although not intended, by the phrase “philosophy and the black experience” or “philosophy and the Africana experience.” This formulation is from a longstanding assumption that Africana and black peoples bring experience to a world whose understanding finds theoretical grounding in European, often read as “white,” thought. I mention this to stress the importance of studying Africana philosophy as a constellation of ideas. When faced with the task of introducing this field, the problem of articulating it as an intellectual endeavor is crucial. It distinguishes the project of the intellectual historian in this field than in the white normative disciplines, for the legitimacy of those areas of study as intellectual enterprises is often presumed, whereas the Africana and black-oriented fields, which, along with theoretical work in ethnic studies and women’s studies is characterized by Nelson Maldonado-Torres as “the decolonial sciences” and by Kenneth Knies as “the post-European sciences,” face constant challenges to their legitimacy. 22 To understand the difficulty of formulating Africana philosophy as an intellectual project, then, we must take into account the philosophical anthropology outlined earlier, with its transition from a theological naturalism to a secular, modern scientific one. An ongoing legacy of this period is the category of people who live in the modern world as creatures outside of the properly human domain. To examine Africana philosophy and black thought as intellectual enterprises requires exploration of the conceptual tools offered by works in the field and the unique problems they formulated and addressed. Among those problems, I have argued, is the meaning of being human in the modern world. Such a task is challenged by the context of its exploration, namely, the impositions of colonialism and racism as leitmotifs of enlightenment and reason. Those hurdles bring Du Bois’s observation of black people’s problems falling sway to black people as problems themselves.23 This impediment, as we have seen as well with Fanon’s reflections, was a function of such people not really being considered people in the first place. Since real people are subjects of history, the problem of intellectual history is expanded to asking: How does one offer a history of those or that which is presumed to be “ahistorical”? Du Bois’s response, as we have seen, was to present a two-tiered argument on the double standards faced by those whose research avows the humanity of black people. Recall that the first was to recognize the general presumptions projected onto such 28

Reasoning in Black

people. The second, which we have identified as potentiated double consciousness, is for intellectual history the more important since it involves recognizing the contradictions and falsehoods of such misguided impositions. That latter, dialectical movement expands the researcher’s understanding of the overall societal context by particularizing it and revealing its pretentions of achieving universal truth. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois expands this discussion into the problem of historiographical portraits of freedom in a world without guarantees of progressive movement.24 The idea of freedom, in other words, exceeds its material realization, and this expectation collapses back onto the interpretation of events with the mark, whether as success or failure, of their historicity. Du Bois, in effect, raised the question of history in the lives of black people in a way that acknowledged and respected the lived-reality of black people and their symbiotic relationship to historical movement. The suppression of freedom in history is, in other words, the repression of black people, especially given the unique relationship black people have to extreme servitude, the radicalized implication of alienated labor, in the modern world: slavery. In addition to the historicity of African Diasporic and black peoples, this dialectical argument of uncovering contradictions also applies to their intellectual life. It calls for examining the value of ideas relevant to the plight of such people, and in doing so, reveal what Enrique Dussel has described as modernity and humanity’s “underside,” those repressed and suppressed layers of human existence that offer a more complex, nuanced, and mature portrait of the human condition than the sterilized claims of normative whiteness.25 The task of avoiding the pitfall of treating Africana and black intellectual history as neither intellectual nor historical requires exploring Africana and black philosophy (and related modes of thought) through at least three themes: (1) philosophical anthropology, (2) philosophy of freedom and liberation, and (3) metacritical reflection on reason. Philosophical anthropology examines what it means to be human. Unlike empirical anthropology, which presupposes the legitimacy of the human sciences, including their methodologies, philosophical anthropology challenges the methods themselves and the presuppositions of the human offered by each society, and by doing so, offers the transition from method to methodology and methodological critique. That area of research makes sense for Africana and black philosophy from the fact of the challenged humanity of Africana and black people in the modern world. Since many Africana peoples are also black people, and since many black people were enslaved in the modern world, the main thesis of antiblack racism and enslavement support this turn, for the essence of antiblack racism is the claim that black people are not fully human beings, if human at all. That enslavement involves making human beings into property calls for a response in philosophical anthropology as the theoretical contribution to the ongoing material struggle for freedom. Developing a philosophy of freedom and liberation is a sensible intellectual response to racism and colonialism, so I will not belabor the second point except to add this. Any theory of freedom must bring along with it more than the unshackling of material chains or the fostering of civil liberties. Recall our discussion about the profound alienation of 29

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nonbelonging in the only world to which one could possibly belong. The assault on the spirit that constitutes the degradation of freedom in the modern world is marked by a profound homelessness. That aforementioned nonbelonging connects to the insight of what could be called the exilic consciousness. Exiles, although liberated from immediate persecution, often suffer from the experience of not being free precisely because they are guests of their host countries. As such, their freedom is limited by the ethics of not being in their own home. They lack what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia (fearless speech), by which is here meant the ability to reveal themselves not only in the language of nakedness but also entitled revelation. It is, in other words, not simply the ability to speak but also having the right, if we may use that modern terminology, to speak and to be who and what they are. Africana and black people lack that status in the modern world.26 There is, as well, the problem of how reason is used to justify arguments in philosophical anthropology and our discourses of freedom. For example, simply asserting the equality of blacks to whites and demanding recognition of that exemplifies failure by virtue of affirming whites as the initial standard of human assessment. That whiteness was predicated on racism should jeopardize its legitimacy as a standard. It is, in other words, at least in moral terms, a low and regrettable measure of humanity. The problem cannot be transformed, however, simply by making blacks the standard, especially since that history was not granted the opportunity to be interrogated on terms beyond conditions of white supremacy and antiblack racism. The task, then, is to raise the standard of humanity by going through and beyond black, white, brown, yellow, and red to the conditions of standards themselves. Standards of the human, it soon becomes evident, are open and incomplete by virtue of depending for their creation on those whom they are supposed to evaluate. The human, in other words, is humanity’s project, and we see that in the everexpanding reach of culture as a condition of possibility of the materially human. Metacritical reflection on reason is a major aspect of Africana and black philosophy, and the intellectual history of the subject should engage that. This is evident not only with the problem of justifying our philosophical anthropology and discourses of freedom, but also on a recurring question posed to every Africana and black philosopher, especially by postmodernists: Given the abusive use of reason by many great philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, Hegel, and many recent stalwart figures, against black people, why bother with such a discipline for the expansion of freedom and liberation?27 Fanon, as we have seen, lamented that reason played cat and mouse with him and had a habit of taking flight whenever he entered the white intellectual world. Philosophy’s love affair with reason suggests that black people do not stand a chance when even it flees blackness. Yet Fanon’s response to unreasonable reason was not to force reason to become reasonable, which would be unreasonable or, as continues often to be the perception toward blacks who attempt to do such, violent, but instead to reason with reason.28 Many Africana and black philosophers, and by extension, intellectuals, exemplify Fanon’s situation over the ages. It is a task that is not taken on exclusively by Africana and black philosophers and thinkers, but it is one that presses upon them in a unique way. All philosophers use reason, but only some face the situation of having to reason with reason. 30

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I took up this task, of reasoning with reason in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy as I examined this Promethean struggle throughout the past millennium. The story I wrote is of many communities—tenth-century Moors developing arguments for a separation of mosque and sultan and determining their relationship to ideas from antiquity, especially through their efforts to reconcile the thought of Aristotle with Islam; sixteenth-century Catholic priests arguing over who has membership in the human community and the subsequent struggles for freedom in the conflicts between spiritual and materialist utopias; Wilhelm Amo, who argued for the equality of the Moors of Europe, challenged Cartesian philosophical anthropology, and who wrote a text on proper reasoning at the University of Halle in the eighteenth century; nineteenth-century work on philosophy of civilization and problems of human study occasioned by the founding of the Negro Academy under the leadership of the Cambridge educated Alexander Crummell; twentieth-century intellectual movements ranging from the emergence of Négritude in France, prophetic pragmatism and Africana analytical philosophy in North America and Britain, to Africana existential phenomenology in France, South Africa (among other African countries), and the United States; and, going full circle back to Africa, raising the problem of decolonized reason in a contemporary world of increasingly, supposedly deracialized states but heavily racist and unequal civil societies. Such an effort is, of course, part of a larger story of recovery and constructing alternative models of intellectual life. The latter are the building blocks by which new ideas and lived relations can be formed and latent, and often invisible, ones can appear. In the meeting place of Africa and Europe on one hand and the black with history and ideas on the other, the devotion of such energy is no less than part of what is proverbially to be done.

Notes 1. Groucho Marx, Goucho Marx and Me (New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), p. 321. 2. See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science XI (January 1898): 1–23. Reprinted in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (March 2000): 13–27. See also his discussion in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). 3. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove, 1967). 4. Ibid, p. 118. 5. This is standard stuff in anthropology of human morphological difference. For discussion, see Charles Finch, III, Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden (Decatur, GA: Khenti, Inc., 1991). More recently, see, e.g., Olivia Godhill, “How Europeans Became Tall and Fair-Skinned 8,500 Years Ago,” Quartz, November 28, 2015. 6. See, e.g., Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco, Tesoro de la lengua (1611), quoted, translated and discussed in David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle ages: The Case of Spain and the Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the

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Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 7. See Columbus’s diary. For discussion, see also Edith Bruten, The Black Jews of Africa (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). 8. See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 9. In addition to Paul Taylor’s Race: A Philosophical Introduction, see also the work of Madina Tlostanova, e.g., “The Janus-Faced Empire Distorting Orientalist Discourses: Gender, Race and Religion in the Russian/(Post)Soviet Constructions of the ‘Orient,’ ” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: A Web Dossier 2, dossier 2 (2008): www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/ dossiers/1.3/. . ./TlostanovaWKO2.2_000.pdf, and “How ‘Caucasians’ became ‘Black’: Circassians, Modernity and the Emancipation Discourses” in this volume (Trajectories for Emancipation and Black European Thinkers, ed. by Artwell Cain and Kwame Nimako). 10. See, e.g., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Michelle Harris, Martin Nakata, and Bronwyn Carlson, eds.,The Politics of Identity: Emerging Indigeneity (Sydney, Australia: UTSePress, 2013; and Julia Suàrez-Krabbe, Race, Rights and Rebels: Alternatives beyond Human Rights and Development (London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015). 11. Cf. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expand. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) and, more recently, Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2022; London: Penguin Books, 2022), chapters 3 and 4. 12. See, e.g., The Politics of Identity: Emerging Indigeneity, eds. Michelle Harris, Martin Nakata, and Bronwyn Carlson. 13. See Golden Age of the Moor, ed. Ivan Van Sertima (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992). 14. For a similar view, see Maurice Natanson, “From Apprehension to Decay: Robert Burton’s ‘Equivocations of Melancholy,’ ” The Gettysburg Review 2 (1989); Judith Butler, “Thresholds of Melancholy,” in Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, ed. by Steven Galt Crowell (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995); and Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 15. See Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), chapter 4. 16. For a short biography of Amo and his thought, see Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, chapter 3. 17. See Anténor Firmin, Equality of Human Races: A Nineteenth Century Haitian Scholar’s Response to European Racialism, trans. Asselin Charles, with an introduction by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (New York: Garland Publishers, 2000); and for discussion, see An Introduction to Aficana Philosophy, chapter 3. 18. See, of course, the classic formulation in W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. For discussion, see Ernest Allen, Jr., “On the Reading of Riddles: Rethinking Du Boisian ‘Double Consciousness,’ ” in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Exiswtential Philosophy, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 49–68 , and Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4. 19. See Paget Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” The C.L.R. James Journal 11, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 79–112; cf. Gordon, Existentia Africana, chapter 4. 32

Reasoning in Black 20. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 60. 21. This articles is reprinted in Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). 22. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 240–270, and Kenneth Knies, “The Idea of Post-European Sciences: An Essay on Phenomenology and Africana Studies,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 85–106. 23. See The Souls of Black Folk and Gordon, Existentia Africana, chapter 4: “What Does It Mean To Be a Problem?” 24. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992). For a discussion of his critique of historiography, see Susan Searls Giroux, “Reconstructing the Future: Du Bois, Racial Pedagogy and the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Social Identities 9, no. 4 (2003): 563–598. 25. See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. and ed. by Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 26. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, trans., ed. Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles: Simiotext(e)/ MIT Press, 2001. 27. For discussion of this problem in European continental philosophy, see Reid [Jerry] Miller, “A Lesson in Moral Spectatorship,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 706–728. 28. For discussion of Fanon’s treatment of this problem, see Lewis R. Gordon, “When I Was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night,” Performance Research 2, no. 3 (September 2007): 8–15.

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CHAPTER 3 RACE IN THE DIALECTICS OF CULTURE

The comedian Gabe Kaplan once recounted the following story from his childhood in a predominantly European Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York. The adults in his apartment building were kvetching (the Yiddish equivalent of griping) that schvartzes (the Yiddish equivalent of “niggers”) were moving in. “The schvartzes are coming! The schvartzes are coming!” they exclaimed. As they lamented the expected indignities and violence that could fall upon them, the young Kaplan became terrified. On the day in which the dreaded schvartzes were to arrive, he ran to his closet, armoured himself with his football helmet, padding, and a baseball bat, and hurried to the front of his building, where he saw a black couple approaching. Concerned, he ran up to them and ushered them into the building, shouting, “Quick, get inside, the schvartzes are coming!” There was a clear disconnection between the young Kaplan and the adults around him, although that wasn’t necessarily the case for many of his peers. His point, however, is well taken: the process of racial demonization is such that the objects of racial hatred, or perhaps better for some, fears, are hardly recognizable in the flesh. The idea of a race, when governed by racist investments, is difficult to comport with reality, unless, of course, ways of perceiving reality are themselves so affected by the force of our beliefs to the point of making us, as Kierkegaard might say, unable to see what we see.1 A feature of racism that makes it difficult for many of us to see what we see is that racism and its accompanying anthropology of race are among the more embarrassing and persisting concepts of modern thought. That racism is a bad thing is now nearly universally accepted, and many of the correlated presuppositions about race and racial difference have received their fair share of criticism to the point of its being difficult even to discuss the viability of race in most academic settings. A near-ritual of disavowal becomes necessary before the exploration of the concept at all, which suggests a neurotic atmosphere of avowed disavowal as, perversely, a condition of avowal. To talk about race, in other words, one is obligated in advance to assure disqualification of its legitimacy. For those of us who teach courses on the study of race and racism, this has led to strange situations in which students often perform what they think is expected of them, and that often involves demonstration of an appearance of thought instead of thinking. They thus often assert, without reflection, the well-known conclusion: race is a social construction. When I hear this, I often ask the students, “Do you believe that?” I have asked that question at universities and colleges across the globe. The students are often taken aback, since I have yet to meet any who have been asked such a question before. Although some stick to their claim, most students actually reflect for a moment and, as they think about it, they often admit, reluctantly, that they don’t. In truth, more people believe that race is not socially constructed, although many of them do not take 35

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the view that the reality of race, or at least belief in its reality, entails a commitment to racism. They simply see a challenge to their commitment to reality. What are critical race theorists doing, then, when our efforts produce a circumstance in which our students—and perhaps by extension also our readers—are led to avow what they do not believe? And, more pressing from a phenomenological point of view, what if that avowal takes the form of believing what they do not believe, of avowing what they disavow and disavowing what they avow, of, in other words, bad faith?2 Quite a bit of recent race theory focuses on the social constructivity of race.3 Racism, as a social process of discriminating against or in favour of groups on the basis of race, points to how values affect social phenomena. Among the effects of racism, social constructivists argue, is the production of race. Thus, if racism is social, race must be a consequence of social reality. Some critics might lay claim to individual racist beliefs as independent of the social, but the racial constructivist quickly points out that no belief can be meaningful without language, which is a social phenomenon, so even at the level of seemingly individual belief is the mediated role of society. This observation holds within it a particular ontological position, namely, the importance of meaning over being. Since to mean something outside of a discourse is meaningless, then what something is beyond the discursive is also meaningless. Examining race and racism without racial and racist discourses becomes, then, a contradiction of terms. Accepting the discursive entails, however, moving into the examination of how the social world produces meaning, and the focus then becomes the richest manifestation of what it means (and is) to live in a human world, namely, culture. From social constructivity, the argument quickly moves to the cultural production of race and, as characterized well by David Theo Goldberg in his book bearing that name, racist culture.4 The notion of racist culture carries with it the notion of race itself as cultural along with the presupposition that there are non-racist cultures. Yet culture itself is not the way many communities see, or at least saw, themselves before unique developments from the mideighteenth century onward emerged regarding the organization of human ways of life.5 Although each community of human beings has always been aware of others who live differently, the cultural designation, even if independent of the racial one, was certainly concomitant with the latter’s emergence. By the nineteenth century, these considerations took the form of a fervent debate in an area of thought known as philosophy of civilization.6 There, drawing upon Darwin, there was obsession at first over the meeting of biology and the social world in notions of the biologically superior producing the culturally superior. This, in the usual circular fashion, led to the demonstration of cultural superiority bringing biological superiority back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door. Thus, critics of notions of white supremacy, such as Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, attempted either to provide evidence for cultural hybrids demonstrating biological superiority (for Crummell, Anglo-Saxon cultural adaptation by the “Negro”), or to show cultural genius as the basis of biological preservation (for example, Du Bois’s discussion of Negro spirituals and epistemic location as justification for continued Negro existence).7 Eventually, as the biological underpinnings of race began to lose force, the cultural assertion seems to have cut its umbilical cord, and began to circulate as a signifier 36

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on its own terms in the realm of racial ideas, to the point of dominating the discussion of race and racism from the late twentieth century into the early years of the twenty-first. Why, then, as talk about culture dominates, to the point of racism being ascribed to views about religious groups (e.g., Muslims) and ethnic groups (e.g., Mexican-Americans), do many subscribe to race as cultural in theory but not in practice, not, that is, as a lived reality?8 The constructivity of race could benefit much from the clarification of culture in philosophical terms. Perhaps such an addition would enable more people to mean what they say, and believe what they mean, when they refer to the constructivity of race and, in so doing, also its reality.

That which Lurks beneath Culture To some extent, a process of obfuscation and distancing seems to be a cause of the dissociation between avowed belief and actual belief. Instead of clarifying the logic of racial and racist discourses, some of us, including the most influential among us, seem to have made it more mystifying. This is clearly Bernard Boxill’s view of Du Bois’s position and its legacy, as he relates in a strikingly sober discussion of race that goes against the grain of the formulations dominant in recent philosophy across the analytical, continental, critical-theoretical, and pragmatist divides: In opposition to Du Bois’s cultural definition of race, I propose a physical definition of race. This definition is, for reasons which will presently emerge, the racist’s definition. Individual differences in culture are supremely irrelevant to the way in which the racist classifies people into races. A man with blue eyes and blond hair who loves chitlins and jazz is still a white man, though perhaps a depraved one. A man with black skin and nappy hair who loves Shakespeare and ballet is still a black man, though certainly one who needs putting in his place. And when the black who “passes” is unmasked, it is not because he reveals a secret weakness for chitlins, but because it is revealed that he has black-skinned ancestors. The racist, we observe, takes a race to be a group of people distinguished either by their physical appearance or biology, or else descended from such a group of people, and since I have adopted their conception, I propose that, insofar as black people are a race, they are people who either themselves look black—that is, have a certain kind of physical appearance—or are, at least in part, descended from such a people.9 He adds, addressing a theme that has received much attack over the past few decades: This definition of race better supports the idea of black pride and autonomy than the cultural definition and is more useful for an understanding of racism. Consider black pride. If to be black one must share in a particular culture, how can people who have black skins or black ancestors but who do not share in that culture have black pride? The cultural definition of race is evasive. When the racist tells black 37

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people that they can accomplish nothing because of their race, he is not telling them that they cannot accomplish anything because of their culture. He is telling them that they can accomplish nothing because of their biological being. For racism is based predominantly on biology. Of course, it also maintains that black culture is degenerate. Thus, to rebut racism’s lie, to confront it directly, we must use words the way it uses words; we cannot use “race” to mean a cultural group. We must use “race,” as racism uses it, to mean a group defined biologically. Only in this way can “race pride” mean “black pride” for all the victims of racism.10 Boxill here gets at the heart of what many who believe in racial difference actually believe. They can observe that members of the same race can belong to different cultures, and also that members of the same cultures can belong to different races. There are black Americans and black Europeans. And there are white Mexicans and black Mexicans. They also know that people could hate the race connected to cultural activity they love. There are many white anti-black racists who love rock’n’roll, jazz and hip hop. But more, there are people who understand who they are in racial terms even while despising their connection to a shared culture and even a shared race. There are whites, for instance, who see themselves as white although they don’t like white people and the cultures associated with whiteness. When referring to themselves as white, they do not mean their mode of behaviour. They mean their biological lineage. For them to say that they are white only by virtue of construction, then, requires them ultimately not to say what they mean.11 We arrive, then, at a discourse that is saturated with bad faith. By bad faith, I mean the forms of self-deception that lead, among other things, to believing what one does not believe. One way of achieving this is by the construction of labyrinthine discursive devices, that is, by creating such a great distance between one belief and another, between one social practice and another, that more pleasing conceptions of reality can be maintained.12 The hope is that complexity, for instance, would slacken the force of an otherwise recalcitrant reality. This is not to say that there aren’t details that could not be illuminated by the resources of sophisticated analysis. What it means to understand reality in terms of one’s common sense has its own limitations, as Gramsci observed in his concept of critical reflection, and it is the role of philosophers and other kinds of theorists to bring the understanding of reality offered by their theories to bear on its parts.13 Among such are considerations of philosophical anthropology, wherein the theoretical conception of the human being often collides with how human beings actually live. The tension there is paradoxical, however, as in an effort to “discover” or “disclose” the human being, the theorist also expands, and at times even creates, the version at hand.14 Theorizing theory, or thinking through thought on thought, then, becomes also a consideration in race theory, where theory must comport with a reality that it also affects.15 Among the instances of theory affecting reality is the problem of defining the subject. How people understand race determines how racial reality is practised. Boxill, for instance, offers two understandings of race in his critique of the cultural theory. The first emerges through racism and is an understanding of how the racist defines race. The other is an understanding of how those who are subject to racism come to see themselves 38

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in relation to each other. Both hinge upon a historical-physicalist conception of race, one that is rooted in an understanding of the body as more than a corporeal entity. The body is also, after all, a biographical entity, a being with a history linked through biological processes of birth to other bodies spanning many generations, which makes it mysterious that so many discussions of embodiment seem to treat bodies as if they were not born from other bodies.16 History without generations giving biological birth to other generations would be as the words of gods. The body is also what enables a perspective on and of reality by which a “here” could emerge that enables the emergence of anywhere that could count as a “there”.17 It is what also enables the formulation of the self and others, and of what it means to correlate shared and diverging narratives. Yet trouble is on the horizon, if we take to heart the following observation by Jean-Paul Sartre early on in his Critique of Dialectical Reason: Language is ambiguous in that words sometimes designate objects and sometimes concepts; and this is why materialism as such is not opposed to idealism. In fact, there is a materialist idealism which, in the last analysis, is merely a discourse on the idea of matter; the real opposite of this is realist materialism—the thought of an individual who is situated in the world, penetrated by every cosmic force, and treating the material universe as something which gradually reveals itself through a “situated” praxis.18 Sartre returns to this observation more succinctly a little later: “Being is the negation of knowledge, and knowledge draws its being from the negation of being.”19 To know that human beings subscribe to a materialist metaphysics of racial difference by virtue of material location and develop certain psychological and sociological responses to it is but the beginning of a reflection on what such knowledge signifies. As well, if what also emerges from this is the view that human beings produce such ways of knowing, the question emerges whether such conceptions are permanent and thus collapse into an isomorphic relationship between concept and being, wherein, as the gap closes, it simply becomes a mode of being and, hence, the negation of knowledge. The dialectical implications of such a movement bring to the fore the importance of thinking through race as a dynamic phenomenon instead of, say, one governed by positivist notions of concepts that stand outside of history, as it were. What enables contemporary processes of identification to make sense, for instance, is a constellation of relationships or rules by which they become meaningful. Such is one of the presuppositions of race theory, which, in this sense, becomes theory also about theory, about, that is, whether the theoretical apparatuses are also linked to the phenomena about which they have been developed. To illustrate, consider the following story of race through a short history of race theory, an activity, a practice as Sartre’s considerations suggest, a field governed by varieties of habitus wrought with the impositions of symbolic violence, as Pierre Bourdieu would add, since it is generated by what human beings do and through which human beings come to understand what they do, if often with a profound ignorance of its underlying grammar.20 39

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A Short History of Race Thinking The definition of race has a story that begins in a prototypical and then full-fledged discourse or, as Paul Taylor calls it, “self conscious race thinking.”21 The prototypical period refers to theories of human difference from antiquity through medieval times. The ancient narratives, whether in Africa, Asia or Europe, were not explicitly race thinking, since race had not yet evolved; but the familiar themes of an inside group that counts as the explicitly human versus a less human, outside group were well known; for instance, the Greek notions of people who were naturally slaves and barbarians being non-Greeks. These accounts of human difference found metaphysical support in a universe that was perfect and cyclical, where each cycle revealed a purposeful or teleological nature. In Aristotle’s thought, cyclical form—eternal, as understood by Plato—became an organic fusion of form and matter made concrete in the manifestations of human potential not only in the magnanimous Greek man but also in the centered group of free Greek men. Christendom marked a fusion of the Greek and Roman worldviews with West Asian and North African eschatological conceptions of time, transforming the centered group into one legitimated by a theological naturalism, which framed the outsiders at first as those who rejected Christianity and therefore stood outside of the holy and the good. Such people needed accounting for in different terms, since the theological metaphysics made them also creations of an all-powerful and all-knowing deity. The result was a kind of argument that has continued even into an age of secularism, namely, theodicy. Theodicy involves rationalizations that make injustice and evil external to the source of all things good. Thus, in most theodicean forms of argumentation, the Supreme Being’s intentions lay beyond human comprehension; or, injustice and evil are consequences of human free will, which was a gift of divine benevolence. The lot of the outside group, then, becomes one of either conforming to an ultimately grand purpose or being at fault for their condition through misuse of their free will.22 In either formulation, their condition, at least on earth, is of the damned. A crucial development in the evolution of race emerged in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages. Ruled by North African Muslims called the Moors from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Christians in that part of the world developed a classification for their outsiders, who were, paradoxically, given the near millennium of colonization, also insiders, and birthed the etymological foundation of the word “race” in the word raza, which referred to breeds of dogs and horses and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews.23 The defeat of the Moors in 1492 was followed by a series of inquisitions to assess the authenticity of the remaining populations of Moors and Jews who had converted to Christianity, a process that led to demands for demonstrations of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre). Ancestry became relevant as the “truly” Christian became a feature of individuals whose origins were “purely” Christian. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological centre, these groups stood as a prototypical formulation of the anthropology that took a path through razza (Italian) to the modern term race, as used by François Bernier in his 1684 account, A New Division of the Earth. 40

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A consequence of modern racial logic, however, is that it also affects etymological practices. Thus, although this story points back to medieval times, simply stopping at the meeting of Arabic, Latin and Germanic languages in Andalusia appears artificial and arbitrary. The Moors, after all, included the Berber and other North African linguistic communities, and within the Semitic linguistic framework was also Hebrew.24 Pushing these considerations further, there is the peculiar connection of raza with ra’ (Arabic) and then rosh (Hebrew), which is related to ras (Amharic), both of which refer to “head” or “beginning,” and there are oddly many cognates in a variety of languages ranging from Old Norse to Sanskrit. A possible link, however, is in the Egyptian word ra, referring to the sun god, which would suggest a conception of beginning (sunrise) and a movement from east to west that could easily be correlated with the foreignness of the people adumbrated by raza. For Jews, however, the story is rendered more complicated by the lunar significance of the Jewish organization of celestial time, which, among other things, begins the day when the sun sets, instead of rises. The complexity of Jewish organization of political life in terms of overcoming or in opposition to an Egyptian cosmological order would, then, make the reassertion of a sun-centred metaphysics a continued assertion of Jewish and by extension Islamic (also lunar) elsewhereness.25 The initial period of the expansion of Christendom in the late fifteenth century led, however, to Christian encounters with people who were neither Moor nor Jew. This period was marked by a succession of realignments of received narratives with conflicting ones, many of which also came from conflicts in West Asia. The processes of naturalization became increasingly affected by conceptions of knowing premised upon a shift from (Greek) geometrical approaches to (Arab and Indian) mathematical innovations such as the concept of zero, decimals, and a more efficient numerical system. These shifts began to affect natural theology as it was transformed through natural philosophy into modern science, accompanied by the eradication of eternal, natural permanence and the realization of having to account not only for the new and the discovered, but also for the dying, and for the real possibility of extinction. The enslavement and near genocide of the native populations of the Americas led to Bartolomée Las Casas’s efforts to save them through appeals to the Papal authority, and to his famous debate with Gines de Sepúlveda on the status and suitability of the native populations for slavery. Although there were by this point Christians, Muslims and Jews who could be found in the interior regions of Africa such as the Congo, a rearticulating of their status and that of other peoples of darker hue in terms of abundance rendered them vulnerable to the growing, global demand for labor. The well-known result, which signalled a key moment in the emergence of modern racism, was the Atlantic slave trade.26 The secular explanations that developed by the end of the sixteenth century, emerging out of encounters of Europeans and North Africans with people, animals and fauna not accounted for in the Torah, the Christian Bible or the Qur’an, stimulated a revolution in human reflection on nature, as emerges from the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, among others, across the succeeding three centuries. This new science demanded explanations, as Ernst Cassirer observed in An Essay on Man, which strained theological, teleological causality, although much of the mythic 41

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foundations of that grammar continued, albeit in secular form.27 The search for causation in the human organism turned to nature itself. As David Hume famously declared in A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739–40), his goal was to articulate for man what Newton had achieved in his explanation of the physical world. Presaging such naturalistic effort was the work of Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) offered a classificatory system, premised upon hierarchies of being, sometimes referred to as “the great chain of being”, which serves as the basis for classifying living things well into the present, while Blumenbach devoted his classification interests to divisions within the human species, or racial divisions, correlated with the recently mapped continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America as they are known today, including the term Caucasians, which he coined, to refer to Europeans. The practice of mapping regions brought to the fore the mapping of people in an ordered rationality. This rationality stimulated an anthropology that was, paradoxically, narrowing as it expanded. The acquisition of land and the flow of labour engineering the wealth that grew along with this expanded knowledge continued to be governed by the logic of the saved and the damned. A theodicean anthropology followed, wherein the below-human category of people grew in ways that made consistent a logic of emancipatory knowledge and wealth. Rationalizations for these practices were governed, as Carole Pateman recently showed, through claims of terra nullius (empty land).28 Claims of empty territories followed a logic from the de facto absence of people to the logic of the conditions of peoplehood. These were first religious, then cultural. The path to the cultural was accompanied by shifts in the study of human beings through a movement from knowledge to its conditions of possibility, in a philosophical anthropology marked by the question of a human world as the condition of possibility not only for knowledge but also for itself, in a movement of thought from Johann Gottfried Herder through to Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, resulting in the challenges of culture and the problematic of history. To place a people outside of the framework of culture and history, then, meant their placement, as with theodicy, outside of the legitimately real. Given the self-reference of the thinkers posing these transcendental considerations of culture and history, “no one” became a signifier taking a path from no Christians and no Europeans to, eventually, no civilization and no whites (where white, Christian and European became one). The result was additionally ironic: as freedom became more valorized (where even culture meant the active production of human reality), slavery became repugnant only if waged against those who were considered properly human—namely, this small portion of humankind who valorized such freedom. Tagged onto the growing racial naturalism, that forbidden population became white, simply because western Europeans came to regard themselves as the only truly human population. In the nineteenth century, the criteria for human status shifted from practices of mapping, cataloguing and language (given the sacred status of Latin and its impact on its cognate languages) to something radically new, the genuinely biological in the form of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Although Darwin’s argument rejects an overarching 42

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teleology or purpose beyond survival, since natural selection had no more significance than a species or its traits persisting over time, old notions of election were tagged onto selection in an eschatology of salvation: survival and redemption became one, but with profound anxiety, perhaps fear of the future, since redemption could be lost simply by being outlived, even by a group’s supposed inferiors. The legacy of cultural and historical idealism along with Darwinian biology led to a new form of argumentation in race theory, one that moved away from classification and identification to their presuppositions and to a different kind of accounting, namely, the questions: how did racial divisions come about? and, how is race possible?29 These considerations take us, ironically, back to Du Bois, but now with a different sense of the context in which his cultural concerns took shape. There is at first the presumption that race functions as a descriptive anthropological classification. Du Bois showed, however, that there were normative presuppositions of white normality versus gradations of colored abnormality that dominated the study of race. Implicit in the study of “Negro problems”, for instance, was the notion of “Negroes as problems” and, a correlate of this, “problem Negroes” instead of “people facing problems”.30 Research on such populations was thus affected in advance by a priori claims about them. Du Bois argued further that there was an absence of social-scientific rigour because of the abandoning of the basic social-scientific practices of theorizing from a shared social world on the one hand, and because of the failure to interrogate the methodological presuppositions of applicability on the other. The social-scientific study of populations in the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century presupposed the legitimacy of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinian bio-sociology, where human populations were placed on a hierarchy of “fitness” according to who dominated and who was dominated. In the European context, different schemas had emerged such as the class analysis of Karl Marx, the typification models of social rationalization offered by Max Weber and the examination of sacred symbols and social meaning in the work of Emile Durkheim. By way of methods, the expectations from positivism, emerging out of the thought of August de Comte, and the general environment of the expected advancement of natural science, suggested that the scientific method offered much for the development of sociology and, as the followers of Spencer believed, for the overall grounding of the study and classification of human populations according to the prevailing scientific models. From Darwin onward, as we have seen, the dominating scientific influence was biology. Du Bois noticed, however, that race seemed to function in conjunction with other disciplinary outlooks and also on its own terms. He noticed that the study of race presupposed indulgence in the particular at the expense of studying the universal “man”. The prejudices, however, centered the categories of universal man in terms of particularities that excluded racialized people and related ethnic typographies, with the result that a particular kind of man became the presumption of man. The continued relevance of Du Bois’s sociological work, which has outlived the Spencerians of his day, is because of the centrality it accorded race, which is a continuing sociological thematic and “problem” not only of American social life but also of much of the globe, giving continued support to his prophetic claim that the 20th 43

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century was going to be governed by the problem of the color line, as contemporary studies of global racism attest.31 Finally, a crucial dimension of Du Bois’s early reflections on sociological theory was his putting the problem of formulating social problems to the fore. That task required understanding the role of social institutions and of pressing social concepts, which later structural anthropologists would call “symbols”, through which race appears and is understood. The Du Boisian shift to social analysis inaugurated an attack on the biological understanding of race that led to the contemporary circumstance of which, as we have seen, Bernard Boxill posed important criticisms. Recall that Darwinism became a sociological theory through a misreading by social Darwinists, especially through the socio-biological theories of Herbert Spencer and, ironically, of Darwin himself. In addition to Du Bois, the famed anthropologist Franz Boas offered a powerful critique of such a turn.32 What the social Darwinians misunderstood about natural selection, argued Boas, was that Darwin was not, or at least should not have been, arguing that human beings evolved out of chimpanzees (human beings’ closest living biological relatives), but that both species were, from the standpoint of natural selection, equally evolved. Given the argument about survival, every species sharing a particular moment in history is evolved by virtue of the coordination with its environment that enables its survival. It can, in principle, be unsuitable for another environmental development, but that circumstance would have to come about for the process of selection to be tested. The misreading of natural selection presumed that there was an inherent progress to evolution, a teleology, which meant that some groups within a species could be interpreted as living at an earlier stage of development while another was at a later stage. Thus, the appeal to racial hierarchies took the form of asserting the primitiveness (earlier stage) of one group versus the more developed stage of another racial group. Boas argued that culture, which the social Darwinists treated as bearing an isomorphic relation to biology, was independent of biology.33 In other words, any human being could be raised in another cultural context in which he or she would express the language and other exemplars of the material conditions of that culture. Boas’s work, in addition to that of other anthropologists, both physical and cultural, played a central role in the eventual development of the genetic disputation of race as expressed in the UNESCO Statement on Race authored by the famed geneticist and anthropologist Ashley Montagu. A revised and embellished version of the UNESCO document was adopted and published in 1996 as an official position of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists under the title “AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race”.34

Concluding: The Intersectional and the Interdimensional A result of the undermining of biological bases for the concept of race has been the domination of the social sciences and humanities as the main sites of work in race theory, although biologists and physicalists continue to do their research, and race continues to be a powerful conceptual tool in the medical profession in cases that are not necessarily 44

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pernicious, such as admission of the differential behaviour of diseases across social groupings premised upon race.35 The rejection of the biological then, although not a closed issue, is the basis for the recurring significance of culture in the analysis of race. Although the Boxill critique points to the biological, the obvious consideration, as we saw with the Sartrean challenge, is to question the conclusive nature of such a criticism. In other words, must the relationship be the primarily physical versus the primarily cultural? Could not a bothand logic, one that is phenomenological and dialectically self-reflective, be at work in understanding how the bio-physical acquires social meaning? Cassirer offers some insights in the following remarks: The functional circle of man is not only quantitatively enlarged; it has also undergone a qualitative change. Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality.36 A characteristic feature of debates over the physical versus the cultural that limits understanding is the failure to see that both are radically different modes of being. Whereas the former is governed, for instance, by laws that would make intersections more geometrical, which would lead to some of the kinds of symbolic violence of which Bourdieu has written by virtue of a battle for ontological space, the latter moves beyond such realms and functions according to differences that are, as Cassirer states, dimensional. To move into a different dimension means to be “inside” in a way that is not necessarily spatial and hence not even intersecting. The human world, from a physicalist standpoint (if such a notion carries any coherence), does not exist, and its notions of convergence are multitudinous because of not adding, ex nihilo, as with miracles, the physically new. There are no more nor less a total of physical things in the universe. But from within the symbolic system of culture, there is a proliferation of meanings and things in an endless series of possibilities. Race, from this perspective, is, then, about meaning—what reality means in human terms.37 Here we discover a new angle on Sartre’s remark about knowledge drawing its being from the negation of being. So, too, does culture. But this paradox, of being through the negation of being, consists in how, in the production of meaning, culture is also the production of new forms of life. Race, in this sense, is thus not the bodies designated by the words “black”, “red”, “brown”, “yellow”, or “white”, but about the bodies, about how they are brought into a logos, about how they are catalogued, and about the story that brings meaning, across time, through the same mechanisms by which culture, in framing history, also brings human reflection to bear on reality. Put differently, race, culturally understood, collapses meaning and being; its rejection is possible only through a delinking of culture from its own history. In race, then, is not simply a story of anthropology 45

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manqué, but an understanding of thought itself, human thought, as incapable of overcoming its own contradictions because the human being exceeds, in an active way, the theoretical models forced onto human reality. In Du Bois’s thought, this was the problematic resistance to disciplinary encasement (attempting to squeeze races into disciplines instead of realizing how race troubles disciplines); in Sartre’s, this was metastability; in Bourdieu’s, it is what symbolic practices are about. The yoking of race to a singular discipline, the disciplining of race, is the misguided anthropology by which race continues to leave researchers vexed. Frantz Fanon in 1952 saw some of these contradictions, which he characterized as productive failures, in the introduction to his classic first book, Black Skin, White Masks.38 There, he challenged phylogenetic and ontogenetic positions in the study of human difference and pointed to the additional element of social reality, which, he argued, as a generator of meaning, also produces the identities by which and through which people live. He articulated an important distinction between race and ethnic identities—the latter could be chosen and transformed by individuals within a group, but racial identities are a function of an imposition on a group, a position he later formulated in L’an v de la révolution algérienne (1959), available in English as A Dying Colonialism;39 by way of example: whites created the Negro, but it is the Negro who created Négritude. Fanon argued that social reality required human agency for its existence, which means that it could also be transformed by human agency. But transformation required the negotiation of symbolic and material structures of culture ranging from language, the psychoanalytical organization of power and constitutional organizations of psychic life. All these fail in the colonial context, which Fanon regarded, in stream with the narrative I have offered in this chapter, as quintessential for the construction of racial ordering, in an asymmetrical semiosis of race: the white constructed the black, but the black did not construct the white. The white functioned as agent in both accounts, and in similar kind to other categories of color. With regard to blacks, however, the racial designation had an additional effect. The slide from racial difference to racism pushed the black into a nether-realm of sub-humanness, the result of which was a disruption of self–other ethical dialectics and dysfunction even at methodological levels.40 The outcome was a structural model of whites and some colored categories in a relationship of self and others. Below that schema, however, was another set who were neither the self nor others except in a unique set of differing relations in the sub-schema. The self–other dialectic functioned between individuals in this sub-schema from below, but the asymmetry of the relationship meant that those above stood as others in relation to the self or selves from below. This structure is a semiotic rearticulation of Du Bois’s double consciousness thesis. The blacks can see themselves as seen through the eyes of whites, which means the positing of the white perspective as a possibility. The realization is that it is not a reciprocal relationship—the white does not see the self as conditioned by the black but as a point of reference looking onto the black looking back onto the white as a white perspective. In other words, the black, as a genuine point of view, is eliminated in the relationship. This means that double consciousness pointed to more than a problem of positioning. It 46

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pointed, as the earlier quotation of Cassirer suggests, to dimensional shifts. In other words, within the symbolic realm of culture, an impact on space emerges in which, although people could be in spatial proximity, they could be in different places. Since place can mean different things, any effort to render a restricted relationship between space and place leads to a situation in which those who are not so restricted are able to see, in a word, what is often not seen. This aspect of racial thought, attuned to the transdisciplinarity of race, calls for decolonizing practices at methodological levels. The move from double consciousness to what Jane Anna Gordon has called potentiated double consciousness takes this form.41 As a phenomenological and dialectically expanding notion, it enables groups to live through multiple dimensions in a single spatial or temporal configuration. Returning to the white/black dialectic (often referred to as “binary” precisely because of the spatial logic, where only one element can occupy a space), this means that blacks live the realization of multiple dimensional configurations, doubled doubling, through which race is a governing, expanding reality. To live and understand race is to realize that culture proliferates categories through which different groups of people live in different worlds, wherein symbolic violence handicaps perceptual capacities in the form of an avowed universality that fails to see its particularity, as opposed to a presumed particularity that embodies a universalizing practice by virtue of its constant, lived engagement with contradictions. Transcending such dehumanizing impasses, then, requires an understanding of more than spatial intersections, as I have been arguing, and an understanding of intersubjective possibilities as also interdimensional ones. This expanded dimensionality, being linked to political locations, brings to the fore the relationship of culture and race beyond questions of the reducibility of one to the other, and on to the understanding of what they mean in the terms through which human beings actually live.

Notes 1. This was the case with Dr Louis Agassiz, the famed Swiss zoologist at Harvard University in the nineteenth century, who was an anti-racist until spending time in Philadelphia, where he actually met blacks in the flesh, who were the staff in the hotel at which he stayed. He was revolted by their skin, their physical presence, and changed his tune. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). For the Kierkegaardian reference, see Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 2. For a developed discussion of race and racism through their relation to this phenomenon, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1995). 3. For a survey of discussions in the field of race theory, see Paul Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). See also Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005). 4. See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Cf. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, pp. 13, 94–95; and Susan Searls Giroux, Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility, and the University to Come (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); see especially pp. 84, 171.

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Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 5. Discussions abound. In addition to Taylor’s Race: A Philosophical Introduction and FluehrLobban’s Race and Racism, see also Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Michele M. MoodyAdams, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6. In addition to the texts in note 5, see Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially ch. 3. 7. Ibid. See also Alexander Crummell, Destiny and Race: Selected Writings, 1840–1898, ed. Wilson Moses (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903). 8. Falguni Sheth’s Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009) offers much discussion of the racialization of Muslims, and there are many philosophical discussions of the racialization of Latin Americans and Latinos, but see especially Linda Martín Alcoff ’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9. Bernard Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), revised edn, p. 178. Boxill subsequently expanded his discussion of Du Bois’s social constructivism to include the political limitations imposed by Jim Crow, the practice of racial apartheid in the United States. See Bernard Boxill, ed., Race and Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), “Introduction”, pp. 1–41. We should bear in mind, however, that such laws were premised on biological ancestry, which substantiates Boxill’s point in Blacks and Social Justice, originally published in 1984. 10. Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, pp. 178–79. 11. There are many studies of these dimensions of whiteness, but see, e.g., George Yancy, ed., What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question (New York: Routledge, 2004). See also Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), ch. 4, which looks at a form of antiblack racism that is manifested in a white performance that suggests blacks are not only bad at being white but also bad at being black. 12. See Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, part I. 13. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), part III. 14. For more discussion of this dimension of theoretical work on social reality, see Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), ch. 3. 15. This is a disciplinary point that applies as well to history and the formation of disciplines across the human sciences. For discussion, see part II of Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), and Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (New York: Routledge, 2006). 16. This is not an error of the existential phenomenological tradition, as Simone de Beauvoir’s classic Second Sex attests, but it is a glaring absence in many recent poststructural discussions of the body. On these matters, see, e.g., Gail Weiss, Refiguring the Ordinary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For de Beauvoir, see The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila MalovanyChevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010). Cf. also Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1998).

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Race in the Dialectics of Culture 17. This formulation of the body and location is a phenomenological one that rejects the notion of disembodied consciousness. See, e.g., Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, ch. 7, “The Body in Bad Faith”. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, ed. Jonathan Rée, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, foreword by Frederic Jameson (London: Verso, 2004), vol. 1, p. 29. 19. Ibid., p. 35. 20. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In spite of his acerbic attacks on Sartre, the affinities between Bourdieu’s theories of practice and Sartre’s in the Critique of Dialectical Reason are striking, and some of Bourdieu’s reflections on his disenchantment with rule-oriented structuralism in his preface to The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), support this claim. 21. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, p. 22. Cf. also Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000), passim, but especially pp. 13 and 73. 22. African-American religious thought and theology have been engaged in a robust debate on this topic since the publication in 1973 of William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology, with a new preface and afterword (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), a book to which I devoted considerable attention in part IV of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. For the most influential recent engagements with the problematics of Jones’s text and the problem of theodicy in the context of black American liberation struggles, see Anthony Pinn, Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1999); and, from the Afro-Muslim perspective, Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 23. See Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco, Tesoro de la lengua (1611), quoted in David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews”, in Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan, eds, Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 79. Cf. Taylor, Race: A Philosopical Introduction, p. 41. 24. See, e.g., Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Golden Age of the Moors (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991). 25. For discussion, see Charles S. Finch III, Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden (Decatur, GA: Khenti, 1991), ch. 5, “The Nile Valley Sources of the Old Testament”. 26. See Lewis Hanke, ed., All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolome De Las Casas and Juan Gines De Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious (Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994). See also Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). 27. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962). 28. Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract”, in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 35–78. 29. Sarah Daynes and Orville Lee have offered a similar account leading to these two questions in the context of sociological theory, with the shared observation that many social constructivists conflate racial difference with physical difference, so that they are led to believing that the rejection of race must bring with it also the rejection of physical difference. See their extraordinary study, Desire for Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 30. In addition to The Souls of Black Folk, see also Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 568, March 2000, pp. 13–27. 31. See, e.g., Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism, and the quantitative data offered by various articles in the University of Michigan journal African American Research Perspectives. 32. See Franz Boas, A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911, ed. George W. Stocking Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). See also Vernon Williams Jr, Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), and Vernon Williams, The Social Sciences and Theories of Race (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 33. For discussion, see, e.g., Fluehr-Lobban, Race and Racism, p. 15. 34. “AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race”, http://physanth.org/association/positionstatements/biological-aspects-of-race (accessed on 29 April 2011). 35. See Jamie D. Brooks and Meredith King Ledford, “Geneticizing Disease: Implications for Racial Health Disparities,” Centre for AmericanProgress, http://www.americanprogress.org/ issues/2008/01/geneticizing_disease.html (created on 15 January 2008, accessed on 29 April 2011). The use of race in medical research, diagnosis and therapy is hotly debated. Among the questions raised is that of genetic versus gross difference. Genes associated with one race could emerge in members of another race. A response by physicians who use race in their diagnoses and treatments, however, is that such cases simply prove that there are members of some races with ancestry in other races. Second, some critics could argue that race in medicine is never a claim about all members of each racial group but most. As a human science, medicine will always have its exceptions. Brooks and Ledford are careful to point out that disease, at least in racial terms, is “a combination of nature and nurture”, which, at least, reminds us that nurture alone cannot account for the phenomenon and, by implication, the same applies to nature by itself. For racial eliminativists, even this concession is objectionable (see, e.g., Gilroy, Against Race, pp. 19–20). 36. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 24. 37. Cf. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, p. 13. 38. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamm Markman (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 23. 39. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, introduction by Adolfo Gilly (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), p. 47. 40. For a more detailed discussion of this dynamic, see Art Massara (aka Jerry Miller), “Stain Removal: On Race and Ethics”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 33, no. 4, 2007, pp. 498–528. 41. While Paget Henry’s analysis refers to “potentiated second sight,” Jane Anna Gordon’s refers to “potentiated double consciousness.” See Henry’s “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications”, The C. L. R. James Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, Summer 2005, pp. 79–112, and J. Gordon’s “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Post-colonialism and Political Theory, Nalini Persram, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 143–161, and in Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

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CHAPTER 4 RACISM AS A FORM OF BAD FAITH*

If a philosophical problem is defined as that for which a final answer appears unlikely, then formulating a complete theory of the concept of racism is surely a philosophical one. The theory I propose here stands as an interpretation among the many offered throughout the turbulent history of the subject. Its strength rests primarily on its ability to challenge other theories of racism and bring out some of their strengths. Racism as a form of bad faith offers such possibilities.1 Bad faith, in existential phenomenological language, is a flight from freedom. It is an effort to hide from responsibility. From an existential phenomenological standpoint, freedom and humanity are regarded as, ultimately, one unless proven otherwise. The contingency of human reality and the questions it poses are upsurges of freedom. Since freedom and human being are treated as one, we can translate bad faith into more prosaic language as the effort to hide from human beings and human reality. The effort to hide from such takes at least two forms: rejection of the humanity of others and oneself. The first is a flight from human being in the flesh. This flight involves elevating an abstract humanity over real, live, flesh-and-blood human beings. A person who adopts this attitude toward humanity ironically has no problem harming actual human beings in the name of humanity. Such a figure is the paradigm insult to humanism, and he or she rightfully serves as the butt of most attacks on self-righteous appeals to humanity. This figure lives for principles over people and will do almost anything so long as it is in the name of something. We may add that the ultimate desire of such figures is disembodiment. They may bark at all forms of “objectifications.” Their ideal world is one in which they are ultimately protected from being seen. The second form is a flight to a reduction of human flesh to “mere flesh.” This flight is an effort to place humanity on no higher level than any other substance in the world. In classic existential language, this form of bad faith is a flight to “facticity,” of being factlike. This form of bad faith involves a desire not only to be seen but also to be seen forever, which, if possible, would be the condition of permanent being. It is an effort to make the transition from contingency to necessity, eternity, or forms of determinism. It is an effort to place values from the realm of “ought” to the realm of “is.” Existentialists from Nietzsche to Beauvoir and Sartre and on to Charles Ephraim and myself refer to this effort as the spirit of seriousness, where values are wrenched from the “absent” realm of ought into the “present” one of is by way of being regarded, by those in bad faith, as material features of the world. Thus, some people “are” good and others “are” bad. The serious ones consequently attempt to avoid responsibility. If they are either good or bad before making decisions, then their virtue and vice are simply functions of the type of beings they are. In racial contexts, these functions are extended to aggregates or groups 51

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called “races.” There are obvious fallacies in such extensions, for couldn’t the class of good people and that of bad ones fall across racial lines? Both forms of bad faith are lived realities. They are lived as certain attitudes toward evidence. For in bad faith, one chooses the false as the true while concealing its falsity from oneself. One deceives oneself. For example, one may take certain attitudes toward evidence in general to believe or reject particular or specific advancements of evidence. It is the nature of bad faith attitudes to play the game of double standards. A man in bad faith may claim that women are bad drivers. When driving accident demographics and statistics contradict his claim, he may assert that such evidence doesn’t capture the “nuance” of driving. If, however, the demographics and statistics work in his favor, he would assert them as proof. Eventually, if pressed, he may even go so far as to retreat to the view that there is something “masculine” about driving. What he seeks, we would determine, is an appeal so linked with gender identity that no woman could meet its standard. Racists adopt the attitude that their race is superior to other races. Other races are not only regarded as inferior but also as blamable for their supposed inferiority. To be a member of the racists’ group involves denying that race “really” matters, whereas to be a member of the group who is the object of racism is to realize every day how much race actually matters. For the racists’ attitude to be what the classical American pragmatist philosopher William James once called a “live option,” there needs also to be an ongoing support system of institutional power and its ideological maintenance. This situation of institutional power is racism. Racists usually have “confirmation” of their superiority by virtue of their access to a wide framework of possibilities that fortify denial of its contradiction. The racists fail to see that it is a mark of power to have real options, just as the bourgeoisie often fail to see that workers may not have at their fingertips the live option of becoming rich. I won’t go into the racists’ psychoanalytical motivations toward racism here, and I leave aside here my stand on the political economy of racism. Let us, however, consider this. There are certain themes implicit in a racist attitude. First, racists confront other human beings in the flesh and ask them to justify their humanity. The racists in effect demand racially demoted people to justify their right to exist. But no human being could do so without the presentation of him, her, or them as a given existent. The racists, then, in making the demand, position themselves as selfjustified while asking others to justify their right to exist. Symmetry is already broken down in a situation that demands symmetry. The racists thus elevate themselves—or at least “humanity”—above the human to the level of gods and racially demoted groups below humanity. In effect, the racists say to the latter, “The problem with you is that you are not we. Show us that you have a quality that has an equivalence relation with us. And, further, are you even similar to someone like us?”2 The irony of such a formulation, however, is that it imposes an abstraction on both the racists and the “objects” of racism. That abstraction is that of “substance.” For at issue is the question of kinds of substantiality, much like the Cartesian problem of Ego-substance versus extended-substance. Oddly enough, there are three divisions here, as there are Ego and Other-Ego substance versus substances-that-are-neither. Are these three kinds at the moment of racism one? 52

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Let us begin with the dual distinction of Self and Other. The symbols of racism usually rest on reducing groups of human beings to either pole of the bad faith dichotomy. Some people are regarded as pure human substances in the world. Others are regarded as human absence in the world. Responsibility is situated in relations with the former, but not with the latter where the Other is pushed paradoxically below Other. Since human beings embody both the possibility of being seen and that of transforming the context of being seen, the polarization of groups of human beings into both aspects of their existence—of being Self and Other—is a form of self-deception. For whatever human beings are presented as, they are simultaneously aware of not being identical with their presentations. Moreover, that they are not identical with their presentations does not free them from the fact of their being presented as their presentations. A black person is thus not only a black person. Yet, such a person “is,” in a very significant sense, a black person. All black persons, like all human beings, are transphenomenal and metastable: They exceed their presentations; they don’t existentially stand still. Racists hide from themselves because they have taken an attitude that requires the denial of their own transphenomenality and metastability. If they try to maintain both the factical and transcendent features of their existence but deny others’ (now interpreted not even as genuinely “Others”), they face the problem of formulating themselves as gods to others. But “being” gods is a paradigm example of bad faith. It is to be the contradictory free substance, awkwardly formulated by G.W.F. Hegel and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others) as the in-itself-for-itself. It is to say, in effect, “What I am and what I will be are what I am already presented as being.” But “to be” wholly such a presentation requires the ongoing choice to confirm it. Racists choose to interpret themselves as materially superior beings that ultimately stand as gods in relation to “naturally” inferiors ones. In Hegelian language, they desire Mastery. In Sartrean language, they desire to be gods—or, worse, G-d.3 The significance of racists’ interpretation of themselves as superior beings is theodicean with unethical implications. Let us consider the theodicean significance in terms of antiblack racism, white supremacy, and an antiblack world. In an antiblack world, the farthest distance from blackness—whiteness—is presented as the fulfillment of desire. In such a world, every white person faces the irony of being G-d while being aware, by virtue of being human beings, of not being G-d. If white people were G-d, they would, by virtue of being white, have achieved the object of their desire. It is a mark, then, of an antiblack world that humanity has, at least symbolically, died, and in fact it is a mark of most critiques of racism that in a racist world, humanity has been stifled. I call this phenomenon the misanthropic consciousness since its aim is an elimination of humanity in two directions: The powerful are raised above the level of being human, and the least socially powerful are situated blow it. The theodicean problem raised by antiblack racism leads to a rather interesting conclusion on approaches to studying ethics. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a text appeared with a provocative question, Is God a White Racist?4 Suppose we suspend the question of whether G-d is a white racist or not and ask what is the significance of the religious rituals of those who may believe in the irremediable fact of 53

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metaphysical antiblackness and, for that matter, misogyny.5 What many black women worship in the Americas is such an example. Such women show that one could love an Other with whom there is absolutely no hope of achieving a relation of identity. The difference is so radical that it is not clear that that Other could even properly be an “Other.” This possibility challenges conventional wisdom that ethical life begins with reaching out for the similarity of the Other. It also suggests that human beings are able to reach and love an Other with whom there is absolutely no chance of similarity or fulfillment of desire—in short, even an Other who is not even an Other or a self, a nonOther and non-self.6 It is a fact that there are women who worship the symbol of a man and that there are black women who worship a white one. On this matter, we need not here deal with the question of whether such women are misguided or not. Every community has such people. More interesting is the challenge posed for a white to reach out to a black without the need to mediate similarity or assimilation. The conclusion is that difference doesn’t eliminate responsibility. The unethical significance of the racists’ choosing themselves as racist is that all racists are ultimately responsible for their racism. The appeal to innocence becomes problematic. No doubt there would be objections in the form or kinds of racisms they may manifest. There are people who may have racist beliefs that they abandon upon receiving sound information. Then there are those who may stubbornly cling to their position. But how different is this from saying that the former may have had an attitude toward information about other races instead of an attitude against those races, whereas the latter had already rejected evidence in support of the equality of other races and is therefore against those races themselves? Are people who remain ignorant to the plight of others responsible for their attitudes toward other races? An important aspect of bad faith is an uncritical attitude toward favored versus displeasing evidence. For people who appeal to ignorance to claim innocence, they show their displeasure with the initial bad evidence available to them. To hear that blacks and Native Americans are savages is one thing; to accept that as a given truth is another. To continue accepting that they are supposed to be incapable of achieving feats that one regards as high human achievements in light of the countless alternative interpretations available—whether as auto workers or local mayors or astronauts in space or philosophers—makes the acceptance a downright form of denial. The concept of bad faith, then, could serve as a useful point of departure into the next phase of analysis of racism—whether they be critical exposure, Marxist demystification, psychoanalytical revelation, deconstruction of centrism, decolonial epistemology, or pragmatic demonstration of meaningful action. By exploring the possibility of people’s choice of racism, we should be able to reintroduce accountability, an aspect of human reality, of situations, that serve also as a focus of praxis toward change. A cry against most progressive efforts toward social change is defense of the (usually abstract) innocent. I consider this warning to be the call for post-revolutionary behavior in pre- and revolutionary times. An appeal to the concept of bad faith is, then, the reminder that there is a point beyond which innocence can no longer be a serious appeal.

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Notes * From The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 92, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 6–8. This is the first article Lewis R. Gordon published as a professional philosopher. It appears here with updated notes from the author since his subsequent publications elaborate some arguments summarized here.

1. I offer a detailed portrait of this view of racism in Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1995). 2. There is another dimension of the problem of justifying one’s existence. If Immanuel Kant is correct that existence isn’t a predicate, and if justification or proof demands predication, then the racist demands members of other races to offer justification or proof without the means of doing so. 3. I use the theological convention of not fully spelling out the name to convey its gravitas. 4. William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 5. I argue in my writings against the disaggregation of gender and race and for the importance of analyzing them in conjunction with power, 2nd Edition; in addition to Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, see also Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), especially the chapter “Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World.” 6. A rather poignant discussion of this aspect of human beings is offered in Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

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CHAPTER 5 CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THREE POPULAR TROPES IN THE STUDY OF WHITENESS

My aim in this chapter is to explore three dominating themes of whiteness studies: (1) the notion of “white privilege,” (2) the notion of victimization as a characteristic of the relationship between whites and communities of color, and (3) the academically popular notion that the concept of race, divorced from the illuminating ascription of social constructivity, leads to consequences both epistemologically false and ethically misguided. More, this collection of tropes stimulates political responses that are contradictory to its goals in that whites are expected to respond to a situation for which they are claimed responsible while facing structural arguments that militate against the agency required for such responsibility. The result in such an aim-inhibiting situation is one, as Du Bois observed little more than half a century ago in his reflections on black petit-bourgeois consciousness, of standing still in many forms—a condition wrought, inevitably, with guilt.1

The Notion of White “Privilege” The notion of white privilege depends on the argument that white supremacy is a structural feature of contemporary global politics, and more specifically, the cultural reality of North American, European, and Australian societies. The impact of this politics is the institutionalization of white supremacy in the governments and societies on those continents. White supremacy entails a radical inequality between whites and other groups in every aspect of social life, from the distribution of wealth to the evaluative force and significance of the self. The accumulation of such endowments is an economy of possibilities wedded to power of skin, an epidermal reality constitutive of a social role and identity the lived reality of which requires a bevy of invisible, suffering souls amid penumbrae.2 Must it be the case, however, that a structural reality that places a particular group at an advantage over another group constitutes a “privilege”? The term itself has an intriguing etymology. From the Latin privus, meaning “one’s own,” conjoined with lex, meaning “law,” it means to exempt oneself from laws applied to others. The moral significance should be obvious here in that from a deontological or Kantian point of view it is a blatant violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative. Recall that the categorical imperative is the moral law, and in Kant’s use of “law,” this means having no exceptions. In the second formulation, a kingdom of ends or rational beings would be compromised if any member were to make him or herself an exception since that would 57

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subordinate others into a means to his or her end.3 From a Kantian point of view, a privilege as a rule of society can be advanced as a political practice, but it would be a severely limited one in that it would fall seriously short of normative legitimacy or moral soundness. Ironically, the notion of privilege could also fail from a utilitaria and virtue perspective as well. From a utilitarian point of view, the rule or principle of utility could have the consequence of one having a privilege (say, for the welfare of the community), but the conditions that make that privilege emerge are not one’s own. In other words, its rationalizations are by definition beyond one’s own law, which could mean the odd consequence of an individual or group being the recipients of an unwanted privilege. (I will leave aside here the problem of whether a privilege is in itself and by itself patently against a community’s interest, which would mean that it could never be grounded as a principle of utility, since it is already demonstrated here that in either case, it cannot be grounded as a rational principle by the recipient alone without paradox.) With regard to virtue ethics, a similar problem arises: To cultivate oneself as an exception requires appealing to a rule that transcends one’s exception to that rule. Although these remarks on the performance of a privilege as a law of morality or a principle of social welfare pertain to their logical viability, they tap, as well, into a problem faced by people who find themselves in advantageous circumstances into which they have been born. They have an ascription that they could not, and indeed did not, will. This is not to say that a form of agreement with it, perhaps even enjoyment of it, could not occur and constitute a form of willing by virtue of approbation. Such a case would be an act with its own moral significance. But the one I am interested in is the case in which the individual does not want the privilege, is disgusted by the privilege, and may find him- or herself in a struggle against it. Such an individual sees himself or herself living a mundane life in which notions of privilege fall sway to notions of human fragility. What he or she looks for in life are things that it would seem unimaginable for other people to reject: safety; food, clothing, and shelter; education through which each generation can achieve its potential; positive aesthetic imagery to transform spaces into places, dwellings into homes; a positive sense of self; and meeting another human being with whom to build and share these features that mark the transformation of a human world into a humane one.4 Yet this is the problem with the notion of white privilege, for it is to the achievement and reception of these features of contemporary societal life that the charge is made. But these features are not just any features of contemporary social life; they are features the absence of which can lead to claims of human rights violations by whoever limits them. These goods are, in other words, human rights, and as such, the term “privilege” runs counter to their normative import since such rights are by definition imperatives that apply to and for all human beings. In effect, the constitution of these goods as privileges would mark a serious problem in society itself, and most critics of whiteness who advance this notion argue just that—there is a serious problem in, say, American society of that sort. There is, however, another dimension of the problem of privilege, but it is not of the kind that one might immediately expect. The immediate expectation is that it is a problem of their availability to a particular class or group—namely, whites—instead of 58

Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness

to all humankind, and there the argument would pertain to dignity: the making of others “lower” than whites constitutes a harm against their dignity. Another problem to consider is that of making a human right a privilege in the first place. To do that would mean to diminish the value not only of other human beings, but also of the notion of rights. It would require eliminating rights/privilege for the sake of a leveled playing field (the absence of privilege) that awaits below. But that would mean to lower the standard of rights, which would defeat the purpose of rights, for rights are, after all, advanced in an effort to raise the standards of the human world. Ortega y Gasset identified this problem well in Revolt of the Masses when he argued that the purpose of ruling is to set standards by which human beings should live.5 The problem with white supremacy is that it would be by definition a standard that only a certain group of human beings could possess, but even worse, they could do so without performance but simply by birth. Internal to white supremacy, then, is a form of white leveling in which a form of massism appears since distinction as a function of performance would have been eliminated between whites and other groups; “any” white would function as the equivalent of “all whites” as superior, however underachieving that white may be. To put it differently, white supremacy is by definition not meritocratic. It is a lowering of standards—at least standards of performance.6 Consider the familiar conflict over the expectations of, say, a college education versus that of an Ivy League education or one at a first-tier school. Although a convincing argument can be made that all members of contemporary society need to have a college level of education, the opposite is the case for, say, having a degree from the college of one’s choice. It may be disappointing to have got into Princeton but not Harvard, but how, in the scheme of things, is Harvard a “right”? One could see, immediately, another difference between privilege and right. A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the whiteprivilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things? Yes, there is the case of the reality of whites being the majority population in all the sites of actual privilege from prestigious universities to golf clubs and board of directors for most high-powered corporations. But even among whites as a group, how many whites have those opportunities? The white-privilege argument creates an imaginary ideal whiteness as the norm for all whites, and this ideal stands in opposition to things black in a similar, closed way. Whites become all things that blacks are not and vice versa. Thus, the larger populations of whites find themselves structured as a reality that has nothing to do with their lived experience. Harvard and Yale and the social pedigree they offer, as in Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom, or Queens and McGill in Canada for that matter, only work as a function of excluding most of the population. The availability of excellence in education does not, however, rely on those institutions, and that there are fields in which the best institutions that offer their study are also those more egalitarian in their practice and promise serves to substantiate the point of those institutions standing more like icing on the proverbial cake or excess than need. To make those institutions the true 59

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mark of whiteness introduces the performance question of getting into them (raising the standards), but there are whites who don’t care about getting into first-tier institutions and are instead concerned with their daily, means-to-means subsistence. For such whites, nothing they have acquired is a privilege but a right. And in fact, they often harbor resentment against those other, genuinely privileged whites because, in the end, those whites often have the privilege of mediocrity—which is always a privilege since it would be odd to exempt oneself, at least in Socrates’s view, from virtue or excellence—insofar as they are able to rely more on their institutions and pedigree than their performance. For everyday white people, the logical response should not be to eliminate or make them feel guilty for what they have but to transform the mechanisms of access to such things— rights—and make them available to all.

Victimization as a Condition of Oppression—a Critique Just as the notion of privilege obscures the discussion of racism by making it impossible to do anything about it—how, after all, could one give up a privilege that is literally in one’s skin?—the equating of oppression with victimization limits the options available to oppressed people. In other words, the notion itself exemplifies a form of oppression. Returning to etymology, the word “victim” emerges from the Latin word victima, which means “beast for sacrifice.” Here, one could readily see the tragic dimensions of victimization by virtue of the etymology of “tragedy,” which is from the Greek tragoidia, literally the conjunction of tragos (goat) and o¯ide (song). The links between victim and scapegoat reveals the tragedy in all tragedies—namely, the suffering of the innocent. This conclusion is, however, the problem with victimization as a model of oppression. For what should be done with cases in which the suffering individual is not an innocent one?7 Is it analytically the case that suffering is a constitutive feature of all innocence? Would it then be the case that he or she who does not suffer cannot be oppressed? Or even more enigmatic, could there be a form of oppression that exists in spite of the absence of experienced suffering? Many of these questions are a function of the advancement of suffering, which is an experiential term. It is from the Old French word sofrir, which is derived from the Latin sub (underneath) and ferre (to bear). The familiar connections with the scapegoat or sacrificial beast becomes clear, as well as the string of connotations in the Greek version marked by their word for suffering—namely, pathos. For the ancient Greeks, compassion for another’s suffering elicits sympathy (synpathos, suffering with another), but by the time we get to the Romans, there is the Latin pietas (dutiful conduct), from which we get the contemporary word, saturated with patronizing connotations—pity. Is pity what oppressed people want? A noticeable feature of the terms of this etymological exercise is the peculiar absence of a familiar feature of oppression: its peculiarly institutional form. Within such institutions, certain individuals may take advantage of the imbalance of power afforded by their social roles and wreak havoc on another individual, the consequence of which is 60

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suffering. But this is not always so. There are individuals who could live as a member of an oppressed group within an oppressive system and never experience an instance of suffering by the direct deed of an individual from the oppressing group. We could call this the anonymity of oppression. In such an instance, the oppressed and the oppressor are estranged from each other. The problem, then, with the model of victimization is that it means that in order to be identified as oppressed, one must both be suffering and innocent and have a victimizer. That would, however, create a circumstance in which guilt of any sort of the oppressed would render their claims of oppression void. In such instances, the demand of innocence would have the consequence of a red herring by putting the claimant on a form of trial instead of examining the status of the claims made. This creates an untenable situation, at least with adult populations, for how is it possible to have an entire adult population of innocents? Although it is true that the various European empires and their American offspring have brought trails of death in their rise and decline, it is also true, as Hannah Arendt has shown, that such processes have unfolded in a world of complicity even among their victims.8 Yet oppressed groups do make a special kind of claim. All oppressed groups lay claim to possessing something that nonoppressed groups (usually oppressors) claim to have exclusively, and that is their humanity. Implicit in all oppression is a special kind of inequality; it is inequality over the conditions by which everyday life can be lived. They are demanding their right to an everyday mode of existence. To illustrate, think of the distinction between options and choices. Options are those objective features of our environment, whether material or social, that are available to us. Although I say “material” and “social,” the impact of options is such that they could become one, for a social world with limited options is as material as a brick wall in its effect. Choices are what we make in relation to the options available. When there are many options, our choices appear isomorphic with them to the point of its appearing inconsequential to distinguish between options and choices. For a god, for instance, all options are choices since the mere making of a choice creates a reality. For a human being, however, options are exhausted by our finitude, and we eventually find ourselves making choices that exceed our options. When directed out at the world in which we are socially impotent, such choices become fantasy, hope, or wishes. Eventually, we discover that we have a set of choices that are also inward-directed; at least, we think, we can affect ourselves. Those choices begin to constitute a world of the self. They convey who we are by virtue of how we respond to our situation of limited options. These choices lead to a phenomenon that I have coined elsewhere as “implosivity.”9 It is the all-too-intense inward-directed exploration of the self that is a function of social impotence. There is no reason for inequality in itself to be a problem. There are simply many things that some individuals can do better than others. Where difficulties emerge is when a shift emerges in which (1) limitations are imposed on the options available to one group over another, (2) what is ordinarily expected exceeds the options available to the group on which the limitations are imposed, and (3) the existence of imposed limitations are denied. In the first instance, members of the imposed-upon group find themselves exhausting their outward-directed effectiveness quickly and soon begin an exploration 61

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of inward-directed choices. For the second, the ordinary becomes an extraordinary achievement because it requires achieving an equal effect with fewer options.10 Third, if we deny that there are limitations imposed upon some members of a group versus others, then we are compelled to conclude that it is they, not their circumstance, that limits them.11 In effect, we would have created a theodicy of our system or economy of distributing options. Although a theological term, theodicy (from the Greek theos [god] and diké [justice]), meaning God’s justice, asserts itself as the grammar of modern rationalizations of justice where the societal system becomes the substitute for God. Under such instance, it is not simply that the system is just and right, but that it must be so. If that’s the case, then evil, injustice, and suffering must be outside of the system. Put differently, since the system cannot be at fault, responsibility for the limitations imposed upon oppressed peoples must lie with themselves. The problem for the oppressed subject, however, is that he or she lives the contradiction of the theodicean thesis every day. The implosivity of oppressive life is such that individuals blame themselves with inward-directed choices all the time in the face of the limitations encountered in outward-directed choices/actions. It is no accident that oppressed people tend to treat their bodies as whole canvasses on which to express their creativity. Their bodies—themselves—exemplify the scope of their power, which, from the standpoint of a social world that mediates power relations as far as the entire globe, means that they are without power. They become their own prisons, which makes their efforts to reach out to the social world constantly jeopardized by the appearance of force instead of power. What’s the difference between the two? Force requires the physical reach of one’s own body. Power transcends that reach because of its ability to affect the mechanisms of the social world. A powerful person can, for example, make a decision in one part of the globe that affects many people at another part. This is why, try as we might, none of us are as powerful as government executives (presidents, prime ministers, commissars, kings, and queens), and although celebrity may occasion a listening ear everywhere, the rituals and processes of command at the disposal of an executive have more severe consequences of life and death. Oppressed people usually lack power, and when they have power at all, its reach is not very far. Michel Foucault’s observation in Discipline and Punish that power has been dispersed in the modern world into micro regions provides insight into how many of us inhabit the social world; without any power, our reach and consequence disappear.12 Individuals who suffer that fate find themselves in a circumstance aptly described by Kevin Bales as being “disposable people.”13 Although individuals within an oppressed group can at times acquire a great deal of power—for example, Disraeli in Victorian England or Colin Powell in the recent United States—that power rarely translates into the group, for that individual stands as an exception instead of the rule. Because of this exceptionalism, the group remains limited in an insidious way: the exception stands as further rationalization of the supposed absence of limits. This is a tortuous situation to be in, for not succeeding is hardly a rational imperative to place on individuals who may emerge as exceptions, but the point, at least from the perspective of the oppressed, is that the exception should count for something other than the viability of the system—and 62

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that is as evidence of the potentials of the group; in other words, within his or her group the exception is not necessarily so exceptional, but outside of the group, such a narrative is needed to maintain an oppressive order. Another consideration. The link between victimization and innocence leads to a narrative that befits children, for who exemplify innocence more than they? Oppression, however, is a circumstance that affects adults. It is not that children do not suffer or are not exploited, and it is not that they are never agents with moral responsibility. The reality of guardianship, however, still lays the trail of responsibility for the welfare of children to adults. Adulthood for oppressed groups is, however, an achievement challenged by an oppressive society. As Frantz Fanon famously observed in the sixth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, an antiblack society has no coherent notion of a normal black adult.14 With adulthood comes absolute instead of limited responsibility for one’s actions, and with such responsibility comes the loss of innocence.

Normality and Normativity Our discussion of victimization and innocence raises the question of normality and normativity. The attack on white privilege and the reality of oppression connect in the concept of white normativity. White normativity is the schema in which whites serve as the exemplification of the human being and the presumption of what it means to be human. Consider, for example, the use of supposedly race-neutral terms such as “woman,” “man,” “girl,” “boy,” “child,” and “one.” The impact of white normativity is readily apparent in that these terms, with very few exceptions, stand for white exemplars wherever there is the absence of an adjective designating color. There is, in other words, a parenthetical “white” before each of these terms—that is, (white) woman, (white) man, (white) girl, (white) boy, (white) child, and the anonymous (white) one. How often is “the reader” in literature expected to be, if not white, at least a white perspective? This is not to say that it is impossible for these terms to designate a multiracial and multiethnic community of agents, but where normativity is the factor, it is unlikely. Normativity is a perversion of normality. In Fanon’s reflections, the goal is not to get rid of normality.15 If that were the case, notions of therapy and liberation would lose meaning since abnormality would reign, and since communities of color are already derailed by white normativity, they would simply have been “cured” and “liberated” by virtue of being considered abnormal by the dominant group. One would, in other words, have normalized abnormality. Normality, however, stands as the healthy functioning of a subject. It does not signify the “ideal,” which implies a subject who functions perfectly. It simply stands as a general theme of good functioning with aims or “purpose” that are not inhibited or thwarted. We see here the connections with rights to an everyday existence in our preceding discussion of privilege and our critique of innocence. Normality does not require perfection; it requires, simply, good functioning or what can reasonably be expected of every member of a species. It is from that basis that we are able to determine concepts like the extraordinary and underachievement. Normativity is 63

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a perversion of this process because it eliminates performance or actions from the subject and collapses the concept of normality into the subject itself. What this means is that there becomes no criterion under which that subject can become abnormal except by becoming another subject. And the same applies to those outside of the sphere of normativity; they can become normal only by becoming other than they are. The result is thus as follows: Blacks could become normal only by becoming white; and whites can become abnormal only by becoming black. The problem, in other words, is that there is nothing one can do under such a schema that is not an affirmation of two Manichean poles.

Social Construction of Race—a Critique A difficulty in analyzing notions of normality is that the “normal” is not an intrinsic feature of the natural world.16 In the natural world, things simply are, and for a time they continue to be by virtue of either their own life span or their ability to reproduce (if they are living). If we ascribe values to such phenomena and their processes, we collapse into what C. W. Cassineli has described as “Hitler’s logic.”17 Such a logic ascribes superiority to what is and inferiority to what either cannot be or has passed out of being. Values are linked to meaning, and meaning is a function of signs and symbols and their grammar or rules of usage that make them communicable. Without such systems, they are merely pragmatic with a tinge of hedonism: we enjoy what works out, and we suffer from and learn to avoid what does not (“Eat this, but make sure not to eat that”; “Stay off the moors at night!”). But the irony of our ability to enjoy things that are not good for us, and even those things that might make us suffer, brings the force of meaning to the fore. What is meaningful for us is already constitutive of my use of the object pronoun “us.” Meaning and the language in which it is embedded are functions of a social world. The social world is, however, a fragile world premised upon the intersubjective web of intentions and their intended features. This means, as Alfred Schutz so aptly observed, that the social world, like normality, is an achievement, and although we are all born into this achievement, the achievement of its continuity and adaptation is a function of our participation in this world, a world of selves and others.18 Whiteness, then, as a system of Whiteness, then, as a system of meaning and identity is an achievement. It is constructed by the societies in which we live, or as it is often put in contemporary academic parlance, it is a social construction. The portrait I have just given is not, however, the way in which whiteness is often discussed and criticized in whiteness studies and critical race theory, and this is because of the prevailing way in which race is generally treated in at least the North American academy. A simple experiment illustrates this point, and I encourage readers who are academics to try it. Whenever I speak to students on the subject of race, I usually begin by asking them what race is. With few exceptions, students simply respond, “Race is a social construction.” The expression has acquired recitational force; simply recite it and the good student will be left alone. But what happens if we do not leave such students alone? What 64

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if many of us, as I have, then ask the students two questions: (1) What does it mean to say that race is a social construction? and (2) Do you believe it? The answer I often get for the first question is that race does not exist. But the second question usually jolts them. After some discussion, I have found it rarely the case that students answer “yes,” which entails the following conclusion: Many academics are teaching students to advance a position that most students do not believe. What is the point of such an exercise? We could advance the Aristotelian stratagem of achieving virtuous actions and dispositions through habit.19 In other words, even if the students don’t initially believe in the fictionality and constructivity of race, their continued appeal to such conclusions will eventually lead to their believing such because that’s all they have come to know. Such a position is, at least from a philosophical perspective, hardly desirable, however, because it lacks a crucial element in a philosophical treatment of the subject—namely, a critical reflection on the subject.20 The mere recitation of this trope of social constructivity is, in other words, a kind of authority pressuring instead of a genuinely critical position. A genuinely critical position occasions a response to the query, “Is that true?” Here are some reflections that have come from students (and I suspect most nonacademics) when provided a genuine opportunity to speak their mind on the subject of racial constructivity. 1. If race is a social construction, why is it that when members of the same designated race pair with each other, they don’t produce children of or who look like the other designated races? 2. If scientists believe that race is a social construction, why is it that medical doctors, who are practitioners of modern medical science, respond to race as matters of life and death? For example, there are treatments that could literally kill a patient if the medication isn’t adjusted along racial lines.21 3. If race is a social construction, why do we “see” races and can identify them sufficiently to create systems that don’t have wider margins of error? All three of these objections are a function of a tendency to ontologize the social to the point of solipsism in much contemporary race theory. This making of the social world into all there is leads to a form of disciplinary decadence in which all knowledge claims from disciplinary perspectives outside of the social sciences are rendered illegitimate by virtue of not being social scientific.22 For such theorists, saying that race is a social construction is equivalent to saying that race is only a social construction. Although there are philosophical critics of race who appeal to some of the life sciences—biology, for example—some of them do so through an isolation of that science from the conjunction of interdisciplinary considerations that would make much sense of such a complex as race. Could one imagine contemporary genetics, for instance, if its methods remained exclusively in biology or philosophical treatments of biology through old Darwinism?23 New Darwinism or evolutionary theory incorporates analyses of sequences and the complexity of computer programing; think, for example, of how contemporary geneticists see genes as chemical programs. And even there, contemporary geneticists 65

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take seriously, as do physicists with the study of actual things in motion, that one should consider such intervening forces as climate, radioactivity, ecological sustainability, and other factors. In short, research in genetics takes seriously the intervening forces of reality. What haunts contemporary discussions of whiteness is an insight from the story of human evolution, and that insight is that the emergence of whites and many people of color in between white and black is a very different story than the emergence of blacks. To say that blacks are a function of white modernity is to chart the course of European expansion and the story of the forms of difference articulated by its efforts at selfunderstanding.24 Blackness and whiteness, in other words, are not ascriptions by which people on the African continent regarded each other prior to the advent of the Arabic; trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades and colonization by Europeans. Whiteness, on the other hand, is not an ascription imposed from without but one developed from within European civilizations. So here we have two social constructions—one imposed from the outside, the other developed from within. Limits to these narratives emerge, however, when we conclude that their being constructed means that there is no material, historical difference prior to those constructions. If this were so, then earlier generations of groups of human beings should be indistinguishable, and the history of the morphological appearance of those groups should lack any causal explanation. One should be able, if it were possible to do so, to go in a time machine and look at human beings in different periods of the first 70,000 years of our species’ existence and “see” the same range of morphological differences that we see today. Or, if we were to pluck members of various communities of human beings from that period and plop them on a street in the contemporary world, we should expect the identity imposed upon those human beings to be any one of the basic ones we use today—that is, black, white, brown, or “mongoloid” versions of those three. As we explore this hypothesis, however, something crucial for the study of whiteness immediately emerges: For a substantial period of the life our species—namely, at least 298,000 years (about 90,000 as an earlier protohuman community and the other 202,000 as “modern” human beings)—there were no people whom we would today upon observation consider to be “white” people. Such people are relative newcomers on the scene. The reason for this conclusion rests in understanding evolution and the human body. Today we have a tendency to talk about people as though people are not of flesh and bone, of consciousness as though it could live disembodied in the social world. Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have pointed out many of the limitations of such a point of view—that disembodiment lacks a perspective (a body, which is a somewhere), which would consign consciousness to being nowhere and having no point of view.25 The problem with disembodiment as a model is that it eliminates the basic “here” and “there” through which knowledge emerges as a process of distinction. It is, as Jean-Paul Sartre aptly points out with his theory of nihilation, the basis of negation. Knowledge could never emerge if we could not distinguish ourselves from other things, and other things from each other.26 Alfred Schutz builds on the insight of embodied consciousness in his phenomenological treatment of social reality as something achieved; it is precisely be66

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cause there are “Others” (other embodied consciousnesses) that the world is constituted through a process of reaching them but doing so in a constantly limited way by virtue of the ongoing processes of their actions or choices. The body is not, however, simply a perspective. It is a living one in an environment that is part of a planet that, too, is part of a solar system that is part of a galaxy that is part of the universe. The planet is subject to forces of gravity and radiation from the sun, so any living thing on the earth must function within such conditions. This means that its “mechanics,” if we will, must be able to do things like regulate heat, and acquire and process energy.27 We know that human beings (Homo sapiens sapiens) evolved from a one-million-year-old Homo erectus (with some versions arguing for the 600,000-year transition of Homo heidelbergensis) on the continent of Africa roughly between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago and then, in some paleoanthropologists’ view, went through a transition into “modern” human beings about 200,000 years ago. A distinct advantage of this new species was the capabilities of its brain, results of which include development of language and culture. Now at this point in the story, the imagination of most readers and many writers has unfortunately been affected by white normativity, for in many portraits, these early prototypical human beings are depicted as very hairy and dirty white people.28 The problem with this portrait is that if they had been so, they would have died out long ago, and there would be no “us.” Some critics of this criticism think the point of this argument rests on a form of fallacious geographicism.29 The point is, however, not about geography but about the challenges posed by a variety of factors in different parts of the world at different moments in time. We see this in the difference of other animals such as foxes and bears, where members of the same species look different in accordance with hot and cold climate zones. Our species evolved in a hot place with wide-open savannas. Its members faced a merciless sun, and although their intelligence eventually made them the most feared species in that region, which enabled them to develop such abilities as REM sleep, they did not yet have the resources for protecting themselves against the climate beyond the resources of modest shelter and their own skin. In short, those early human beings were dark-skinned because they had to be so. Otherwise, melanoma would have been an immediate peril of their existence (especially so for the occasional albino child who did not achieve sexual maturation and proliferate there because of cancer). So, in spite of white normativity’s depiction, the re-ality is that early human beings were very dark beings with tightly curled hair and all the other features necessary to protect them from the sun’s radiation and enable the release of heat. (The danger of an overheated brain is well known today: heat stroke.) As the story unfolds of the mechanics of the human organism, it becomes clear that what we would see if we were to look at them would be the people today we call black people. Those people managed to spread to parts of the Southern Hemisphere by taking to the seas at least 50,000 or 40,000 years ago, evidenced by recent discoveries that people inhabited such regions as Australia, the South Pacific islands, and South America by those early periods.30 (Another presumption of white normativity is the notion that human beings have an irresistible urge to move “up” or “north-ward.” It strikes me that it may be more logical for early people to have followed the movements of the sun, which would mean eastward or westward.) Since climactic conditions do not remain constant, 67

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neither do such resources as food, and if we add to this equation another dimension of the human brain—namely, curiosity—the global spread of our species was inevitable. As the story goes, other species had evolved from our common Homo erectus ancestors a little earlier than us during those primordial periods, and they had done so in Ice Age Europe and Western Asia. One set was Homo neanderthalensis. This species used to be presented in popular culture as rather stupid cave dwellers, but their depiction was radically “humanized” upon the discovery that they had to have been “white” in the sense of light complexioned and straight-haired. They were physiologically different from our species in many ways that contradict popular portraits. Instead of huge male oafs with clubs over their shoulders dragging the female members of their species along the ground by their hair, they turn out to have been short, stocky creatures with long biceps and short forearms, a skull governed by a very large face and a larger brain than Homo sapiens sapiens, very dense bones, and a variety of adaptations to retain heat, such as compactness, a very large nose, and white or very pale skin. They made tools and survived in Europe and Asia till about 20,000 or 30,000 years ago. Some of our ancestors entered Europe and Western Asia about 40,000 years ago, which meant that for a time they lived alongside the Neanderthals, but the latter species soon died out, and debate rages today on whether they were absorbed by those early Homo sapiens sapiens into a new species (“us”) or were rendered extinct under pressures of environment or conflicts with our ancestors.31 Much evidence, the most compelling of which is the absence of neanderthal DNA in most subsaharan Africans and a tiny presence of Neanderthal and another species— Denisovans—in everyone else, suggests the latter.32 With regard to the continued story of members of our species who went into Europe and Asia, their migration stimulated a morphological change in their descendants. It was not only the severe cold that posed a threat to those bands of human beings who settled in such challenging regions, but also the effects of environments governed by limited sunlight. Melanin, which was great protection from the sun, becomes a liability in the North, where it would inhibit reception of vitamin D, which comes from the sun. By contrast, living along the equator posed a different problem: enough vitamin D but too much sun. In the north, absence of enough vitamin D led to rickets in those who had too much melanin. Lighter skin, which was a liability in the southern regions, became an asset in the North, and those individuals began to thrive.33 The upshot of this story, which is the prevailing story of human evolution and subsequent morphological differentiation, is that the physical features that we have come to associate with whiteness were not always apparent in our species. Such features, and consequently the people we associate with them, have only been around for probably 8,000 years or less. What this means is that the operative conditions of identity in historic inquiry that have dominated our studies of human beings should be radically changed, for those are built upon the question, “How did black people come about?” when in fact they should pose the opposite question: “How did white and other light-skinned peoples come about?” We are already seeing some of the ideological responses to this realization through recent efforts to reassert white normativity, as witnessed by the popularity of such racist books as Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Bell Curve, the first of which garnered the Pulitzer prize.34 These books accept the evidence of the movement of human beings, but they add 68

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to the equation the notion that morphological changes in the North over the past 8,000 years were evolutionary changes that stimulated the great achievements of human civilization. They are, in other words, white Manifest Destiny updated. In a nutshell, they argue that the pressures of Africa stimulated the development of a species with limited intelligence, but the unique conditions of Europe and Asia stimulated greater intelligence and cultural development. We see here the return of Hitler’s logic. What is missing from these narratives is the fact that human beings have never stood still. It is not that they went north and did not return till times of Greek and Roman expansion. There has always been a back-and-forth and sideward set of movements in which “outside” genes entered communities. But more, the development of human culture led to something that brought to a halt the pressure to evolve, and that is our achievement of homeostasis. Human beings, in other words, no longer have to adapt to environments because we carry our environment with us. Wherever human beings are today, they manage to manipulate their immediate environment to a range of roughly 50 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. There is, in other words, an environmental normativity that most human communities live by these days, and that is roughly those along the Mediterranean latitudes. What we have today externally, then, is our species as we have looked since about 8,000 years ago, but internally we are the same as we were, with very minor mutations, about 200,000 years ago or so. Given human movement and the achievement of homoeostasis, genetic advantages and disadvantages are constantly mixing, so what with complete isolation and no homeostatic response would have been the continued creation of new species of hominids has come to a halt, and we remain a single species, evidenced by our ability to produce fertile offsprings from what has become known as racial mixture.35 What is more, globalism—begun thousands of years ago as human beings migrated, got lost in various regions, and then kept finding each other and initiating trade and marriages across communities living in different climactic zones—has brought such a spread of genes that, as Winthrop Jordan pointed out recently, whatever viability the notion of races may have once had has been lost, and the reality of the future is that there will be only one race, marked by a maximum presence of diverse genes.36 In an odd way, our future is becoming our past.

Conclusion My aim in this chapter has been to outline some of the limitations I have encountered in whiteness studies. The account I give is not meant to apply to every researcher on whiteness but only to those tropes that have become both popular and dominant. What is needed is a concerted struggle against the subtextual reintroduction of notions of white Manifest Destiny that undergird scholarship saturated with white normativity. The reason for fighting against this is a matter of getting the story—the true story—right on the human past so as to understand the human present and make sensible decisions for our future. It is clear, for example, that getting the story wrong has led to rationalizations that make our notions of difference that govern our understanding of who and what we are appear more radical than they in fact are. And more, failure to understand the 69

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complex mechanisms by which we have been able to survive for so short a period on our home planet are such that we could imagine the absurdity of policies that demand no less than a lighter-skinned future for humankind. Whiteness, in other words, is a very costly venture for our species. Its hegemony functions much like the folly of the continued effort to make European pastures out of deserts. In the words of Gregory Stock: If you wanted to build a superior human, you would probably choose black skin, at least if the person was going to spend much time in the sun. A comparison of an elderly black person’s skin with the wrinkled, damaged hide of an elderly white or Asian sun worshiper shows this clearly. Moreover, the genetic controls of melanin production are probably not complex, since a mere three to five genes seem to determine skin color. But don’t hold your breath waiting for such engineering. A genetic module for black skin is unlikely to be in big demand anytime soon. Blacks certainly don’t need it, and few nonblacks will want it. Race and parentage carry so much cultural baggage that few parents would use their children as political billboards when sunscreens, clothing, or even drugs and lotions that stimulate melanin production to create natural-looking tans, can protect their skin.37 In the end, a key reminder in whiteness studies should also be bringing out the humanity of white people. It is absurd for us to expect people to argue against the value of their own survival. But with such critical engagements should also, always, be an understanding that our liberating pleas for common ground bring along with them an underlying optimism not only of what is to be done, but also what can be done.

Notes 1. See W.E.B. Du Bois’s poignant reflections on his Atlanta years in The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), especially pp. 222 and 228. 2. The most influential discussion of white privilege is Peggy McKintosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Independent School (winter 1990): 31–36. For an excellent recent summary of some of these views with some philosophical reflections, see Cynthia Kaufman, “A User’s Guide to White Privilege,” Radical Philosophy Review 4, nos. 1 and 2 (2002): 30–38. See also Frances V. Rains, “Is the Benign Really Harmless?” Deconstructing Some ‘Benign’ Manifestations of Operationalized White Privilege,” in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 77–102. 3. See Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), pp. 54–55 [Prussian Academy, pp. 436–37]. 4. On this point, cf. Cynthia Kaufman, “User’s Guide,” pp. 31–32. 5. See José Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932), chapter 14, “Who Rules the World?,” especially p. 134. 6. Many whites use the term “merit” in bad faith. They appeal to it only when the decks are stacked in their favor. Many institutions function pretty well with mere average performance.

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Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness The effort to include people of color usually leads to a response on the part of homogenous institutions in the form of attempting to justify their past exclusions and continued exclusionary practices. Under the latter circumstance, many whites depend on the absence of merit while advancing it as a rationalization. That is why it is a form of bad faith. While depending on whiteness as a trump card, they advance merit under the presumption of black mediocrity, while blacks in such situations find themselves facing a nihilistic situation wherein no amount of achievement ever becomes relevant. I have seen this phenomenon time and again in many of America’s first-tier educational institutions, where there are two extremes—either inflated standards on black candidates or deflated standards for “less threatening” black candidates. The most threatening blacks are consistently those who are the highest ranked people at what they do. Many such institutions could, in other words, use a healthy dose of genuine meritocracy. For discussion of how bad faith configures in this discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995), passim, but especially part 3. For a discussion of the “mass” dimension of American meritocracy, which is the model of whiteness here, see also Ortega, Revolt of the Masses, especially pp. 25–26. 7. For an analysis of this question, see Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, “Victims No More,” Radical Philosophy Review 1, no. 1 (1998): 17–34. 8. See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition with added prefaces (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), part 1: “Antisemitism.” See also Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 9. See, for example, Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), chapter 3, and Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4. 10. For a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, chapter 3. 11. For development of this argument, see Gordon, Existentia Africana, chapter 4. 12. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). Foucault’s point addressed the modern sociological situation of a near symbiotic relationship between power and knowledge, where the presence of one carries the association of the other, a circumstance that he describes as “power/knowledge.” 13. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Bales argues against fixed models of vulnerability and advances a theory of shifting vulnerability. An individual could find him- or herself powerful at one moment and radically vulnerable at another to the point of being enslaved. In those moments, his or her knowledge of others is irrelevant because he or she is not considered a point of view—that knowledge, contra Foucault, does encounter itself as power. But the enslaver “knows” the slave as a function of power over the slave. We thus find a unilateral structure of disciplinary inculcation where, in defense of Foucault, the practice of disciplining the slave is a disciplinary practice of its own of the master. But Bales’s point would be that it is not the slave’s doing. 14. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), chapter 6. 15. Ibid. 16. For discussion, see Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, chapter 6. See also Gorden, Existentia Africana, pp. 114–15. 71

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 17. C. W. Cassineli, Total Revolution: A Comparative Study of Germany under Hitler, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and China under Mao (Santa Barbara, CA: Clio Books, 1976), pp. 21–27. 18. See Alfred Schutz, The Collected Papers, Vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. with an intro. by Maurice Natanson; preface by H. L. Van Breda (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), part 2. See also Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, pp. 20–22 and 50–56; and Existentia Africana, 72–80. 19. See, for example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, trans., historical intro., and commentary by Christopher Rowe and philosophical intro. and commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1103a14–1104b3. 20. As a political strategy, it functions like the imposition of a new religion; subsequent generations will simply believe such since that is what they have always been told. In this case, the strategy is not for the present generation but subsequent ones. 21. The varieties of race-identified genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and Alpha (Mongoloid/Northeast Asian) and Beta (Semitic/Middle Eastern) Thalassemia are examples, the presence of which indicate recent ancestors from particular racial groups from particular regions. The paths certain diseases might take—such as that of Pityriasis Rosea—differs for blacks than other groups (for discussion, see C. Finch). Medications show different patterns as well. Here is an example: A black colleague of mine suffers from Myasthenia. On one occasion of relapse, he was suffering from severely high blood pressure. His physician prescribed hydrochlorot to reduce his blood pressure. His condition was worsened, however, by his treatment. Fortunately, there was a Ghanaian physician on staff who was the senior supervisor for the day. He quickly prescribed Zestril, and my colleague’s blood pressure immediately began to lower. Here is what that physician told my colleague: “Many white physicians do not understand that some medications have adverse side effects upon black bodies.” He informed the general physician, and that physician agreed to prescribe Zestril. Although the human gene pool has sequences permeating across racial lines, the reality is that there is a greater diversity of genes among blacks than any other population group. Thus, medication developed through presumptions of white normativity will encounter nonwhites, and especially blacks, as “abnormal.” The probability is greater of finding a normal sample by moving from the greatest diversity of sequences to those of less diversity. See, e.g., Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 114–15. 22. For discussion of disciplinary decadence, see Lewis R. Gordon, “The Human Condition in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence: Thoughts on Knowing and Learning,” Philosophical Studies in Education 34(2003): 105–123. 23. For a succinct discussion of old Darwinism and its limits, see Benjamin Farrington, What Darwin Really Said: An Introduction to His Life and Theory of Evolution, foreword by Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Schocken Books, 1966). 24. For a wonderful, influential portrait, see V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 25. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962). 26. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2 (1970): 4–5; and his discussion of nihilation in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), introduction and part 1. 27. The discussion that follows draws much from Dr. Charles Finch III’s “Race and Human Origins,” in his Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the American Eden (Decatur, GA: 72

Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness Khenti, 1991), pp. 1–57. See also Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar, From Lucy to Language (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Johanson has also put together a website summary: http://www.becominghuman.org/. 28. This is rampant. Even the Johanson website documentary depicts, for example, the first Australian Aboriginals who left finger paintings in the Koonalda cave some 40,000 years ago as very hairy naked white men, complete with straight red hair! We need simply wonder why, then, the European settlers some 39,700 years later encountered only very dark-skinned Aboriginals. 29. See, for example, Naomi Zack’s Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 36–37. 30. For research on early migrations through East Asia, Australia, and to South America, see the groundbreaking work of Walter A. Neves and Hector Pucciarelli, “The Zhoukoudian Upper Cave Skull 101 as seen from the Americas,” Journal of Human Evolution 34, no. 2 (February 1998): 219–22; and Walter A. Neves, André Prous, Rolando González-José, Renato Kipnis, Joseph Powell, “Early Holocene Human Skeletal Remains from Santana do Riacho, Brazil: Implications for the Settlement of the New World,” Journal of Human Evolution 45, no. 1 (July 2003): 19–42. 31. See, for example, C. J. Mauricio, P. B. Pettitt, P. Souto, E. Trinkaus, H. van der Plicht et al., “The Early Upper Paleolithic Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and Modern Human Emergence in Iberia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 96 (1999): 7,604–609, and the rebuttal by I. Tattersall and J. H. Schwartz, “Hominids and Hybrids: The Place of Neanderthals in Human Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 96 (1999): 7,117–19. See also the website: http://www. talkorigins.org/faqs/ homs/ lagarvelho.html. 32. This argument is made by Tattersall and Schwartz in “Hominids and Hybrids.” 33. See Finch, “Race and Human Origins,” pp. 34–37. We may wonder about individuals who went north but coastal. The cold may have stimulated a change in their hair, since long, straight hair is better protection under the cold, but not necessarily a change in their skin since they would have access to another source of vitamin D—namely, deep-sea fish. Research on indigenous peoples along such northern islands as those in Japan may reveal, for instance, a story of dark-skinned straight or at least more loose curly haired peoples. We may wonder if a similar story might not have been the case for those along what is today known as the British islands or the coasts of Scandinavia. 34. Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), and Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). A feature of these books is their posing of the question of white dominance as though that were an inevitable path of history. But we should bear in mind that white domination is very new on the scene, and the rate of consumption that such domination has entailed does not make it a sustainable condition for our planet. Who knows what the future will bring? 35. Consider the implications of a term from old racial ideology: mulatto. This term emerged from comparing an offspring of a white and a black to that of a horse and a donkey the result of which is a mule. In this view, race is akin to species. An on-topolitical jolt emerges, then, at every moment such an offspring either becomes pregnant or impregnates another human being. 36. Winthrop Jordan, “The Uniqueness of the One-Drop Rule,” presented at the conference Race, Globalization and the New Ethnic Studies, The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University, March 6–9, 2003. 37. Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 114–15.

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CHAPTER 6 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF BIKO’S BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS

Mabogo Samuel More (also known as Percy Mabogo More) has pointed out the philosophical importance of Steve Biko’s thought in the areas of Africana existential philosophy and social and political philosophy. In the latter, Biko’s thought is distinguished by his critique of liberalism and his discussions of the political and epistemic conditions for black liberation. As for the former, much is offered from his readings of Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and Fanon, and Biko’s own creative understanding of social identities formed by political practice, that is most acutely formulated in his theory of Black Consciousness. This gathering notion has generated discussion in terms of its existential dimensions in the work of Mabogo More and the resources of psychoanalysis and deconstruction in the writings of Rozena Maart. This short essay will add some thoughts on its phenomenological significance. Why phenomenology? Phenomenology examines the formation of meaning as constituted by consciousness where the latter is relationally understood as always directed to a manifestation of something. That Black Consciousness refers to a form of consciousness already calls for a phenomenological analysis. Biko is explicit about its inclusiveness, that Black Consciousness is not premised upon biology or birth but social and political location. Under the brutal system of apartheid in South Africa, whole categories of people were positioned below those who counted most—namely, whites. That system generated lower layers of subhuman existence ranging from Asians and Coloureds to blacks. The Coloureds were designations for mixed offspring of Afrikaner (white South Africans of Dutch descent) and indigenous blacks. The racial schema made British and indigenous black offspring a problematic category. Among the Asians, the East Indian population was the largest, although Northeast Asians were also included below whites (except, at times, for the Japanese). As with American apartheid, Jews complicated the schema as they were generally seen as Eastern European and German Caucasian immigrants to the region. The South African Jewish story is complicated because there was also a group of descendants of Yemenite Jews who migrated there at least 1,000 years prior to the influx of Ashkenazi and small numbers of Sephardi during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The work of Neil Roos has offered additional complications to the South African schema, since there were few white women (and in some communities none) among the Boers who eventually became the Afrikaners, which meant that the growth of their community had to be through sexual relationships with indigenous women. It is clear, argues Roos, that children who could “pass” made their way back into the Boer community and contributed to the line of contemporary whites, and those who could not assimilate fell into the world that became Coloureds. 75

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Among Biko’s contributions is a generation of political mythos that both offered a critique of racial formation through actively constructing an expanded and new conception of one of its categories. For him, East Indians, Coloureds, and indigenous blacks in South Africa all became blacks, a designation that reflected the reality of their political situation. Biko’s addition offers a politically situated understanding of consciousness that lends itself at first to a Hegelian-affected model of racial relations and a semiological and, ultimately, existential phenomenological model that suggests more than the Hegelian one. The Hegelian narrative, as articulated in his Phenomenology of Spirit and with some additional considerations in his Philosophy of Right, is familiar. The self is not a complete formation of itself but a dialectical unfolding of overcoming through which selves and correlated concepts of domination, bondage, and freedom emerge. The self, so to speak, is always struggling with its own fragmentation and incompleteness in relation to a world that resists it and through which other selves emerge through such struggles. A point of realization is the understanding that the self cannot be a self by itself. In transcendental terms, the only meaningful understanding of selfhood and freedom is that manifested in a world of others. The semiological addition points out that the relations of meaning accompany such an unfolding, which manifest a fragile balance at each point of identification. The matrix of such a system is often binary and it offers seductions in relation to each binary point. Consequently, much of the semiological discussion is about what happens between white and black, which everyone occupies always at a point short of an ideal. Hence, whiteness by itself is never white enough except in relation to its distance from blackness, which makes this domination also a form of dependency. Blackness is always too black except in relation to its distance from itself, which means that one is always too black in relation to white but never white enough. Coloured, Asian, and brown function as degrees of whiteness and blackness. The slipperiness of these categories means a system of unceasing conflict the subtext of which is a teleological whiteness. Biko’s notion of Black Consciousness demands shifting such a telos. To aim at becoming black undermines the legitimacy of whiteness, but it does so with an additional consideration. Whiteness, in spite of the historic and empirical reality of mixture (as pointed out by Roos and many other scholars in recent scholarship on white formation), works on a presumption of purity. Blackness, however, is a broad category that includes, as is the case in the New World from the Americas to North America—a mixture. Consequently, Biko was able to work with a range of peoples under the rubric of blackness that ironically includes some of those listed under old racial designations as “white.” The old racial designations supported absolute interpretations of such identities, but Biko argued for their permeability. As a semiological notion, Black Consciousness is thus fluid. It becomes a term that can be understood as an identity of most people. It also brings under critical reflection the question of the formation of whiteness—there was not always, for instance, a Europe. That geopolitical notion emerged from the process that succeeded the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 in the name of Christendom. The consequent unfolding of a political anthropology of hierarchical racial formation brought along with it the transformation of what was, in reality, the western peninsula of Asia into “Europe” 76

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as literally the home of white people, of Europeans. (I will leave aside the current political dynamics in the formation of a European Union in the face of the multiraciality of nearly all of these countries.) The Hegelian challenge returns here through the fragility of these relations by virtue of their dependence on dialectics of struggle for recognition. There was no reason for Christendom to have considered itself white nor for Moorish Islam to have considered itself black, except for the unique consequences that led to the formation of Europe as the place of whites and Africa as the place of blacks. The Hegelian model affirms their mutual role in the formation of their modern identity. This point could be illustrated through the etymology of the word “race.” The term has immediate roots in the French by way of the Italian word razza, which in turn suggests origins in Spain or Portugal through the term raza, which, according to Sebastian de Covarrubias in 1611, referred to “the caste of purebred horses, which are marked by a brand so that they can be recognized . . . Raza in lineages is meant negatively, as in having some raza of Moor or Jew.”1 Yet, if we consider that Spain and Portugal were under Moorish (Afro-Arabic) rule for 800 years, a continued etymology suggests the Arabic word ra’s, which is related to the Hebrew and Amharic words rosh and ras—head, beginning, or origin. One could push this history/genealogy further and go to the Coptic or to the ancient Egyptian/Kmtian considerations in the word Ra, as in the god Amon-Ra, which refers to the sun and, at times, the King of all gods or located in the origin stories of the gods. In short, the theme of origins, beginnings, and the rising sun, even when connected to animals such as horses and dogs, suggests the following narrative. The Moors introduced ra’s into the Iberian Peninsula (Andalusia) to articulate origins and to differentiate even themselves from the Christian Germanic peoples (Visigoths) they conquered and colonized. By 1492, the by then hybrid (Germanic-Afro-Latin-Arabic) peoples who pushed out the Moors (mostly Afro-Arabic, but by this point probably Afro-Arabic-Latin-Germanic) in the name of Christendom, used the term that by then became raz and eventually razza to designate the foreign darker peoples within a theologically oriented naturalistic episteme who, in a holy war, were pushed further southward back to the continent of Africa and into (as they imagined it) the Atlantic Ocean and the New World. Although both uses of the word and its mutation refer to foreigners, the indexical point is what has shifted in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Where ra’s may have once meant “I” and “we” who are from elsewhere, it became “they” who are not from here and who exemplified a deviation from a theological order in which being Christian located one in a normative and natural relationship with God. The discursive shift into what is often referred to as the “other” took shape. We see here the compatibility with the Hegelian model, since the term emerged, through struggle, to the effect of a mutual formation. But, as we will see, its slope was a slippery one, so its movement went beyond the threshold of “self ” and “other.” At this point, a connection between Biko and Frantz Fanon might prove useful. In his critique of Hegel and the question of recognition, Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks, which he elaborated further in The Wretched of the Earth, that antiblack racism structures blacks outside of the dialectics of recognition and the ethical struggle of self and other. In effect, the semiological structure of oppositions pushes the poles to a 77

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continued extreme in racist situations. The result is a struggle to enter ethico-political relations, ironically to establish the self both as “self ” and “other.” The not-self-and-notother is characterized by Fanon as “the zone of nonbeing” in his early work, and in his final one, it simply means to be the damned of the earth. For our purposes, this racialized schema below the Hegelian model, when mastery/Lordship and enslavement/bondsman have been issued as overcoming, demands an approach that addresses contradictions that are not of a dialectical kind. The call for Black Consciousness already demands addressing a “lived reality,” as Fanon would say, a meaning-constituting point of view, that requires acknowledging, although at the same time structured, as lacking a point of view. In effect, it is the point of view from that which is not a point of view. The consequence is the retort: At least the other is an other. To become such initiates ethical relations. To arrive at such a conclusion, additional phenomenological considerations are needed. One must not only take into account the lived-reality of consciousness, but also how reflection itself already situates a relationship with contingent forces in a dialectics of freedom. Put differently, the self is posed as the self through the realization of others, which means that a social framework for selfhood is that upon which even identity (an effort to recognize the self) relies. Linked to all this is the communicative dimension of every process of recognition. At the basic level of conscious life, which we share with other animals, this communication is primarily signification for activities at the level of signs, but the human being also lives at the level of meaning wrought with ambiguity, as Ernst Cassire, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have argued. This other level is governed by symbols more than signs, of meanings more than signification. At this level, which is a fundamentally social level, the organization of meaning does not only affect life but also construct new forms of life. Fanon characterized this phenomenon as sociogenesis. Biko explored in more detail its political dimensions. Political phenomena are those governed by discursive opposition. To understand this, one should think about the etymological roots of politics in the polis or ancient city-state. Although the term is Greek in origin, the activity is much older. Walls to protect them surrounded ancient cities. This encirclement established a relationship between those within and those without, and in each instance different governing norms emerged. The relation to without is primarily one of war; this relationship within would dissolve the city, since it would be a civil war. It is not possible for people within the city to live without disagreement, however, which means that opposition, short of war (between states), is needed. The shift to the discursive, recognized in ancient times through to the present as “speech,” initiated or produced new forms of relations, identities, and ways of life that became known as politics. The question asked by Fanon and Biko (and most modern revolutionaries, but especially so by African ones and their Diaspora) is the role of politics in the context of political formation. In other words, what should one do when the place of discursive opposition has been barred to some people? What should those who live in the city but are structurally outside of it do if they do not accept their place of being insiders who have been pushed outside? Their questions pose the possibility of politics for the sake of establishing political life. It is an activity that is paradoxical. They must do politics in order to establish politics, where politics is recognized according to 78

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norms that will always respond to them as illegitimate—as violent—by attempting to change what is already recognized as the discursive limits. Put differently, one group wants to claim benevolence to those whom they dominate, and the other must seize its freedom. Echoing Frederick Douglass, Biko writes: We must learn to accept that no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. We must accept that the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress . . . . The system concedes nothing without demand, for it formulates its very method of operation on the basis that the ignorant will learn to know, the child will grow into an adult and therefore demands will begin to be made. It gears itself to resist demands in whatever way it sees fit. When you refuse to make these demands and choose to come to a round table to beg for your deliverance, you are asking for the contempt of those who have power over you.2 We see here, then, a conflict not simply between politics (in the city) and the nonpolitical (beyond the walls of the city), but also about the very notion of politics itself. There are those within the city who are structured as though outside of it, which means the city has to explain why discursive opposition with certain inhabitants is not the continuation of politics instead of the feared attack on social order. Biko’s pseudonym “Frank Talk” situated this opposition in apartheid South Africa: Why was the response to him, as the embodiment of speech, the brutal assertion of the state? His assassination was not simply one of a man but also an effort to suppress an activity and an idea, of political entities outside of the narrow framework of those defined by the state in terms with more political consequences than political activities. In other words, the apartheid state was not only a war on people of color, it was also a war on politics. Biko understood this. His genius included rendering politics black. By fusing the apartheid state’s opposition to blacks with its opposition to politics, he was able to pose a genuinely revolutionary question of social transformation. The question of citizenship instead of rule, as Mahmood Mamdani has formulated for the opposition, became a question, as well, that interrogated white legitimacy in political terms. I stress political terms here because of the bankruptcy the antiapartheid groups found in the assertion of ethical terms. Recall that the ethical already presupposed the self/other dialectic. Biko’s (and Fanon’s) challenge was to show that much had to have been in place for ethics to be the dominating factor. To assert the ethical, consequently had the effect of presupposing the inherent justice of the political situation when it was circumstance itself that was being brought into question. The political conflict with ethics in this sense, then, is the reality that colonialism has left us with a situation that requires political intervention for ethical life. In Biko’s words: “In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible—a more human face.”3 What Biko also showed, however, is that such a structure and encomium render politics black. Black Consciousness is thus identical with political life, and those who are willing to take on the risk of politics in a context where a state has waged war on politics are, as 79

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their opposition mounts, blackened by such a process. As a political concept, this makes the potential range of Black Consciousness wide enough to mean the collapse of the antidemocratic state. The moving symbol of this was the expansion of that consciousness in apartheid South Africa and its spilling over into the international community with the consequence of a response that required more than the question of inclusion instead of the construction of a different state. The new state, as Fanon would no doubt argue, now faces its political struggles, and, as scholars such as Ashwin Desai, Richard Pithouse, and Nigel Gibson have shown, the poors have emerged as a new dimension of that struggle in the postapartheid government’s effort to put the brakes on democratic expansion; a move from possible socialism and de facto liberalism to neoliberalism has brought with it renewed tension between citizenship and rule. I would like to, at this point, explore further in phenomenological terms the significance of the gift of “a more human face.” The phenomenological dimensions of politics are that discursive opposition requires communication, that in turn requires intersubjectivity. There is, thus, a social dimension of political life, and much of the oppression has been an effort to bar social life and hence political life to certain groups of people. Phenomenology also demands that one examines consciousness as a lived, embodied reality, not as a floating abstraction. What this means is that consciousness must always be considered as indexical and in the flesh. Speech should not, from this perspective, be considered an expression of consciousness but instead as symbiotically related to the bodies by which, through which, and in which it is made manifest. In human beings, this phenomenon is manifested in our entire bodies, but it is most acutely so in our face and hands, our primary sites of signification, although the entire body is symbolic. It is no accident that oppression often takes the form of forcing its subjects downward, to look down, so their faces cannot be seen, and even where there is nothing they can do, their hands are often tied. In these instances, oppression is an effort to erase the face and eliminate the gesticulating capacity of hands; it is an effort to render a subject speechless. In antiblack societies, to be black is to be without a face. This is because only human beings (and presumed equals of human beings) have faces, and blacks, in such societies, are not fully human beings. By raising the question of Black Consciousness, Biko also raises the question of black human beings, which is considered a contradiction of terms in such societies. A conflict comes to the fore that is similar to the one on politics. Just as the state was shown to have been waging war on politics, and that politics was black, so, too, one finds a war against the human being, and in it one against humanity, in which looking at the human being in black face becomes crucial to looking at the human being as a human being. This requires transforming the relationship of I–it (“them blacks”) to I–You (with blacks) in which an “us” and a “we” could be considered from the point of view of blacks. When “I” could see being “you,” even when it is impossible for me to be identical with you, there is possibility of transparency even at the level of conflict. In effect, the movement is the ethical responsibility of a shared world. The phenomenology of Black Consciousness suggests, then, that such a consciousness cannot properly function as a negative term of a prior positivity. Its link to the political is such that its opposition would have to be the chimera, appealed to in retreats to neutrality 80

A Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness

and blindness. Should we consider, for instance, the popular liberal model of cosmopolitanism? The conclusion will be that such claims hold subterranean endorsements of white normativity. This is because white consciousness is not properly a racial consciousness. It is that which does not require its relative term, which means, in effect, that it could simply assert itself, at least in political terms, as consciousness itself. The effect would be an affirmation of status quo conditions through an appeal to an ethics of the self: The cosmopolitanist fails to see, in other words, that politics is at work in the illusion of transcending particularity. To point this out to the cosmopolitanist would constitute an intrusion of the political in the dream world of ethical efficacy. It would mean to blacken the cosmopolitan world, or, in the suggestive language of Biko’s critique, to render it conscious of political reality, to begin its path into Black Consciousness. We are living in the period of postapartheid in South Africa. That is a good thing. What is unfortunate is that the prize has come along with an aggressive assertion at a global level of the kinds of liberalism Biko criticized in I Write What I Like. The path of this development has been a world situation in which the war on politics has also returned as forces of destruction have pushed regimes more to the right. As the rightwing in liberal democracies and theocratic states has ascended, the dissolution of civil liberties has been such that political life is in even greater jeopardy. In this global order, Biko’s thought has come full circle, where even liberalism finds itself in increasing need of political solutions to political problems and therein faces the possibility of its own Black and hopefully far less naïve Consciousness. As the South African example reveals, neoliberalism has meant the construction of procedural structures that enable, as Mamdani has argued, the shining example of a deracialized state in the sullied interests of a radically unequal and more rigorously racist civil society. In spite of the gripe and anxieties over the black middle class and small exemplars of black wealth, which is still more an exception than a rule, in the new South Africa, the fact remains that white South Africans can now benefit from white supremacy without shame in the global arena. The structures that now more rigorously subordinate groups of South Africans in poverty (“the poors”) present themselves in ways that at first seem to make Biko’s appeal to a black consciousness problematic. Nevertheless, the blacks who now represent blackness in the South African government are clearly not based on Biko’s political designation, but the old South African racial designations. But the fact remains that the liberalism they exemplify clearly also lacks the political understanding of Black Consciousness that he offered. In effect, they have taken the reins from the whites and have presented a more rigorous means of disarming the political voice of excluded populations. Biko’s critique of liberalism ultimately challenged appeals to blindness. If politics itself is what is at stake in the failure to address blackness, then there is the ironic conclusion that the contemporary South African state is also an antiblack one. The places for speech, for protest, avowed by the efforts of a liberal state in the African context, requires challenging claims of homogeneity in African societies and the reflexive appeals to a communitarian consciousness. In effect, it means that sites of opposition must be protected, but such communities are genealogically linked to Biko’s formulation of blackness. In effect, the struggle of politics itself has returned. But at this moment, since 81

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it is an avowed liberal democracy in power, it now faces the contradictions of its claims. For its claims of transcending the pathologies of many of its neighbors rests on possessing what many of them lack. Some liberalization would be welcomed in central Africa, as Kwame Gyekye and Elias Bongmba have recently argued, but the contemporary South African situation is revealing that such an achievement, if wedded to neoliberal demands for state-level equality and a radically unequal, market-centered economy, brings liberalism in conflict with the political promise it was supposed to exemplify. Biko did not consider Black Consciousness a fixed category. Whether as the poors or the blacks, the political itself now faces global challenges that reveal the continued significance of Biko’s foresight on the dialectics of its appearance. Freedom continues to demand a face.

Notes 1. Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozsco, Tesoro de la lengua (1611), quoted in and translated by David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maueen Quilligan (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 79. 2. Steve Bantu Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 91. 3. Ibid., 98.

Bibliography Biko, Steve Bantu. 2002. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. with a personal memoir by Aelred Stubbs. Preface by Desmond Tutu. An intro. by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana. A new foreword by Lewis R. Gordon (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press). Bongmba, Elias Kifon. 2006. The Dialectics of Transformation in Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press). ——. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1, Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press). Desai, Ashwin. 2002. We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa. (New York: Monthly Review Press). ——. 2000. South Africa: Still Revolting (Johannesburg: Impact Africa Publishing). ——. 2000a. The Poors of Chatsworth: Race, Class and Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Durban, SA ; Madiba Publishers). Dussel, Enrique. 2003. Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, trans. and ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Lanham, MD : Rowman and Littlefield). ——. 1995. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum). Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Charles Lamm Markman (New York: Grove Press). 82

A Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness ——. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. An intro. Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press). Gibson, Nigel, ed. 2005. Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press). ——. 2003. Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Cambridge, UK : Polity Press). Gordon, Jane Anna. 2007. “The Gift of Double Consciousness: Some Obstacles to Grasping the Contributions of the Colonized,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham, MD : Lexington Books), 143–161. Gordon, Lewis R. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge, MA : Cambridge University Press). ——. 2007. “Problematic People and Epistemic Decolonization: Toward the Postcolonial in Africana Political Thought,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham, MD : Lexington Books), 121–141. ——. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge). Gyekye, Kwame. 1997. Tradition and Modernity, Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——. 1995/1987. An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, revised edition (Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friederich. 1989. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity/Prometheus Books). ——. 1979 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——. 1967. Philosophy of Right, trans. with notes by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon). ——. 1956. The Philosophy of History, with prefaces by Charles Hegel. Trans. J. Sibree. A new intro. C. J. Friedrich (New York: Dover Publications). Maart, Rozena. 1990. Talk About It (Ontario, Canada: Williams-Wallace Publishers). ——. 2004. Rosa’s District Six (Toronto, Canada: Tsar Publications). ——. 2006. The Politics of Consciousness, the Consciousness of Politics: When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness, vol. 1, The Interrogation of Writing (Guelph, Canada: Awomandla Publishers). ——. 2006a. The Politics of Consciousness, the Consciousness of Politics: When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness, vol. 2, The Research Settings, the Interrogation of Speech and Imagination (Guelph, Canada: Awomandla Publishers). Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press). More, Mabogo P. Samuel. 2004. “Philosophy in South Africa Under and After Apartheid,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Wiredu (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers), 149–160. ——. 2004a. “Albert Luthuli, Steve Biko, and Nelson Mandela: The Philosophical Basis of their Thought and Practice,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Wiredu (Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers), 207–215. ——. 2004b. “Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher,” Alternation 11, no. 1: 79–108. Nirenberg, David. 2007. “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews,” in Rereading the Black legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maueen Quilligan (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007), 71–87. Pithouse, Richard. 2006. Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press). Robinson, Cedric, 2001. An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, UK : Ashgate). Roos, Neil. 2005. Ordinary Springboks: White Servicemen and Social Justice in South Africa, 1939–1961 (Aldershot, UK : Ashgate). Van Sertima, Ivan, ed. 1992. Golden Age of the Moor (New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishers). 83

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CHAPTER 7 THEORY IN BLACK: TELEOLOGICAL SUSPENSIONS IN PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE

My aim in this essay is to explore some challenges in the philosophy of culture that emerge from its often repressed but symbiotic relationship with what Enrique Dussel calls “the underside of modernity.”1 Philosophy of culture and its forms in various disciplines of the human sciences have often avowed French, Germanic, and Scottish roots, through a repression or denial not only of the African, Native American, and Oceanic peoples who function as sources of taxonomical anxiety but also of such sources from “within,” so to speak; Spanish influences, for instance, with their resources from Jewish and Muslim social worlds, acquired a peripheral status. Throughout, as I have shown in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, there have been those who thought otherwise, and their stories reveal the centering of the question of “man” in the modern world in a movement that led from his definition to his conditions of possibility.2 To study these conditions calls for identifying the subject of study, the main difficulty in studying such a subject, and the reasoning behind such claims. In studying culture we study the being or beings that create culture, which, drawing upon the work of Ernst Cassirer, I argue is a phenomenon marked by a transition from signification to symbol. Cassirer’s articulation of the distinction is worthy of a lengthy quote: we must carefully distinguish between signs and symbols. That we find rather complex systems of signs and signals in animal behavior seems to be an ascertained fact. We may even say that some animals, especially domesticated animals, are extremely susceptible to signs. A dog will react to the slightest changes in the behavior of his master; he will even distinguish the expressions of a human face or the modulations of a human voice. But it is a far cry from these phenomena to an understanding of symbolic and human speech. The famous experiments of Pavlov prove only that animals can easily be trained to react not merely to direct stimuli but to all sorts of mediate or representative stimuli. A bell, for example, may become a “sign for dinner,” and an animal may be trained not to touch its food when this sign is absent. But from this we learn only that the experimenter, in this case, has succeeded in changing the food-situation of the animal. He has complicated this situation by voluntarily introducing into it a new element. All the phenomena which are commonly described as conditioned reflexes are not merely very far from but even opposed to the essential character of human symbolic thought. Symbols—in the proper sense of this term—cannot be reduced to mere signals. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse: a signal is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are “operators”; symbols are 85

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“designators.” Signals, even when understood and used as such, have nevertheless a sort of physical or substantial being; symbols have only a functional value.3 No doubt most readers will confirm Cassirer’s observation on signs and our sharing their communication with animals. Signs are more referential here; they lack a schism between meaning and referent. But symbols emerge at the breakdown of such isomorphism. The symbolic, which Cassirer ultimately explores in his philosophy as symbolic forms, exemplifies the relationality of signs at more complex levels. These levels of meanings offer relations constitutive of reality in ways that could also be understood as grammar and structure.4 This “being,” the human being, distinguished by its immersion in this world of meaning, however, is also both signifying and symbolic, and is so in a way that challenges study, as W. E. B. Du Bois showed in his article “Sociology Hesitant”;5 it is a free being, a being with a future, who constructs meaning in a world already created by other such beings, a social world. The approach I thus use in this essay is not a linear narrative but rather a series of observations and reflections touching upon several problems raised by this initial one about the social world. My reason for doing so is that philosophy of culture, as I understand it, is systematic in a paradoxical way: it is a systematic account of “open systems,” of modes of being whose formalization always collapses or results in failures of formalization or systematization—in other words, a systematic account of that which resists systematic accounts. It requires, then, a celebration of contradictions not for the sake of elusiveness or a callous disregard for rigor but, instead, for that of illumination. Such an approach could thus be called dialectical, psychoanalytical, and existential. Philosophy of culture involves the complexity of integrating at least two notions that may at first not seem compatible—namely, reason and culture. The latter, as is well known, is often governed by myth, aspirations, and the constellation of relations that facilitate a world in which the human being can be at home, whereas the former is governed by a commitment to reality and truth often with a consequence of displacement and realized contradictions. That the former is an expression of the world human beings forge, the struggle and at times folly of human existence, is exemplified by Karl Jaspers, echoing Hegel: “truth is in league with reality against consciousness.”6 A commitment is, however, not identical with the realization of that to which it is made. One of the paradoxical and ironic dimensions of reason, at least as understood in its human manifestation, is the ability to synthesize the anomalous and even what at first may offer itself more aggressively as antinomy.7 The context for this discussion is what has become known as Africana thought and black thought. There are those who object to such designations, seeing them as particularized loci for practices that in fact have universal potential. I could have chosen not to admit such a location of thought, especially since throughout my career I have also characterized my work as “radical thought,” not only in its historical political specificity but also in the sense of thought devoted to getting to the roots of phenomena and to a level of self-critique that includes subjecting the method of self-critique itself to inquiry. That I am a black (specifically Afro-Jewish) person doing theoretical work, however, 86

Theory in Black

makes the ascription of blackness unavoidable because of the context: I, and many others like me, do something that, under an interpretation of theory that was unfortunately held by a good number of giants of modern thought, we should not be able to do. As Frantz Fanon put it in Black Skin, White Masks, in the modern imagination reason takes flight whenever the black enters the scene.8 Theory in black, then, is already a phobogenic designation. It occasions anxiety of thought; it is theory in jeopardy. On one hand this is not a surprise given the story of the emergence of blackness in the modern world. Its roots, as many in race theory have shown, emerge at first from the theological naturalism of Christian efforts to exorcise Medieval Christendom of Jews and Moors—as attested to in the medieval Spanish word raza, which referred to breeds of dogs, horses; Jews and Moors.9 My formulation separates the series with a semicolon between “horses” and “Jews,” but that the original form did not do so exemplifi es the point: Jews and Moors were to be understood at the level of dogs and horses, levels beneath the human being, personified here as Christian. Yet, as at least Sigmund Freud might observe in the choice of animals, the dog and the horse—a beast of scent and proximity in terms of the dog; another on which one rides in terms of the horse—both point to the closeness and distance from which medieval theological naturalism organized the human, subhuman, and nonhuman world into an order that would encounter its contradictions in the expansion succeeding the reassertion of Christendom.10 The native populations of lands that were not Jewish, Christian, nor Muslim strained the anthropological categories in those prototypical years of the late fifteenth century, and the alignments that followed revealed the theological dimensions of theory itself, whose origins are, after all, in similar language: theorein, from which we receive the word theory, did not only mean “to view” but also to view, as the root theo suggests, what G-d or the gods would see. That to see Jew, Moor, (New World) Indian, and eventually black as an affront to things holy meant, in effect, that to see what G-d (in such a presumption) saw was to see that which should not be seen. There is a form of illicit seeing, then, at the very beginnings of seeing black, which makes a designation of seeing in black, theorizing, that is, in black, more than oxymoronic. It has the mythopoetics of sin. Although the subsequent unfolding of theory claimed other sites of legitimacy, where G-d fell to systems of thought demanding accounts of nature without an overarching teleology—instead elevating what could be thought through inescapable or insurmountable resources of understanding, as Kant subsequently argued—the symbolic baggage of prior ages managed to reassert themselves at sub-terranean levels of grammar. As Derrida correctly observed, what it means to do things “right” still brings along with it theological forms, such as those found in the theodicy of systems.11 The modern world, in other words, is sustained by the mythic life that the age claims to have transcended but instead has simply repressed. The many uses of the term repression, from its political to its psychological forms, point to the problem faced by any effort at self-reflection. As Freud, and all subsequent psychoanalysts, observed, reflecting on the self is no easy task. Albeit the most praised, it is also the most feared; really to know the self is a dangerous undertaking since it requires 87

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acts of “uncovering.” That something is “covered” in the first place substantiates Freud’s point. Even “recovery” becomes problematic when revealed in hyphenated form, as Sara Ahmed has shown, as “recover.”12 As Freud, and supporters such as Norman Brown, observed, there could be a neurotic dimension to efforts at historical recovery: think of how much of history is, at the methodological level, the delineating of events for recovery, that is, the resituating of it as an even more rigorous assertion of covering.13 The task of laying bare, of bringing out in the open, becomes the activity it resists, hiding paradoxically by offering itself for exposure: hidden by virtue of being seen. We have come, then, to the important challenge raised by theory in black: it is, in effect, for theory to face itself. Theory, in other words, faces doing what Freud attempted to do with Freud, namely, really analyze itself. Blackness, in all its metaphors and historical submergence, reaches out to theory, then, as theory split from itself. It is the dark side of theory, which, in the end, is none other than theory itself, understood as self-reflective, outside itself. These are very abstract reflections, but I hope they make some sense as I proceed. This story of theory leads to at least three problematics, as I suggested at the outset but now make more specific. The first raises problems of identity and identification. The second raises problems of freedom, transformation, and transcendence. The third questions the justificatory practices of the first two and even itself. All three then take a reflective form that leads eventually to these formulations: theoretical or philosophical anthropology; freedom and liberation; and metacritiques of reason. I make the first “anthropological” since the questioner, the being asking “What am I?” is the proverbial “we,” which is as we understand it or ourselves, human beings. But the humanity of human beings is not easily defined and it could be such that it transcends its own subject. Philosophical anthropology should, then, be understood beyond empirical anthropology. These three problematics relate to theory in black as follows: (1) the black is a site of questioned humanity, (2) the black emerged as a site whose freedom is challenged, and (3) the black is a site without reason or worse—a threat to reason. Addressing these three troubled forms of emergence—and we should remember that emergence is but another way of stating appearance or manifestation, which in turn, at least in the formulation of standing out, is another way of saying existence—requires addressing the relationships they manifest, namely, relationships with human being, freedom, and reason. In this, we see a movement from theory to metatheory. Since the focus of this essay is theory, and since theory is wedded to reason, I center the rest of this discussion on reason, with the other two serving a contextualizing role. So first, let us distinguish reason from rationality. Rationality calls for maximum consistency. This is because to be rational requires consistency with a principle or “reason” for action or thought, and since to be inconsistent there need only to be one instance of contradiction, the demand for completeness is also one of maximization. Maximum consistency is, however, identical with hyperconsistency (otherwise consistency, at some point in its series, could be inconsistent).14 To be hyperconsistent is, however, to be unreasonable. Rationality thus faces the problem of its own reasonableness. This means that the scope of reason must also include the evaluation of rationality. That reason must 88

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evaluate rationality means, however, that its scope exceeds rationality. Reason must be able to enter the realm that the rational must avoid; to be reasonable, one must be willing, at times, to be inconsistent. Although seemingly weighted down by logic, this observation has enormous consequences. In logic, the exemplars are those such as Gottlob Frege, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell, each of whom (save later on for Whitehead) waged the good fight in defense of consistency maximization and against the collapse threatened by Gödel’s observation of the incompleteness of self-referential logical systems. Although some logics are complete, metalogic, which includes the logic of logic, is incomplete. This observation at first seems to be of little consequence until one realizes that reason is also a self-referential activity, an activity that involves selfevaluation. This means that incompleteness can emerge in a heavily lived, existential sense made concrete by the observation that only gods are complete. We human beings face, this analysis suggests, the negation at the heart of our emergence.15 The distinction between reason and rationality raises the question of the effort to ground reason in rationality in the first place. Besides the limitations of formal efforts, there is also that which echoes the emergence of modern science as the governing epistemic approach to the study of nature. Science promised to emancipate the human being from the tyranny of nature, but in such conquest was the problem of the legitimacy of its own scope.16 Limits on science suggested limits on rationality, so in the expansion of rationality was the hope of an ever-expanding reach of epistemic security. In more prosaic form, in the effort to make rationality complete, its scope reached beyond itself to reason. In that effort a special form of epistemic practice followed, which I would like here to call the colonization of reason, or at least its attempt. This phenomenon was identified early on by thinkers such as Rousseau in the eighteenth century and Schopenhauer in the nineteenth. Their legacy from Nietzsche to Jaspers, Sartre, Freud, and even Claude LéviStrauss, is well known. Oddly enough, Jaspers, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss made contributions in the life sciences and social sciences, and all three were willing to look at the limits of reason and the problems of rationalistic imposition on it. I have been speaking of Freud throughout, but we could add Jaspers’s observation on philosophy as a hymn to reason in his Philosophy of Existence, which he calls “mystification for the understanding,” and LéviStrauss’s posing of the mythic dimensions of reason in response to efforts to rationalize mythic life.17 To all this I should like to add the significance of Fanon’s contribution. Fanon, after all, made the colonial aspirations of such a conception of rationality, of expanding the imperial scope of rationality even over reason, visible in his reflections on method. For Fanon, the methodological challenge of addressing colonization even at the level of method required a suspension of method. This is because, as he argued in the fi rst chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, colonization is also manifested by its means of implementation. Such instruments are also epistemological, and if the disciplinary practices that construct the modern colonized subject as subhuman are to be interrogated, that includes, as well, the presuppositions of unprejudiced interrogation.18 This observation led Fanon to advance the paradox of a method of no method. The paradoxical method that is not a method or nonmethod that is a method brings to the fore the importance of phenomenology in a critical discussion of the metacritique 89

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of reason, especially the dimension that focuses on metatheory. Although Husserl is much attacked among postmodern scholars, especially with regard to the Heideggerian attack on philosophies of consciousness, there is much in Husserl’s thought that is misunderstood, especially the aspect of it that responded to the problem of completeness that I have raised here.19 Husserl understood, in stream with what I have outlined in Fanon, that there was a constant threat of the colonization of reason by relativized or relativizing orders of rationality and logics.20 Similar as well to Freud, Husserl took the critical path not only outward but also inward, radically inward, even to the level of his own methodological assumptions. By placing everything, even phenomenology, in the category of that which cannot be presumed but must be posed as an object of critical evaluation, he in effect advanced a demonstrative proof instead of a formal one. This is so because no inquiry, no study, can be made without something being an object of investigation. And this relationship was all Husserl needed to show in order to prove his point: that relationship was no less than intentionality itself. This is the basic premise of phenomenological investigation—to appeal not to a psychological notion of consciousness but rather to a relational understanding of what it means for any inquiry to take place. Thought—any thought—must be of something, and that relationship is performed in any act of reflection. Returning to Fanon, his refusal to presuppose a method brought problems of method to the forefront. It also advanced an early version of the problem of what I call disciplinary decadence, a phenomenon in which method facilitates the epistemic rejection of reality.21 There is a neurotic dimension in how human beings have come to relate to reality, as Freud and Jaspers observed—namely, to avoid it. It stands, after all, as those uncontrollable elements of life that stimulate insecurity. For many of us, reality is something we can take only in small doses, mediated or often covered by the rich sauce of culture. Some might wonder why any dose of reality is needed, why, in fact, culture could not simply sever the link and leave us in the world of floating signification, of long chains of fabricated relationships whose governing principle is the fragile self. The answer is that for some of us, that is exactly what happens. We know it as psychosis or, simply, madness. Although often inspired by the hope of agency and motivations for security, such a path collapses into dependency on the continued play of delusions. In the world of comedy, this insight is often brought to the fore through the bit of a protagonist constructing a false world in which to convince a loved one, often a disappointed parent, of his or her success. The subtext is, of course, that in attempting to fool others, the trickster becomes the fool. One of the tricks of method, where method in itself functions on a par with magic, is its elevation to the status of ontology. This is apparent in the sociological phenomenon of disciplinary professionalism, where many evaluators seek the meticulous adherence to method as though it were Kant’s Categorical Imperative.22 This is not accidental since Kant himself brought such formality to practical reason, even though he encountered antinomies of reason in his first critique. The legacy of Kant is such, however, that this turn to method as a condition of possibility is no less than the misguided presupposition of methodological transcendentalism. The problem, however, is that such an achievement 90

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of method could only have been possible if there were an isomorphic relationship between the conditions that formed the method and all of reality. The method, in other words, would have to have had omniscient and omnipotent origins. These phenomenological reflections reveal themselves to be grounded, then, if and only if it is impossible to reject them without instantiating phenomenology. The rejection of phenomenology must, in other words, discount itself as anything—including as a rejection—to lay claim to the absence of an object of reflection. It must, in other words, not present itself as what it is in order to assert a claim against being anything within the framework of a phenomenological critique. The whole rejection falls apart under the weight of its own reduction, and even the accusation of logicism cannot work as a counter-argument since, as Husserl, and also Fanon as I have been reading him, demanded at the outset that logic, too, cannot be the source of such legitimacy. This may seem overly abstract, but it is crucial to understanding that phenomenology is premised upon a relationship of and with phenomena, a position shared by even its structuralist and poststructuralist critics, as Peter Caws and Hugh Silverman have shown, and that even the transcendental ego, in this reading, cannot be a neat, closed substance, as critics such as Sartre presupposed, but instead bears a formal relationship to, proverbially, all there is, which is in turn another series of relationships or, to put it differently, a potentially infinite open series.23 Methodological decadence, whose correlate is disciplinary decadence, encounters its limits in a variety of ways. Fanon advocated the position of embodied interrogatives, of the human being re-entering a relationship of questioning.24 Nelson Maldonado-Torres characterizes this, and Fanon’s initial critique of method, as a “decolonial reduction.”25 By this he means laying bare the mechanisms of colonial imposition. To this I have advocated teleological suspensions of disciplinarity, including methodology. Teleological suspensions take purpose seriously and offer a respect for, and realization of, the scope of reality. This recommendation has been misinterpreted as a plea for interdisciplinarity. The problem with interdisciplinarity is that it carries with it a presupposition of the completeness of the disciplines, which leads to a form of disciplinary solipsism, where the discipline becomes the world onto itself, the effect of which precludes actual meeting on the tasks at hand. Instead, a teleological suspension of disciplinarity suggests a transdisciplinary movement, where engagement with reality may demand disciplinary adjustment, transcendence, or the construction of new disciplines. Teleological suspension demands being willing to go beyond one’s disciplinary presuppositions for the sake of reality. In philosophy it is when a philosopher goes beyond philosophy, which sometimes has the ironic consequence of, instead of discarding philosophy, creating new philosophy. “Teleology” is, however, not here meant to be in the form of an overimposing force or superstructure but as a generative consequence of intelligent life. Although some postmodernists have objected to teleological reasoning as essentialist, a problem with such a counter-claim is that it appeals to an a priori anti-essentialism, where the scope of essential claims is presumed and rejected without demonstration. Such a position exemplifies the contradiction of an essentialism of anti-essentialism. The thought process by which assessments can be made is precluded here, since to go 91

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through it would require purpose, which is ruled out by a presumption of essentialized purpose in all teleological reasoning. What is reason without purpose? Recently, Jane Anna Gordon and I have been working on the question of purpose in intellectual life through what we call the pedagogical imperative, by which we mean that teaching and learning require the constant articulation of reality’s vastness.26 The effort to yoke reality under a single-size-fits-all schema encircles such vastness in itself at the cost of an “outside.” The price of such recalcitrance is a loss of freedom through the abrogation of humility, in the good sense of remembering that one is part of the world instead of its whole. Theory, in other words, signifies beyond itself, and even when it is self-referential, the distancing inaugurated by the displacements of self-reference points to an ever-larger context of thought. Teleologically suspending disciplinary decadence also requires an expansion of disciplinary languages, which raises several considerations. Kwasi Wiredu recently argued, in his Cultural Universals and Particulars, that postmodern criticisms of universal claims across cultures in favor of cultural particularism creates a false dilemma and a misrepresentation of facts of language and those about the human species.27 So long as a human being has learned a language, Wiredu argues, he or she is capable of learning other languages and thus understanding concepts from other languages, including those that cannot be translated into his or her base language. This is so, he explains, because of the necessity of human communication with each other. Even if there were not other cultures with other languages, the same problems would arise internal to a given culture and language: The expansion of learning requires a point of nontranslation and simply apprehension and comprehension. The evidence for this is all around us. English, for instance, has many words from other languages that have become simply part of how an English-speaking person speaks and thinks. The error many critics of human universals have made, Wiredu concludes, is that they focus on translation instead of learning. Wiredu’s argument reveals a great deal of indebtedness to Kant, as do Husserl’s and Fanon’s, even though these thinkers disagree with him in many important ways. It was Kant who stressed the importance of transcendental argumentation for a constructive relationship with reason. Kant asked for the conditions by which certain received concepts are possible. We could prosaically refer to these as the conditions of possibility of questions and answers. The impact of this argument has pretty much been the orientation of all subsequent thought, as seen by efforts to demonstrate historical, linguistic, semiotic, and increasingly cultural conditions of possibility for everything from knowledge to culture itself. Although Wiredu showed that the underlying human subject, even though open with possibility, must be premised on its capacity to learn and to communicate, there is an odd consequence of this kind of demonstration when radicalized as an evaluation of its own condition of possibility. If we return to the demonstration of the relationship of intentionality as a condition of possibility for any phenomenon as an object of study, we cannot from this point make conclusions of universality or particularity, which would require a presupposed conceptual framework into which to place the stage of evaluation. Since even that framework must not be presupposed in our effort to evaluate the process, 92

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it affords no domain or set into which its status as universal or particular could be established. In effect, this is a demonstration beyond universal and particular claims. It, in other words, simply is. This is not to say that more cannot be said about the type of subjects that could learn to communicate and in doing so manifest a series of open relationships constitutive of world and culture. A critic may ask, for instance, about what is involved in talking about intentionality in a way that does not render it as a psychological phenomenon, psychological consciousness, or mind. There is already much research on mind as a relational activity and on how our minds work as embodiments of consciousness.28 I will say straight out that disembodied consciousness makes no sense to me. But an embodied consciousness reminds us of our condition as biological entities. We all experience degrees of alertness and clarity, and we know that things get murky as we grow fatigued to the point of near loss when we are asleep, but awareness disappears only at the most severe collapse of brain and other bodily activity. At each stage, we are capable of multiple levels of thinking instead of a unilateral, linear structure. The mind, in other words, functions like the performance of a jazz drummer or pianist: much is going on simultaneously, and decisions are made through the rhythmic and melodic flow of each limb. Just as there is not a conscious gap between our brain and our entire body (the whole thing is consciousness), the same argument about the flow of the levels of conscious pertains to their symbolic interaction. All this amounts to remembering that consciousness is manifested, even symbolically, as a “here” by which we relate to the world as “there,” and that this phenomenon is always embodied as “whole.” If we were but a dot, for instance, we would be a whole dot. This is to say, then, that alternative models of mind and its semiology are needed, other than the ones that structure who and what we are on a linear path of a reflection needed before reflection. There is much of what we do, in other words, that is a spontaneous convergence of significant and symbolic activity. At this point, much of what I have focused on is the dimension of philosophy of culture through theory in black that involves the metacritique of reason. I should now like simply to outline some considerations that follow from the effort to negotiate the elements of identity and freedom, of philosophical anthropology and liberation, that have emerged from the idea of theory in black. Two are considerations from Du Bois. Racism and colonization lead to conceptions of the self in which the self becomes a rejected standard of itself for some groups versus others. For blacks, as Du Bois and also Fanon have argued, this meant being placed in the neurotic situation of being measured by standards they could never achieve because they are standards not of actions but of beings. To be legitimate, antiblack racism demands that blacks become white or at least cease to be blacks. This stimulated the fi rst stage of double consciousness, namely, seeing the self through the eyes of hostile others. Paget Henry has shown in his essay “Africana Phenomenology,” however, that Du Bois and Fanon also identified a second, dialectical and phenomenological stage—the realization of living by a false standard.29 In other words, the contradictions of a system that props up a set of human beings as gods are revealed in a critique of the system that forced people to measure themselves so neurotically. This leads, second, to the posing of 93

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blackness as a problem, as Du Bois showed, often exemplifying a movement from people with problems to problem people.30 The consequence has been an effort to “fi x” black people.31 The structure of this fixture has, however, been historically neurotic and violent, since it has posed to black people their own elimination as a condition of progress. This negative path has produced, as Abdul JanMohamed has shown in The Death-BoundSubject, a form of subjectivity conditioned by a suprastructural expectation of its elimination—namely, a death-bound subjectivity.32 He rightly explores the psychoanalytical dimensions of this situation, for it should be clear, as Fanon showed with his philosophical psychoanalytical explorations, that the sociogenetic conditions of its emergence demand social conditions and socially oriented strategies for its transformation. Fanon, in other words, de-ontologized psychoanalysis by revealing the social conditions of the generation of symbols in the colonial context and the normative expectations that demand the elimination of certain subjects for systemic consistency. Although Fanon offered a critique of psychoanalysis, he also affirmed an aspect of it, shared here by JanMohamed and emphasized by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, that superstructural or super-egological impositions on how human beings can live as agents in the social world must be transformed for the possibility of healthy human existence. Put differently, what is caused by the social world requires a change in the social world for it, too, to change. We live, however, in a world that demands the change of individuals instead of a changed society. The response in the modern world has been the prioritizing of ethics as the condition of the better possibility of a more just world. The additional problem, however, as Freud has argued, is that ethics and justice, two expectations of modern liberal social and political thought, often have the consequence of producing more radicalized forms of alienation as cultural equivalents of an aiminhibiting, neurotic, guilt-laden super ego. Although Freud received many criticisms for this claim, including those against his postulate of destructive threats from nonsexual forms of aggression, the argument itself is particularly pertinent to any project of decolonization, again understood through considerations from Fanon. Fanon had observed a form of ethical derailment occasioned, paradoxically, by the modern prioritizing of ethics amid its structural repression. Ethics and the ethical depend on a set of relations of recognition between human beings that have been submerged for some people in the modern world. On one hand, ethics demands a selfother dialectic, one in which the self could be posed to the self as another. In effect, the other, then, is part of the continuum of relations constitutive of the self, which affords obligation to others as also obligations to the self. Racism, however, locks a group of beings below the self-other dialectic, which means in relation to them there is neither self nor other; there is no-self, no-other. This subterranean realm, referred to by Fanon in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks as a “zone of nonbeing,” leads to a strange relation to ethics. The antiracist struggle becomes one, not against otherness, but of becoming other. The problem is that as neither self nor other, the assertion of appearance becomes a violation instead of an affirmation of the ethical order. It is, in other words, violent. This meant as, Fanon argued in Les Damnés de la terre, that talk of the ethical conditions of social justice and politics misses the point.33 The legacy of colonialism is 94

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the necessity of a politics for an ethics. The political preceding the ethical means, in effect, a relation of suspended ethics and justice; as something fought for, they can no longer be conditions of possibility. The connection that this kind of argument has with Freud is that he, too, argued that it would be better for society to construct livable conditions for healthy life than to focus on idealized concepts of ethics and justice, two ideals productive more of anxiety and neurosis than of social well-being, as witnessed recently, for instance, in the debates over public-run healthcare in the United States.34 Freud’s conclusion is no doubt shocking in a world enamored with ethics, especially in academic settings. Ethics, after all, is being taught everywhere, and argumentation in terms of ethics is profuse. Even postmodernist arguments, as found in those that dominate many works in cultural studies, often boil down to conclusions of ethical condemnations and recommendations. The contemporary global social, political, and ecological situation suggests that ethics seems to have acquired the status of a fetish rather than an effective exemplar of practical reason. Freud’s and Fanon’s critiques point to a dimension of mature life that is unfortunately discomforting and discomfi ting. The point can be illustrated as follows: each of us should ask ourselves, which would bother us more—our community (whether professional, personal, or public) considering us “unethical” or “stupid”? As intelligence is prized more than ethics in our age, the futility of pushing ethics becomes apparent: how could people be expected to behave ethically in a world that makes doing so silly? In other words, any system that makes it more rational to act unethically is destined to produce the kinds of problems by which humanity is besieged today. In the colonial context, the situation was, as Aimé Césaire and Fanon observed, a matter of microcosmic portents of the future: colonialism made it stupid for colonized people to act according to the ethics of the system, since ethics in such a system demanded the preservation of that system.35 Ethics in that context meant to remain colonized, and the parasitic dimensions of that kind of ethical argumentation into postcolonial settings have resulted in the persistence of a grammar of ideals of systemic preservation. This is not to say that becoming sociopaths is the way to go. It is to say that perhaps the formulation of ethics versus sociopathology is a false dilemma. The suspension of prioritizing ethics and the focusing on expanding the conditions of agency in the social world could have an effect on the meaning of normative life by making life itself and ethical life more meaningful. These philosophical psychoanalytical reflections raise the problem of whether whole areas of thought, whether particular kinds of theory, have been subverted by the conditions they were developed to overcome. A form of didacticism of values accompanies colonial culture and its dialectical movement from decolonization to neo-colonization. Didacticism, as its etymological namesake Daedalus suggests, is an organizing trope of sacrifice and impaired development among intellectuals. Recall that Daedalus built the labyrinth in which hid the Minotaur waiting to consume lost and confused souls. Such is the threat of overly moralized theory today.36 I should now like to conclude by simply touching on several themes I have been working on that are of relevance to the topic of this essay: (1) the meaning of the face in 95

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an antiblack world, (2) the melancholy of reason, (3) the significance of home for any discourse of freedom, (4) the significance of disastrous culture, and (5) the humanizing role of art. Speech, which is crucial for social appearance, is expressed through the complex set of bones, nerves (including the eyes), muscles, teeth, and skin that constitute the face, accompanied by the gesturing force of hands. It is no surprise that antiblack institutions demand the distortion of black faces to the point of near speechlessness or emotive cacophony, in short, facelessness. For black speech (not ebonics) to appear as speech requires a relationship to reason that brings its melancholy to the fore. As we have seen, black people, among other groups of color, struggle against unreason in the modern world, but it is an unreason that poses as reason. It is “reason,” as I indicated earlier, not being reasonable. Our neurotic situation is one of having to fight an unreasoning reason reasonably. If melancholy could be understood as the loss born of our subjectivity, we face such a condition as a productive loss. The phenomenon of theory in black is born in the modern world; it is, in other words, indigenous or, for some, endemic to it. Black suffering, then, involves having to transcend a world that is the condition of black being. That suffering involves the paradox of black people living as exiles in the world from which they are born. They are homeless in their home. Freedom, a precious aspiration brought to heightened attention in the modern world, ultimately demands going home. For it is in one’s home that one can really speak freely, can really appear. There is not enough space to spell it out here, but in our recent book, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age, Jane Anna Gordon and I explored the problem of cultural disaster, a phenomenon in which a culture is frozen in its past as a consequence of colonization. This leads to a subversion of dynamics ordinarily apparent in living culture, such as the creative possibilities of creolization in its future. It renders a group of people homeless in the present because they are only able to live in the past. Art, as I see it, is the construction of human presence in space that transforms it into place and thereby makes us more at home in the world. Even the most abstract art exemplifies human presence, however small, in the cosmos. The face, loss, emplacement, disaster, and attunement accompany our very human query, “Where do we belong?” Although theory begins, always, with the recognition of a displacement, its task, as ironically Charles Sanders Peirce and Du Bois, two greats from radically different racial perspectives, observed in the past century, is to offer an understanding of the place to which we wish never to return because of the one we have found.37 And what could provide a more fitting end to this reflection than such a question?

Notes This talk was presented at the University of California, Berkeley on April 16, 2009, as the inaugural Chancellor Lecture. I thank Abdul JanMohamed for coordinating this event, which consisted of a two-month seminar on some of my work, a discussion meeting between the participants and me, and this public lecture, with Paget Henry from Brown University offering a response. I also want to thank the graduate students and faculty who participated in the seminars and public lecture.

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Theory in Black 1. See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). 2. Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Hereafter cited as AP . 3. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 31–32. Hereafter cited as EoM. 4. For Cassirer’s more detailed account, see his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1955). For a discussion of its relation to structuralism, see Peter Caws, Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1988), hereafter cited as SAT , and Kenneth Panfilio and Drucilla Cornell, Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 5. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 37–44. 6. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. and intro. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 43. Hereafter cited as PoE. 7. The famous demonstration of this is Kant’s articulation of antinomies of reason in his Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965). 8. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamm Markman (New York: Grove Press, 1967), chapters 6 and 7, hereafter cited as BS . For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, “When I Was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night,” Performance Research 2, no. 3 (September 2007): 8–15. 9. See David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and Its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. M. R. Greer, W. D. Mignolo, and M. Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 71–87. For an excellent philosophical introduction to and summary history of race theory, see Paul Taylor, The Concept of Race (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004), hereafter cited as CoR. 10. For Freud’s observation on dogs: “It would be incomprehensible, too, that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world—the dog—as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of sexual functions.” See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, ed. and intro. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 52, in the continued note 1. Hereafter cited as CD . The psychoanalytical dimensions of the horse, with symbols of speed and strength, also face counterbalance with, for the human being, its rear end at face level in a world, as Freud saw it in that chapter (IV), premised upon the subordination of anal eroticism. The theological considerations emerge in the various hierarchies of being in the Middle Ages and those adopted in hierarchical taxonomies of early modernity. For discussion, see Taylor, CoR, and also Lewis Gordon, “Race Theory,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir and Naomi Choi (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishers, 2010), 1133–1141. 11. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. with intro. and additional notes by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 12. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 103–6. 13. See Norman Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959).

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Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 14. This understanding of consistency is from formal logic, although its intuitive and informal elements come to bear on the argument. For a discussion of consistency and the effort to maintain it at meta and higher-order systems of logical evaluation, see Susan Haack, Philosophy of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), hereafter cited as PoL. 15. For discussion, see PoL and PoE. 16. See EoM, PoE, and Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954). 17. See PoE, 60, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), and Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, with a new foreword by Wendy Doniger (New York: Schocken Books, 1995). 18. See also Walter Mignolo, “Philosophy and the Colonial Difference,” SPEP Supplement, Philosophy Today 43, no. 4 (1999): 36–41. 19. The discussion of Husserl here draws upon Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. and intro. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71–147; Husserl, Cartesian Mediations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); and Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). 20. For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), especially chapters 2 and 3. Hereafter cited as FC . 21. See FC , chapter 5, and Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (New York: Routledge, 2006). 22. See, e.g., Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobs-Merrill, 1959). 23. See Caws, SAT , and Hugh Silverman, Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). 24. See the concluding paragraphs of BS . 25. See Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 26. See Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, “On Working through a Most Difficult Terrain: Introducing A Companion to African-American Studies,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. and intro. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), xx–xxxv; Jane Anna Gordon, “Beyond Anti-Elitism: Black Studies and the Pedagogical Imperative,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 32, no. 1: 1–16; Lewis R. Gordon, “A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives,” Thresholds in Education XXXVI, nos. 1 & 2 (2010): 27–35. 27. Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 28. This is the standard position in the phenomenological tradition, in which the most prominent formulations are from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See his Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2005), and The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). More recent neuroscience and work in philosophy of mind are supporting his (and many other phenomenologists’) position. See, e.g., Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 98

Theory in Black 29. Paget Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” C. L. R. James Journal 11, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 79–112. See also Lewis R. Gordon, Existential Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4. Hereafter cited as EA . 30. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 1–23, reprinted in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (March 2000): 13–27, and The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), hereafter cited as SBF . 31. See EA , chapter 4: “What Does It Mean to Be a Problem?” 32. Abdul JanMohamed, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 33. I prefer to use the French title for this text since Wretched of the Earth, albeit also a reference to the “L’Internationale,” does not quite capture his argument about the subjects at hand. See my discussion of this matter in AP , 90. 34. For Freud on ethics and justice, see, e.g., CD , 100–103. 35. For Césaire’s discussion, see his Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 36. For discussion, see Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), chapters 1 and 5. 37. For Peirce, see his influential essays, “The Fixation of Belief ” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and ed. with intro. by Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 5–41. For Du Bois’s thoughts on the same, see SBF .

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CHAPTER 8 SEX, RACE, AND MATRICES OF DESIRE IN AN ANTIBLACK WORLD

Our epigraphs are two classic statements on sex and sexuality and two classic, provocative statements on their intersection with race. In Aristotle’s world, where the hierarchies of a mythology are writ large and are at the core of a rational ordering of the universe, we find that the question of sex is colored by an indirect reference to the cold and, consequently, the dark. In that world of biological convergence with reproduction, the female is worse than a derivative of the male; she also is a derivative of the human species. For whereas male stands as the formal constitution of human reality, female lays bereft as an undeveloped male and, consequently, an undeveloped human being, a less-than-human being. To be is to be both form and a mover, which Aristotle linked to fertility. The male was a fertile mover who brought form into matter (female) and hence the concrete reality of the human being. In that world, then, one does not see female as a gender at all, another constituent of the human species. One sees simply males/human beings and lessdeveloped-males/less-developed-human beings—that is, one gender.1 By the time of Freud, we witness a schism between reproductive capacities and gender, where male and female refer to realities that are fertile, in spite of the etymological link between gender and Greek words such as gênesis (birth) and genos (kind). For Freud, the psychological constructions of sexual identity need not be linked to the markers male and female. In Freud’s world, then, a female can be what psychologists regard as masculine and a male can be what psychologists regard as feminine.2 Separating the gender-sex link does not entail, however, a schism between the acts signified by the previous relationship. Thus, the masculine performance of a female can restructure her relation to a feminine male. This coding becomes particularly multivalent when we add, as do Fanon and Lorde, racial significations to the context. If we make as our model the context that 1 have characterized in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism as an antiblack world, we can see immediately how Fanon’s and Lorde’s remarks come into focus. For if a group is structured, in a phobogenic, overdetermined way, to signify hot/ active/masculine/white and another group is constructed as cold/passive/feminine/ black, then relationships between males and females in such a world may be skewed, with subtexts of transformed sexual meanings (in spite of the normative significance of sex): White males and black males may relate to each other in homoerotic ways that may be more genital than social; on the social level, the level of signification, the relation may be heterosexual and misogynist. I have explored the significance of intersections between sexual relationships and race before. My past discussions focused on their relevance to phenomenological ontology.3 I would here like to provide a discussion of racial and sexual matrices and 101

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their significance for the understanding of phenomenological treatments of social role. It is my aim to show how the false reality created by such bad-faith forms of desire ironically provides a clue for richer understanding of desire and, consequently, racial and sexual roles. Let us begin by articulating a few key concepts. In Freud’s and Fanon’s remarks, there are indirect references to the constructability of human identity formations. An implication of this conception of identity is the view that human identity is made or lived; it is not a “determined” feature of the world. Where it is treated as constituted by an already existing social order, we may call it a social identity or a social role. Where it is lived, we can simply call it an existential identity or existential reality. Existential realities are transphenomenal realities. What this means is that how they are lived always surpasses how they are understood. Their existence precedes their essence or conceptualization. When the order is reversed, and the essence is treated or lived as preceding existence, we shall refer to that circumstance or attitude as bad faith. Bad faith closes human reality into an essential reality that precedes existence or lived reality. A key feature of all social realities is that they are constituted realities. What that means is that they are Geist-realms or spirit-realms. They add nothing physical to the world, although they are positive, meaningful additions to reality. Two human beings standing side-by-side in love are no different from two human beings standing side-byside in lust or hate from a physical point of view. From the point of view of intentionality, the point of view of realities conditioned by meaning-contexts, there are worlds of difference. In bad faith, we play upon the difference and try to evade ourselves; we treat social realities as either consequences of nature (and hence not constituted by human beings) or fiction (and hence nonexistent by virtue of being nonphysical). At the heart or bad faith, then, is a denial of agency in the human condition and a denial of the relationship between such agency and the constitution of meaning. We find, then, in the advancement of bad faith as an index of human possibilities, a principle of positive contingency and agency: That although the human world may be contingently constituted (neither by necessity nor fate nor destiny), it is never accidental. It is a world of responsibility and the irony of limited choices. By limited choices, I mean decisions based on options available. Options are what are available in the world; choices are what we make on the basis of those options, including how we may interpret the options themselves. To articulate options, choices, and meanings, our inquiry must make an appeal to context. For options are not conditions etched in stone. They are simply wherever we happen to find ourselves or whatever is most relevant for our inquiry here. (Irrelevance has, as Schopenhauer would say, no principle of individuation.) To decode matrices of race and sex requires contexts premised on racial and sexual identities. The context that we shall here focus on is the context of the antiblack world. We shall focus on the antiblack world primarily because of its unique relation to the Western world. The Western world, as we saw in Aristotle’s depiction but can also see in many other sources, structures itself according to a binary logic of opposition. What this 102

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means is that the system functions contextually by always placing any two terms as far from each other as possible by that which supposedly differentiates them. Since the Western valuative system has historically placed positivity and its self-identity on the value of the white, that means, then, that it structures its primary opposition on the level of the black. To speak of racial opposition, then, is to speak of white and black. Now, although this may make it seem that one can immediately speak of race and gender simply by placing the opposition in respective lines, that would be an error. For although our antiblack world is also a misogynist world, a misogynist world is not necessarily an antiblack one. For instance, in Aristotle’s world, there was simplv one gender: male. What we call female was in that world simply not-male. Race, in that world, simply meant genus. Only males were considered really part of the human race. Women, as women are envisaged in contemporary Western society, had no meaning in Aristotle’s world.4 On the other hand, in an antiblack world, race is only designated by those who signify racial identification. A clue to that identification is in the notion of being “colored.” Not being colored signifies being white, and, as a consequence, being raceless, whereas being colored signifies being a race. Thus, although the human race is normatively white, racialized human beings, in other words, a subspecies of humanity, are nonwhite. The negation is the supposedly opposite term—in a word, the black. In effect, then, in the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black. Thus, to be racialized is to be pushed “down” toward blackness, and to be deracialized is to be pushed “up” toward whiteness. So, we have: Aristotle’s world: to be gendered and to avoid being nongendered—that is, female (not-male-enough). The antiblack world: to be raceless and to avoid being racialized—that is, black (being never-white-enough). It is ironic that today when we say “gender studies” we invariably mean discourses on women. A lot has changed since Aristotle’s time. The centered significance of gender has been pushed to a racial paradigm, where gender has begun to function like race. Consequently, the genderless designation has become a goal similar to the racial designation. How can this be possible without a shift in the binaries by way of a third factor? Let us call this third factor power. What thus emerges is the following: The antigender world: to be genderless and to avoid being gendered—that is, determined, powerless, defined, feminine. The antiblack world: to be raceless and to avoid being racialized—that is, determined, powerless, defined, black. The third factor of power: to be neutral, genderless, raceless—that is, self-determined, powerful, self-defined, neither feminine nor black, which amounts to being masculine and white.

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There are obvious breakdowns of logic in this triad. Take the third. If to have the power of self-determination means to be white, what can be made of determinations not to be white? Although the determinations may be lived as raceless and genderless, the social meanings are clearly skewed, because the “meaning” of being white in an antiblackinfected social sphere equates whiteness with such neutrality. Clearly, then, all three worlds are bad-faith worlds. To analyze the world conditioned by all three, which is the focus of this sketch, requires multiple levels of analyses that correlate with the evasive nature of bad faith: One must, in other words, analyze a world lived as a world encountered; a world of contingency without accident. How does desire correlate with sexual identities in such a world? Desire is normatively constituted as avoiding being the black and feminized. What this means is that in such a world a rational person wants to be white and masculine. But since white and masculine are treated as positive variables, there is a short step in reasoning to white or masculine to white as masculine to white equals masculine and masculine equals white. We find, in this logic, a complex framework of identity and desire premised on the context itself as antiblack. If white equals masculine and masculine equals white, then blackness and femininity become coextensive realities in an antiblack world. Such a world becomes diadic, with “mixture” being indexed by two polar realities as follows: (Supposed) Highest Nonmixture: white/masculine. The claim to this position, in an antiblack world, is the white man. (We do not say white male since we have already problematized the relationship between masculinity and maleness, although we concede, as did Freud, that the tendency of masculinity to manifest itself in males must be acknowledged.) (Supposed) Lowest Nonmixture: black/feminine. The claim to this position, in an antiblack world, is the black woman. (We do not say black female for the same reasons that we do not say white male.) Mixture is now left for structures that cross the color-gender convergence. Thus: Mixture α: white and mixed with feminine. Claim to this position in an antiblack world is not always clear. For now, we shall simply designate this α-mixture as white woman by virtue of the order of the pairs white and feminine. (We do not say white female because the significance of color/gender designation is already conditioned by the context itself—an antiblack world. A white female is not necessarily a mixture, since masculinity can attach to males and females; whereas a white woman is necessarily a mixture.) Mixture β: masculine and black. The claim to this position in an antiblack world is similarly problematized. (We do not say the black male for similar reasons as in the α-mixture.)

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Now, what should be apparent is that the highest nonmixture functions as what Fanon calls a governing fiction over the mixed categories. Since the mixed categories do not stand as “pure” and therefore extremes, then we should have a proper hierarchical articulation in an antiblack world as follows: Highest nonmixture → mixture α → mixture β → lowest nonmixture. The reason for this schema is that the antiblack world is conditioned by what we have already seen are two principles of value: (1) It is best to be white but (2) it is worst to be black. When one fails to achieve whiteness (principle 1), it becomes vital to avoid embodying blackness (principle 2). As in our previous chapter, we reformulate our two principles thus: (1*) “be white!” but (2*) “don’t be black!” Mixture in this world is conditioned by poles of negative blackness (principles 2 and 2*), as we have seen, more than positive whiteness (principles 1 and 1*). The impact on sexrace constructions thus follows from the extent to which the sex-gender relationship serves as a leitmotif for the identities. For the extent to which we separate sex from gender will make all the difference between certain coextensive realities being homoerotic and homophobic on the one hand, or heteroerotic and misogynist on the other. Our concerns are problematized even more by the constructivity dimension of color itself. For it should be obvious that black and white are not here meant to refer to colors in any ordinary sense but to the valuative expectations placed on people who are meant to exemplify those colors. One doesn’t “see” white and black people ordinarily but instead sees pink, gold, brown, and a host of other shades of people, shades that may not correlate with the color designation—as we see so well in cases of brown caucasians and pink, in a word, Negroes.5 The constructivity of color designation has led some critical race theorists to reject race itself by appealing to its social constructivity and natural scientific invalidity.6 A problem with the appeal to scientific invalidity, however, is that it is of no consequence in any other world but the world of scientific positivism, for in effect it centers natural science as a model of assessment. But scientific positivism, as Edmund Husserl,7 Alain Locke,8 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty9 have shown, is incapable of critical and, admittedly, valuative assessments of its own assumptions without contradiction. On the interpretive level, the basis of scientific meaning and value itself is at stake. To get to these questions requires metascientific considerations. We can see how the problem of a neopositivist and social constructivist approach to race plays itself out when we choose supposedly preferred descriptions such as “human being” and “person.” To define the human being in biophysical terms is one thing, but to define what it means to “be” human is another. For assessments of the basis of adjudicating philosophical anthropological claims, more

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radical articulations of human “science” may be needed. Such radical articulations also demand interrogations of appeals to even the social constructivity of science itself. Our discussion suggests that the framework of the social is itself conditioned by intentional features that situate it on the level of constructivity as well. Thus, social constructivity amounts to asserting, redundantly, constructed constructivity.10 To get at the heart of the matter requires, then, realization of both the active and passive components of social phenomena, that human communities maintain phenomena that are lived as pregiven phenomena. This pregiven dimension of phenomena carries reality principles and meaningful features that make them accessible to phenomenological reflection at disparate times. It is in this regard that phenomena such as language and humanity, albeit constructed, are not fictional realities; they are dimensions of social reality. Now, in worlds where social reality has been skewed, where it has become aim-inhibited, where it has become antisocial, antihuman, anticommunicative, there are rigid, underlying themes of subverted recognition. What this means is that, although there may be human beings in such a world, the sociohistorical features of that world may be such that ordinary expectations of human contact are inhibited. In an ordinary human environment, for instance, human phenomena are accessible to all human beings and, as such, have an anonymous dimension to their meaning; they become, in a word, typical. In a skewed context, however, the typical has been transformed in such a way that the atypical becomes normative. Relationships are therefore skewed in such a world, and what counts as typical of certain groups hides, in effect, atypical realities. For example, in an antiblack world, to be a typical black is to be an abnormal human being. Thus, normativity is indexed by its distance from blackness. The black could at most hope to be a black who is typically white, which in effect is to be atypically white. To be black in that world is, therefore, to be trapped in an obversion of normative reality: To be an extraordinary black is to be an ordinary person; to be an ordinary black is to be an extraordinary person. “Normal blackness,” as Fanon has shown in Peau noire, masques blancs, is to be locked in the absurdity of everyday or banal pathology. The implications of this absurdity become stark when we return to our matrices of value and consider them with the added element of desire. Desire can be constructed along matrices of (a) most-desired, (b) desired, (c) less desired, and (d) least desired. Context will dictate what ideal types fall along each category. Since our context is an antiblack world, it should be obvious that, on the level of color, to be white is a conclusion of ideal desire (a) and to be black has its conclusion in no desire (d), because there is no desire that is less than no desire at all. When gender is colorized and treated as coded forms of color, we find ourselves facing a world with a number of social enigmas. On the one hand, there are two groups: the white and the black. Whoever lays claim to being “in between” does so only as a matter of distance from the black or closeness to the white, which is, for the white, still too close to the black for comfort. Since mixture is ultimately a function of colored gender configurations, the notion of “white woman” carries within it a positive element of whiteness and a negative element of blackness. Now, although most day-to-day activities carry an air of anonymity, where typically women and men pass by, in an antiblack world blacks and whites do not typically pass by. 106

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For to pass by typically means to be situated as a limited place of epistemic clarity: One simply doesn’t know much about the typical Other beyond her or his typicality. In an antiblack world, however, to see black is to see a typicality that is epistemologically conclusive. What this means is that to see black is to see all that needs to be seen. It is to see a superfluous existent, a plenitude. To see the whiteness of a white woman, then, calls for an act of epistemic closure on her blackness, to the point of closing off the colorcoded dimension of her femininity—that is, to not see her femininity. With such a seeing, she will have become “purified.” “She” will become desire. “She” will be a point at which more needs to be known. “She” will be an informant into her subjective reality, realities that, if known, will be of objective value because they will be realities onto which and from which action will be encouraged. If, however, the closure is not possible and the feminine dimension, her blackness, is acknowledged, then she becomes a form of tainted whiteness. Her power in an antiblack world becomes a denial of her femininity.11 The conclusion? Her phallic order, power, becomes linked, fundamentally, to her skin, to her epidermal schema. In an antiblack world, the phallus is white skin.12 One may wonder what type of situation emerges when the white (woman) is declared rapable, for as we know, there is a rich history around the avowed protection of whites from rapacious blacks in antiblack worlds. The obvious conclusion is that the history has nearly nothing to do with white women at all. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon has observed that white male’s aggression toward black males is saturated with homoerotic content. In his discussion, “Le Nègre et la Psycopathologie,” he points out that the black is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety, in negrophobic people.13 For the negrophobe, the black is not a symbol of certain negative realities. The black is those negative realities. Thus, if femininity is regarded as a negative characteristic of that world, the black will “be” femininity. The white concern with rape in such a world is conditioned by the extrication of the feminine dimension of woman in white woman. Rape in such a world is thus premised on violating whiteness. Since whiteness has been structured as masculine, the violation becomes a violation of masculinity. The rape of white women—translated into this schema simply as “whites”—ultimately becomes to white men the rape of white men. The violent response that has been the history of lynching in the name of redressing the offense of rape in the U.S. antiblack world is, therefore, indicative of the form of bad faith manifested in homophobia: Public violence locates the masculine identity’s rejection of homosexual desire. But as is well-known, there is a twist to this affair, for the lynched black body often was mutilated in a ritual of surgical restructuring; genitals were often removed and holes gauged into the bodies to eradicate vestiges of claimed masculinity. The sexual dimension of lynching, in other words, had to be restructured into a heterosexual framework, where the black body becomes woman. Woman, as the body of clay on which any form can be forced, becomes the motif of lynching. As a result, we find the history of mutilation, a history of literally cutting away all protruding and active bodily appendages, in the lynching of blacks of all sexes and ages. Rape, a form of violation, depends on human agency for its existence. In our portrait of criteria for rapability in an antiblack world, the place of subjectivity, and thus consent 107

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and dissent, was the highest point on the hierarchical scale: whiteness/masculinity. For the phenomenon to appear as a violation of an agent and hence have standing before law requires that it embody the phallic order in that world, that it be white. Where agency is denied, so, too, is violation. We can thus restructure our matrices as a portrait of rapability to “unrapability.” In such a world, it would seem, black women (a redundant reality) are literally not rapable, for they supposedly lack the ability to dissent. A portrait of desire is implied by this conclusion. Recall our two initial principles, that (1) it is best to be white and (2) it is worst to be black. We can add two correlates to these: (1**) desire white and (2**) reject black. Since the values of an antiblack world are existentially serious values—that is, values that are treated as material features of the beings who comprise that world14—we find ourselves encountering two more correlates: (1***) whiteness is the desired desire and (2***) blackness is the rejected existent. As the desired desire, the white man’s relation to the black woman becomes obvious in such a world: He is incapable of raping her because she is incapable of not desiring him. He is constructed as her desired desire, and constructed as not having desired her in the first place. In effect, she would be constructed as having violated him if physical contact occurred.15 Since the white female can only be recognized as rapable through suspending her womanness to the point of simply becoming “the white,” then we find a similar derivation; “she” must not have desired the black and the black must have desired “her.” We find also that these considerations affect even avowed homosexual and lesbian structures in such a world. For white men in sexual relations with white men become the homosexual paradigm, whereas black women with black women become the lesbian paradigm. White female liaisons are restructured so that whiteness becomes the operative dimension of gendered identity; the relationship becomes, in a word, masculine and, therefore, homosexual—unless, of course, womanness is the operative dimension of the specific instance of that relationship. Likewise, black male liaisons are restructured so that blackness becomes the operative dimension of gendered identity; the relationship becomes feminine and, hence, a lesbian relation. We find even more twists in interracial relations, for the white female with a black female, given these matrices, becomes a “heterosexual” liaison; so, too, becomes the white male with black male liaison.16 Destruction of the link between the penis and the phallus and advancing an alternative configuration like white skin may, however, raise the following objection: Aren’t black men nevertheless men by virtue of their chromosomal make up and their extended urethra, their penis? What about the extensive literature on the reduction of black males to their penis? On penis size? 108

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Our analysis suggests that the significance of penis “color” must be brought into consideration in an antiblack world. Two penises of equal length are not of equal significance when they are of different “color.” For, in an antiblack world, a black penis, whatever its size, represents a threat. Given our discussion of the black signifying the feminine, the underlying nature of the threat should be obvious: the black penis is feared for the same reason that a woman with a penis is feared. She represents a form of revenge. Literally, the very notion of a black penis, a demand for masculinity, spells danger. The rationale for lynching returns with an added dimension of prevention. In lynching and other forms of “castration” and bodily reconfiguration, the objective is to prevent the black from doing not what the black supposedly has done, but what the black must want to do. The black “penis” is phobogenically not a penis at all. It is a vagina bent on revenge. Now the reader should bear some obvious facts in mind, given our discussion thus far. The first, and most obvious, is that our stated existential commitments entail that the portrait presented here is limited to realities that are conditioned by its context. As Fanon has cautioned all of us who tread along the critical race terrain, not everyone will find her or himself in such texts.17 The antiblack world is what phenomenological sociologists call an ideal type.18 An ideal type is a subjunctive reality. It is a world with a strict logic and strict rationality, a world that is governed by a specific ontology where the human being collapses under the weight of existence. Although in such a world there is only one perspective, the critical theorist who attempts a hermeneutics of such a world has the triple task of interpreting the two poles as perspectives and interpreting her or his own relation as a critical relation to such a world. By considering the perspective of the bottom-pole of such a world, the theorist raises the question that Fanon raised in 1952: What is “the lived-experience of the black”? The theorist will then find two directional poles of theocratic values: The white: It is desirable to be a human being, but it is undesirable to be black. Whites are human beings, but they are not gods, because to be gods would mean to be a desired desire; to be, in other words, better than human. Blacks, on the other hand, although humanlike, are less than whites and, therefore, less human—or at least not the type of beings to desire to be. The black: Whites are the desired desire. They are, therefore, better than human. They are gods.19 Although the theorist ascribes a point of view to both poles and to her or himself, in order not to slip into being the wnite, the theorist must be properly critical. What this means is that the theorist must not construct the theorist’s position as a desired desire, or even a desirable position. Whether this is possible requires another discussion, but suffice it to say that a value-neutral theorist, even if desirable, is susceptible to our concerns about ideal typification and existence. As Merleau-Ponty cautions us in Phénoménologie de la perception, we should not lose existence for the sake of validity.20 So, what does our analysis offer for an understanding of social role?

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The first and obvious conclusion is that context is a complex existential affair. Although we have been speaking of an ideal type, an antiblack world, the existential significance of bad faith enables us to understand how the ideality of the types are concealed by how they are lived.21 Next, although it may be common knowledge that some identities are more basic than others, as is the general view toward sex and gender, the phenomenological critique of the mundane permits the extraordinary dimensions or tne ordinary to make themselves manifest. When it comes to social role, the logic of gender in an antiblack world can be demonstrated to converge with the logic of race in ways that question the very meaning of sex. Thus, third, the significance of social role emerges through the significance of context itself. The antiblack world is one context among many, but even in its case, the extratextual consideration of gender comes into play. Isolated meanings, although useful for modeling and assessments premised on formulating paradigm cases, will never achieve social significance without exhausting themselves. Finally, as we saw in our discussion of desire, identities can be structured by multiple matrices of value. These matrices take multivalent forms of sexual, political, and theological economies of expression premised on centers of power. In the intersection of sex and race, we found not only white people and people of color, men and women, but we found also prosthetic gods and a dark continent of effeminate existent—a world, that is, of spirit and nature conditioned by identities that transform themselves along grids of institutional power. Where do we go from here? Our project at this point is primarily interpretative. The obvious methodological consideration is that theorizing sex, gender, and race in an antiblack world calls for understanding of ideal typifications of lived realities. It demands an existential sociology. On the question of the antiblack/misogynist world itself, our existential concern, committed to preceding essence, beseeches us to admit to what we see as we attempt, in the spirit of an eleventh thesis of a century ago, to change our world.

Notes 1. Cf. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routiedge, 1993), “Introduction,” where sex is deconstructed as normative: “The category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory ideal.’ In this sense, then, ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls” (p. 1). 2. Teresa Brennan has argued that it is this disjunction of sex and gender that led to the Freudian riddle of femininity: “Why is [femininity] found in men?” The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (London and New York: Routiedge, 1992), p. 8. We also find an existential psychoanalytical dimension of this question in Simone de Beauvoir’s restructuring womanhood away from birth and into the realm of project and historicity; see her classic Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). But the prime space in which this disjunction is

Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World afforded semiotic analysis is Jacques Lacan’s Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), where, for instance, the subject/object relation is substituted by the signifier/signified relation (see especially p. 284). 3. For discussion and critique of that work, see, for example, Paget Henry, “African and AfroCaribbean Existential Philosophies” in Existence in Black; William L. McBride, “Review of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” British Society for Phenomenological Research (1996); Linda Alcoff, “Review of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,” Canadian Philosophical Reviews/Revue Canadienne de Comptes rendus en philosophie (1997); Patricia Huntington, “On Castration and Miscegenation: Is the Phallus White Skin?” Philosophy Today, Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Edition (1998): 90–103. 4. The impact of the Aristotelian view is explored in Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, which in turn draws on, among many sources, Luce Irigaray’s ironically psychoanalytical neoAristotelianism in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Particularly revealing is Butler’s discussion of hyle (matter) in endnote 22 of chap. 1 of Bodies That Matter. 5. See Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, chaps. 13–14, and Tommy Lott’s “Du Bois on the Invention of Race,” Philosophical Forum XXIV, nos. 1–3 (Fall-Spring 1992–93): 166–187. See also our chap. 3 above. 6. The most well-known proponents of this basis for rejecting the concept of race are Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack. My criticisms of this position can be found in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Zack’s position also has an existential dimension. See her, “Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy” in Existence in Black. Lewis R. Gordon, ed. 99–110 (New York: Routledge, 1997). 7. See Husserl’s “Philosophie als strenge Wissensschaft,” Logos, 1 (1910–11); 289–341. This essay also is found in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. and ed. by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 8. See Locke’s essays “Values and Imperatives” and “Value” in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. with an intro. and interpretive essay by Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), chaps. 1 and 7. 9. Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard 1945), passim; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New York and London: Routledge/ Humanities Press, 1962). 10. See Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, chap. 3. 11. For a discussion and critique of this attitude toward femininity in an antiblack world, see Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, intro. by Nancy K. Bereano (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), 75. 12. Although I discuss this conclusion in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Patricia Huntington develops its implications for a critique of poststructural psychoanalyses of gender; again, see her essay, “On Castration and Miscegenation.” In an informal discussion of the present essay, Cynthia Willett also reminded me that Lacan’s analysis doesn’t exclude multiple manifestations of the phallus because, as we have already noted, the signifier/signified relation is its hallmark, which means that the signifier could be any semiotically active designation. Most Lacanians do, however, work in a world in which sexual difference takes center stage. For discussion, see Patricia Huntington’s “Fragmentation, Race, and Gender: Building Solidarity in the Postmodern Era” in Existence in Black. The multisignificative dimensions of the phallus are developed also by Tina Chanter in her provocatively titled article, “Can the Phallus Stand, or Shoud It Be Stood Up?” in Returns of the “French Freud”: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond, ed. by T. Dufresne (New York 111

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge and London: Routledge, 1997). And the complexities of sex, sexuality, and color converging along power lines are explored in many passages of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. My point here is not to reduce the phallus to white skin. It is to point out what emerges, hermeneutically, when the phallus is, in at least its instantiation in an antiblack world, white skin. 13. For discussion of Fanon’s conception of phobogenesis, see my essays, “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis” in Frantz Fanon: A Critical Reader and “Existential Dynamics of Black Invisibility” in Existence in Black. 14. See Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, chap. 6, for a discussion of the spirit of seriousness, and part III for a discussion of that attitude in an antiblack world; also Linda A. Bell’s Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence: A Feminist Approach to Freedom, foreword by Claudia Card (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993), passim. For the classic statement on the subject in philosophy of existence, see Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’être et le néant. 15. Think, for example, of black women who have been imprisoned for resisting white men’s sexual advances and assaults. For discussions of the sexual exploitation of black women by the U.S. criminal justice system, see Calvin Hemton, Sex and Race in America (New York: Grove Press, 1965); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976); and Gerald Horne, “On the Criminalization of a Race,” Political Affairs 73, no. 2 (February 1994): 26–30. 16. See my discussion of Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: “The Fact of Blackness” in Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism in a Neoclonial Age (Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) interracial homosexual liaisons. For interracial lesbian relationships, Audre Lorde provides many insights in Sister Outsider on the egalitarian project she and her lover Frances (a white woman) worked at developing. 17. Cf. Peau noire, 9/Black Skin, 12. 18. See Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, chap. 3, for discussion of typification. See also Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 19. See Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Part IV. 20. See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion in the preface, Phénoménologie, p. vi/Phenomenology, xii. 21. Peau noire, masques blancs, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, and Existence in Black address this dimension of theorizing about living in an antiblack/misogynist world. See also Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence and Cynthia Willett’s Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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CHAPTER 9 RACIALIZATION AND HUMAN REALITY

A few years ago I came upon a controversy regarding an article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” by the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel. Many responses to Tuvel’s arguments were visceral. Upon reading the paper, I found the outrage against it and the condemnations of her perplexing. She was accused of a wide range of indiscretions, from being transphobic and racist to lacking academic integrity and competence. It’s the latter accusations that would be most damaging to an academic, especially an untenured assistant professor. An academic’s capital, so to speak, is her intelligence and intellectual integrity. My read of the article was that Tuvel was posing a set of questions for adherents of social constructivism to consider when they dismiss people avowing transracial identities. Although concerned about her privileging analytic philosophers in her citation—a warranted concern because the vast history of philosophical work on gender, racial, and trans identities points to philosophers outside of the analytic tradition—it struck me that the questions she posed were legitimate, and the underlying argument sound. Basically, Tuvel argues that there is a similarity between the arguments used to justify transracial identities and those used for other forms of trans identities, and, further, that a commitment to gendered, racial, and sexual identities as socially constructed should entail that people can adopt identities so long as—given proponents’ philosophical commitments to social constructivism—there is no underlying claim of ontological fixedness or essentialism to those identities (that is, as long as these identities are seen to be social constructs rather than, for example, “natural kinds”). Additionally, the identities people live or exemplify are not always identical with those socially imposed upon them. If gender and sex are made, then they could be made in different ways and, thus, lived in those and others to come. Following on from this, Tuvel argues that if there is going to be support for all but transracial identities, stronger arguments for the rejection of the latter are needed (especially since the arguments used to reject the former mirror those to reject the latter). Had I been one of the referees for the article, I would have recommended publication, despite my concern for its lack of acknowledgment of the rich history of phenomenological discussions of social constructivity and critical work on reality beyond the confines of analytic philosophy. Many, if not most, practitioners in that sphere tend to treat ideas as absent except when uttered or written by an analytic philosopher. This is so even if the analytic philosopher has arrived at a subject after the arguments avowed have been around for a century or more. In short, there was nothing unusual in Tuvel’s article, within the confines of analytic philosophy, even though her training was in both analytic and Eurocontinental philosophy. Junior scholars, most academics know, are often evaluated by scholars who prefer them to cite a narrow set of authors. I hate bullying. It struck me that Tuvel was suffering from an epistemic and professional instance of that. I also don’t believe in offering private support for those who are bullied. 113

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So, I posted my thoughts in social media sites and encouraged anyone with whom I corresponded on the matter to share our correspondence with whomever they choose. These exchanges led to a forum in Philosophy Today, in which I formally stated my position. Tuvel was able to respond to other critics and me there. Tuvel also recently wrote a piece, “Changing Identities: Are Race and Gender Analogous?” for Black Issues in Philosophy, in which she offered more clarification of her position. For instance, she stressed that “analogous” and “same” are not identical. She never argued that transgender and transracial identities are identical. Further, even where people transition into a new identity, it doesn’t follow that their history and moral entitlements on all relevant matters are the same as others who preceded them in that identity. She acknowledges those differences and concludes with an ethical instead of epistemological and ontological claim. She identifies the importance of answering “ethical questions about how to balance respect for specific individuals . . . with our obligations to members of the racialized groups people seek to leave or join.” *

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I won’t repeat the varieties of examples and arguments I posed in my discussion of her original article. The forum that occasions writing this essay is devoted to the relationship of concepts to reality. Given this, I will offer some considerations on how theorizing that relationship—itself a form of conceptualization—offers insights, especially in light of tendencies in philosophy to treat debates (like those examined by Tuvel) as of less philosophical quality because of supposedly not being formally “pure.” There is often circularity at work when philosophers speak of purity, especially in light of the adverb “formally.” For some, “pure philosophy” boils down to being formal, and one could be even purer if one could be formally formal. For those wishing to avoid that rabbit hole, an option is to read philosophical classics and learn about the history of philosophical ideas. The challenge in doing that is to be aware of the pitfalls of treating one tradition as the sole legitimate bearer of philosophical knowledge. Another challenge is to be aware that no one approach to philosophy is conclusive and the only legitimate one among the rest. The incompleteness of foundational efforts in philosophy does not mean there are no points of convergence across various areas, styles, traditions, and cultures. Whether endorsing or being critical of it, philosophers struggle with the scope and sufficiency of reason, critical reflection, and the ways in which reality is disclosed—as “truth,” (German) “Warheit,” (Latin) “veritas,” (Greek) “aletheia,” (Mdw Ntr) “MAa,” or, heading eastward, (Hindi) “saty,” (Mandarin) “zhēnxiàng,” (Japanese) “shintjitsu,” or southward, (Swahili) “ukweli,” (Zulu) “ikiniso”/ “iqiniso,” or, in the South Pacific, (Māori) “pono.” Each of the non-English terms from the previous list could be translated as “truth,” but that would be misleading, since they are so contextually and conceptually packed with philosophical additions—in the case of MAa, linked to balance, breath, and justice; in aletheia, to openness, disclosure—that translation itself achieves its mythical problem, as portrayed in so many allegories, as a deceptive messenger. Amusingly the etymology of the English word “truth” points to the old West Saxon “triewð,” which connotes faith, 114

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faithfulness, fidelity, and loyalty—in short, that in which one should have faith or trust. To be truthful is to be trustworthy. What is clear is that humanity has been struggling with our relationship with “reality” for many millennia. In the first chapter of my recent book Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization I discuss written reflections on this struggle, going back at least 4,000 in East Africa. Yet, as an inheritance from colonialism, the prevailing portrait of the history of philosophy is that it began about 2,500 years ago on the European side of the Mediterranean. The alliance between hegemonic philosophy and colonialism—manifested in what has become known as “western philosophy”—is a crisis, and perhaps even a scandal, in the light of many practitioners’ ongoing failure to address it. That there has been an underside tradition, which has addressed this problem (since at least the seventeenth century) raises the question of whether philosophy, as practiced in its hegemonic form, is sufficiently selfcritical. This is not a light challenge; at its heart is the integrity of philosophy—whether philosophy is, ironically, true to itself and, as a consequence, again, trustworthy. There are many reflections on philosophy from philosophers, and in many of them the question of reality looms large. Perhaps none is more enduring, for reasons I suspect that defy colonial fantasies, than Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his Republic. There were similar reflections in antiquity, but Plato’s survive in full written form, which clearly offers much on which to reflect. Among the many takeaways from the allegory is that any theorizing within the cave—and thereby separate from the realm of the radically public— falls short of tracking reality. It is not that there are no elements of reality in the cave; it’s just that shadows are confused with the broader domain of possibilities. Inside the cave, reality is closed and complete. Outside, reality is open. A longtime aspiration and source of anxiety for humanity, as demonstrated not only in philosophy but also mythic and aesthetic accounts, is the realization that words and sentences, through which concepts and speech are formed, both demarcate and produce aspects of reality. The productive side is both alchemical and magical; as we know, language and the social worlds human beings build through it are also those in which, through which, and by which we live much of “reality.” In other words, the reality in which we think is always accompanied by the parenthetical “human.” For those antipathetic to (human) reality, “social reality” could suffice. There are, of course, reasons to object to adding “human” to our efforts to articulate and understand reality. Anthropomorphism is one. Another is archaeolinguistic and genealogical, similar to my point about translation. Given the many forms of selfreference to the art or practice of thinking, theorizing, attempting to discover, know, and learn, the parenthetical adjective could be more varying than one may think. Even further, objections could be posed to claims of a thinking subject as a necessary condition of or for thought. Responses include conceding such objections through a process of interrogating each objection and exploring where they lead. Such a process could lead us to an open horizon in the wake of broken idols, as many from Edmund Husserl to Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone Weil, or from John Dewey and William James to W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper, or from Rabindranath Tagore 115

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to Sri Aurobindo or from Cheikh Anta Diop to Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu or from Ottobah Cugoano to Anténor Firmin to Frantz Fanon or from Kitarō Nishida to Keiji Nishitani or from Abdel-Rahman Badawi to Ali Shariati and Mourad Wahba, and more have shown. As what always exceeds us, reality is humbling. Efforts to articulate and understand reality ricochet back to our relationship to all relationships and the communicability or intelligibility of each insight along the way. Now, this already rather abstract yet historical contextualizing brings to the fore the point I made about the importance of discussing problems of forming identities beyond formal analytic constraints, an approach that privileges formal logical analysis. That approach seeks to eliminate contradictions often without interest in learning from them. The project of eliminating contradictions could be characterized as a search for consistency. This means that if one were to continue a line of reasoning, all subsequent steps must also not contradict the previous ones. There is a long line of philosophical debate about what happens when evaluating logic or any activity capable of questioning itself. Many arrive upon a realization of a distinction between what it means to behave rationally versus behaving reasonably. Imagine being married to a person who is maximally consistent, one who never commits a contradiction. There is a word for such a marriage: hell. There would be a point at which adherence to consistency, to being rational or logical, amounts to being unreasonable. This revelation is of reason being broader in scope than rationality. Because it must evaluate rationality and all kinds of thinking, including itself, reason must be open and dynamic. It involves not only maintaining rules but also knowing when to break them—and providing good reasons for doing so. The incompleteness of rationality premised on maximizing consistency permeates philosophical reflection in every tradition in which the law of noncontradiction has been formulated. But formal logical reflection isn’t the only source of philosophical thinking, and others ranging from intelligibility, coherence, demonstration, description, indirection, dialectics, and a wide range of alternatives in other languages (think, for example, of hasasa or hatata in the Ethiopian language of Gəˁəz) already set the framework for philosophy, as a practice, to open its gates. Ironically, the line of reasoning Tuvel raised on specifically human identities and limits of analogies are already at work in the varieties of divisions, commitments, and identities in the discipline in which she is a practitioner. These critical reflections come forth in many ways in discussions of race in relation to its reality, and are there in challenges from the epistemological to the aesthetic, ethical, and political. Now, respecting the limitations of space in this forum, I won’t recapitulate what I have written on these matters but will instead simply state that “race,” as a designation now primarily posed as a feature of human groups, places it under the purview of human study and, thus, in philosophical terms, under philosophical anthropology. This requires thinking through what “human reality” means and what is required for its study. In my 2006 book Disciplinary Decadence, I argued that all disciplines are humanproduced and as such, they have the strengths and limitations of human production. 116

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Efforts to liberate them from us are rife with performative contradictions, among which is a form of human cleansing (purification). This effort often takes the form of treating disciplines as if they were created by gods. The same treatment applies to their methods. The result is what I call disciplinary decadence and what Wahba calls “fundamentalism.” Both offer forms of epistemic closure through which, in practice, the disciplines are offered as complete and perfect. This leads to secularized theodicean forms of argumentation. Theodicy deals with the kinds of rationalizations used to justify gods in the presence of injustice and evil. Where a god or the gods are presumed all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, why don’t they do something to prevent injustice and suffering? Two classic responses are that such a powerful god’s aims exceed human understanding and that a loving god respects human freedom. Both responses preserve the integrity of the god through pointing to human limitations. This argument could be secularized through replacing the god with something that could play the same role in the argument. The substitute could be a person, a society, a system of ideas, or a discipline. Where disciplinary decadence reigns, anything that challenges it must be rejected. In disciplines that study human reality, the response to people who don’t fit their disciplinary presuppositions lead to the frustrating question: “What’s wrong with these people?” This response in effect calls the people into question instead of considering whether it is the discipline itself that should be questioned. It is not a long leap to conclude that a discipline that should not be questioned eventually becomes full of itself. Sealed onto itself, reality could only be considered from within the discipline. We could call this “disciplinary solipsism.” Similar to the response of frustration when confronted by people who don’t fit, disciplinary practitioners who treat their disciplines as complete and its methods as perfect make the same move as proponents of theodicy: they build fortification against a rude intruder—reality. Although they didn’t use that formulation, the impact of disciplinary decadence on the study of race and racism is well documented among philosophers and social theorists over the past few hundred years, ranging from Ottobah Cugoano to Anténor Firmin to W.E.B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon. The varieties of human sciences produced in the Euromodern world posed racialized peoples as problems instead of studying them as people who face problems such as racism. By making those people the problem, the disciplines and the societies in which they are produced are left off the hook of political responsibility. There are additional fallacies in the study of race that are produced by disciplinary decadence in the human sciences. They include presumptions of a “pure” human species from which so-called inferior races deviate. There is also the presumption that “origins” must be pure. And there is the view that a human identity could be studied by itself without a relationship with other identities. It took some time to overcome the damage of these combined fallacies in contemporary thought. In genetics, we have come to learn that species originate from points of the most diverse combination of their genes. “Deviation,” so to speak, tends to move toward purity. With regard to the notion of isolated, pure identities, consider this: race never actually 117

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works by itself. Nor does gender. Nor does class. Nor do sexuality, religion, national identity, and many more. No one has ever seen a race walking, a gender walking, nor a class, sexuality, religion, or national identity. We encounter combinations of these embodied in each human being. That is because each of these are relational terms that, through fallacious, disciplinarily decadent interpretations, are decontextualized and placed outside of the relations through which they were produced and by which they are lived. This negative process is also called, in philosophical terms, “ontologizing.” Once identities are not ontologized, the question that follows is: What kinds of reality are they? The general answer is that they are forms of social reality. A crucial feature of social reality is communication. Without the ability to communicate, one would be locked into oneself. There would be no “outside,” and no others to whom to be accountable and with whom a concept such as evidence could make sense. Practitioners who behave this way in a discipline ignore what other disciplines offer. This process mirrors the racist attitude of those who believe that they have nothing to learn from other races. The superior race becomes an end and means. In both cases, what is needed is a way of going beyond them. As both impede one’s relationship with reality through investments in the self as reality, what is needed is a commitment to reality that transcends them. In the study of disciplines, I call that a “teleological suspension of disciplinarity.” That involves being willing to go beyond one’s discipline for the sake of reality or truth. In a discipline such as philosophy, this means being willing to go beyond philosophy for the sake of what many, if not all, philosophers claim to seek—namely, reality and truth. In the case of race and racism, it means being willing to go beyond the notion that one’s “race” has all the answers and is superior. Clearly, if racism is both wrong and premised on falsehoods, then such an effort involves a commitment to reality and the quest for truth. Now, what should be evident is that the willingness to go beyond the presupposition of the intrinsic legitimacy of one’s discipline, group, society, or system of beliefs requires not only a willingness to communicate with and be accountable to others, but also the ability to act and take responsibility for one’s actions. The decision to do so or not is an expression of freedom. It is also an expression of power since it involves the ability to bring meanings and their consequences into being. Power here means the ability to make things happen, along with access to the conditions of doing so. Those conditions are, in a word, reality. These observations amount to reality not as a “thing” but as what precedes our actions and what can be produced by them. There is, however, something that haunts at least our experience of reality. Just as it is possible that humanity could have not emerged, so, too, could all that preceded us. A terrifying thought for many, besieged with existential reflection, is that all of reality, from the physical to the metaphysical, need not have come about. None of us—indeed, nothing—had to be. In effect, human beings live in a reality that did not have to produce us. It is one of the reasons we in effect “live” or exist through human reality. Beyond the reality we produce, we are, in a word, homeless. We alleviate the homelessness of our existence through producing values and valuing those values. These range from our decorated habitats to our relationships with one 118

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another and our social institutions to our systems of knowledge through which we understand the world in which we live. Actions inaugurating and supporting these features of human reality include those that produce the public realm of communication through which we can manifest citizenship and, thus, politics. *

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The upshot of all this is that to speak of the reality of race is not to speak of it in ontological terms as one would a chair, stone, or tautological algorithm. It is to speak of the intelligibility of communicating it within the sphere of action. In other words, people act on race, and in such action produce it as a feature or a form of human reality that could be called “racialized human reality” or, simply, “racialization.” The logic of power by which race is produced is deceptive, since it requires treating as a fixed, natural, or ontological feature of reality that which is made or constructed. What is made, we should remember, must be maintained to stick around. This is another way of saying it can be unmade. Avoiding this conclusion requires at least two options. The first is coercive, which is the deployment of power to block others—in this case, those racialized as inferior—from conditions of being able to make things happen. The second is for the dominated group to make things easy by blocking themselves. If they believe either in their inferiority or the impossibility of changing their conditions, if they fail to see or understand their ability to act, the consequence would be identical with their condition not being made but given. In either interpretation, the result is an outcome, through the production of race, that is disempowering. When people are disempowered, their agency is only expressed inward. They act, at best, onto themselves. Pushed further inward, they are immobilized. Pushed further, they implode. Clearly, the best course is to move outward, to render disempowerment impotent. Outward directed power is social. Without the social, one’s reach is that of one’s physical body. The power of language enables us, through communication, to affect the world beyond our physical reach. Social power is such that one could be in one country but affect those on the other side of the planet by virtue of what is communicated through the technologies and institutions at our disposal. Racism is the rallying of institutions, manifestations of social power, for the sake of disempowering people who are racialized as inferior. It is also the propping up of a certain group as superior through granting them the supposed right to determine the rules of who counts as superior and otherwise. Since an individual aspiration or effort to block others would be impotent where there are no forces to spread it through the institutions and mechanisms of possibility in a society, racism is patently a political matter. Individualized, it is at best an insult or the attitudes of, in colloquial language, haters. The biggest fear of haters, however, is becoming irrelevant. The more power they lack, the more irrelevant they become. The enemy of racism, then, is the realization of its irrelevance. When racism is unable to permeate institutions—through organising their structures—it ceases to be anything more than individual aspirations. Put differently, the result is racists without racism. 119

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Racial eliminativists have argued otherwise. For them, the goal should be the elimination of race. Without race, there is no target, and, therefore, they argue, no institutional location for it to acquire intelligibility. A problem with that argument, however, is interpreting concepts in the way one would exact, singular terms. Concepts, however, especially when premised on human action, can have many meanings through how they are used. Thus, even the eradication of the term “race” and specific racial designations marked by color such as “black” and “white” do not entail the eradication of racialization in racist societies. In the United States, for example, the shift from “black” to “African American” did not eliminate racism. The term “racism” in fact came out of the European experience, even though the practice of racism preceded its coinage by nearly a thousand years. The prototypical term raza referred to Jews and Moors. Despite the efforts of Jews to escape race, even with arguing for the singularity of antisemitism, the grammar of racialization is there. It is an error to think of racialization as requiring morphological similarity or homogeneity, for, as many blacks know, black homogeneity is a stereotypical racial construction. That is because black peoples are morphologically and culturally diverse. There is thus no reason why a group as diverse as Jews, whose complexion ranges from the lightest to the darkest hues, cannot be racialized. This, too, is the case with Muslims. This makes sense since Muslims were part of the prototypical designation. It is so with varieties of Southwest Asian groups who are placed outside of the orbit of belonging to the holy and the natural. Think of Dalits (from the Hebrew word actually meaning “crushed,” “low,” “poor,” “weak,” but more familiar today as “Untouchables”). This list can go on. It can because the grammar and ongoing practices (Wittgensteinians would say “language games”) of racialization persist through the institutions and conditions of intelligibility of racist societies. Critics of the expression “racist societies” often mistakenly interpret it to mean that every member of the society is racist. As we have already seen, it’s possible to have racists without racism. There are many instances of racists from a racist society visiting another society in which racism is not part of its history or institutions. Think of travellers or explorers arriving in societies where the indigenous peoples have no idea of what is being introduced by the visitors or, in some cases, invaders. In those contexts, especially where the invaders lose, there is simply anomaly. If, however, we consider societies in which racism is intelligible, there is a stronger argument that can be made. In those instances, we should think back to the discussion of human reality as an open instead of closed reality. What this means is that racism is an effort to impose closure on human reality. But since each human being is a relationship with human reality—that is, human beings are not properly beings or substances (things) but, instead, ongoing relationships in the making—then the idea that every single individual relationship in a racist society is a racist one is not viable because it is not liveable (though it is, admittedly, logically possible). The racially dominated are also in relationships with racist societies, so racism is always, by virtue of the forces it is deploying, being resisted, circumvented, and challenged. The sustainability of racism depends on rallying energy away from so many other aspects of racist societies such that, to paraphrase a familiar adage, its members discover that no society can live by racism alone. 120

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All this leads to a meditation on failure. After all, once political solutions to racism are announced, the question that remains is how to put them into effect. Many examples of failed efforts to transform racist societies can be pointed to, but one should bear in mind that there is a fallacy at work in these examples. The failure is determined through the individuals who acted. There is an implicit non-relational metaphysics in the judgment. It leads to the fallacious notion that the world can only be changed if an individual can do so alone. What else could such an individual be but a god? There is, however, another way of reading individual efforts to change the world. If those individuals and their efforts are read as relationships that are part of a larger series of relationships that are constitutive of a society, any action that challenges that system requires a realignment of power for their suppression. Consequently, other sites and practices would be unlocked. This is because there is no such thing as an omniscient and omnipotent human system. Failure is not the measure of a moment; it is a conclusion of a practice or effort that has been exhausted. But as each effort is the condition of possibility of others, there is a form of anonymity of future actions at the heart of each effort of social transformation. Made plain: those of us who enjoy broader options today do so on the basis of the conditions of those who preceded us. Think of those many past enslaved women and men who were told their struggles for dignity and freedom didn’t matter. They had no way to know those of us whose lives and opportunities came about from their actions. At best, their actions were for them expressions of commitment. We who are the beneficiaries of our ancestors’ punished actions may be unintelligible to them. The same will no doubt be the case for our successors. Whether in the past or the present, political action against coercive models of power—and for the distribution of power into empowered action—requires political commitment. This is an expansion of freedoms that are antipathetic to racism. This is one of the reasons why antiracism is ultimately a struggle for democracy. A society devoted to disempowering (dehumanizing) portions of its population is patently undemocratic and often worse: anti-democratic. The fight for the eradication of dehumanization is worthless if the result is a socially impotent group. As a struggle for democracy, anti-racism is thus a transcending activity in which communication is a necessary condition. The communicative practice of democracy requires conceptions of citizenship beyond contemporary formulations of voting. A “thick” or rich model of social access—brought about by having institutions that make such things possible—would patently not be a racist one. As racialization is always part of a constellation of other forms of reification, a long list of its convergences or intersections would come into play—from gender to sexual orientation to class formation and others constitutive of how people actually live. *

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I’m aware that these implications of the transdimensionality and radical potential of human reality may be dizzying for the reader. This is a normal response. Human existence is a struggle for stability amidst our ongoing metastability. Existence (from the Latin 121

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expression ex sistere), after all, also means to stand out. This includes standing out sufficiently to pose human reality as a concern of inquiry. I have written here about asymmetries, incompleteness, openness, and other considerations that amount to additional discomforting and discomfiting implications of human reality, which, in the effort to stabilize, gave rise over the ages to varieties of avowed stabilizing efforts such as class, gender, and race (among many others).At the heart of their correlative dehumanizing practices of class oppression, misogyny, and racism is misanthropy. Although the trans stories are manifold, at the heart of them is the unlocking of possibilities by which human beings could live otherwise. This raises a consideration at the core of existence. To stand out, even from initial manifestations of doing so, because contingent and free, need not be, in a word, “straight.” There is something queer about human existence, and just as dehumanization involves closing off the openness of human reality, so, too, are efforts of de-queering. I leave the reader at this point with that thought, which so many other courageous souls are not only articulating and developing, but, also, as we already know, living.

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CHAPTER 10 LETTER TO A GRIEVING STUDENT

Dear -----Thanks for sending me the link. I will send the funds [in support of your deceased friend’s mother] today. I didn’t spell out the details [of my illness] because I want to focus on your grief. I have unfortunately had to deal with the loss of loved ones so often that it even became an existential philosophical study. I remember losing my best friend in 1991. It was in a hot, sunny August in NYC. The rays of light felt like unbearable assaults on my flesh. It made it hard to think. Confusion was all around, and I felt my spirit eating away. He was Catholic, so his funeral was in a Catholic church. As we carried his casket out the church, I was drenched in tears. I couldn’t imagine a day worse than that. Then suddenly a breeze came from nowhere. It compelled me to look up. Across the street, there were two little girls skipping along while eating ice cream cones. It occurred to me that they were enjoying one of their happiest days while I was suffering from what I thought was my worst. I learned that at every given moment, there is someone going through affliction while we experience joy and vice versa. That day wasn’t the last. Deaths were markers at different periods after that, but an avalanche occurred in 2004 when my mother was killed en route to my home in Rhode Island. She was on her way to celebrate the birthday of my eldest son. Her passing was so brutal that my middle brother is still traumatized from having looked at her corpse. I knew I couldn’t bear doing so, and since my family and relatives depended on me to take care of everything, I had to stay focused although the trauma was so severe that it eventually led to a variety of illnesses. My father died the end of that year from an accident while taking a shower. And a series of other deaths—favorite aunts, cousins, etc. followed. All that was happening while I was chair of a department, founding the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and many more things. Something I learned about loss is that despite the pain we feel at the moment, it’s actually worse a few years later on. That is because in the moment, our subconscious doesn’t accept the loss as reality. I would expect a phone call from the lost loved one. As you might imagine, this was most so with regard to my mother. The grief at the third year after her death was crushing. I spent a month at times unable to move. We live in a society that throws upon us an attitude toward life and death that involves suppressing whichever we most fear or dread. Yet the truth is that both are always there. We live and die at the same time, and as you are experiencing, it is not our own death that is worse—although narcissists avow otherwise—but instead the death of our loved ones. That, at least, is how people capable of love experience life. So, although I had to take seriously that I was facing death a few weeks ago, what was mostly on my mind was what that would mean for my loved ones and what I should do 123

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to look out for them. I realized that in the end, I had to try ultimately to continue living for them. They went through a period of being so terrified that they were also angry at me. I had to reach some inner strength to understand that. COVID-19 is not a flu. It really is something new, which you already know from what your loved ones went through. I realized that within the second week of immense suffering. There were many counter-intuitive steps I took. As I am already writing you a long letter, I won’t spell out the details here. I began to improve nearly 2 weeks ago, with some mild relapses. I waited until last week to begin contacting friends and colleagues to explain why they hadn’t heard from me. My main explanation was this. If I had informed them earlier, they would have been going through suffering a form of limbo. So many people are suffering right now that I did not want to impose that on them. If I had passed, there would be resolution. Contacting them at a point where I was improving with stable temperature and oxygen levels brought some positive news into their life. I suspect no one returns to normal from this. I haven’t returned to normal since my mother passed. All I could do is work to build a different kind of normal. I will have to do such as I learn how much damage struggling with this illness will leave on me. So, -----, I am so sorry your family, your friend’s mother, and you are going through this. Remember your right to your grief. Try not to go through the pitfalls of survivorship (for years I wished it were me instead of my mother, but I realized that she would have preferred it were she instead of anyone of her children or grandchildren). That is part of our condition when we love. Again, please send my condolences to your friend’s mother and the community who lost his father and him. And, of course, do your best to build a way of living with this. Your community there and your community here do not want to lose you. Try your best to be safe and healthy, ----Lewis

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CHAPTER 11 ROCKIN’ IT IN BLUE: A BLACK EXISTENTIAL ESSAY ON JIMI HENDRIX

How ironic it is that rock ’n’ roll, a black art form, has been so whitened that one of its practitioners, arguably the greatest rock guitarist, could be located as an exception to its rule. Yet (white) rock ’n’ roll is not necessarily always a racist product. Many of the early great white rock ’n’ roll artists, especially those in Britain such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, were actually lovers of the blues and simply sought to participate in music they loved. They created their brand through ultimately being themselves. Black existentialism raises questions of such ironic twists, as presentation and representation unfold in unique ways not only in performance but also in content and as themes of what it means to be human, to struggle for freedom, and to sing, shout, and play music—often without being heard by the dominant yet loved by the oppressed— come to the fore. These questions become even more poignant as the blues sensibility of rock ’n’ roll, as the leit-motif of modernity, receives reflection. In that spirit, I offer here reflections that I hope will (1) contextualize philosophically the work and significance of the de facto greatest guitarist and one of the greatest figures of blues and rock, Jimi Hendrix; (2) offer a black existential reading of his contributions; and, as a musician myself, (3) consider some analyses of musically specific elements of Hendrix’s playing. Though primarily a drummer, I also play a variety of instruments, including piano. I have directly experienced in musical contexts the whitening of black music about which I have just remarked. I recall in the late 1970s setting up instruments to perform at a club in New York City. A group of black boys passing by were intrigued by the instruments and asked about the gig. We invited them to come to the sound check and also come by later to hear the performance. “What kind of music?,” they asked. “Jazz,” we responded. “Jazz? Naaa. That’s white people’s music!,” they protested and walked off. Think about it. Jazz—a music born of the fusion of Africa and Europe, a medium that shook up racism in producing an array of artists whose status as “geniuses” was undeniable and that broke the grip of presumed white legitimation of musical excellence—was by then perceived as “white people’s music.” To make matters worse, although we were black musicians, the reality by then, and pretty much exacerbated since, is that playing African American classical music—the preferred term of the teachers at Jazz Mobile, the artist collective in New York City, in the 1970s and 1980s—pretty much consigned black musicians to majority white and, in some cases, entirely white audiences. Add the devastation created by neoconservatism and neoliberalism in the United States and Britain since the 1980s, and that demographical change emerged among musicians as

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well, where the performers of jazz became increasingly white and, as with European classical music, Northeast Asian. At this point, I would like to state, unequivocally, two positions I take on an issue that would immediately come to mind from what I have said thus far. The first is the cultural appropriation thesis. I have so many reasons to reject this thesis, of which, for the sake of brevity, I will here only mention two. The cultural appropriation thesis is premised on a fallacious understanding of culture that reduces culture to mere folkways and mores instead of the reality of its human modes of being and disclosing reality. (I will return to this claim.) Anything created by human beings that is of use for other human beings will work its way through our species and ultimately belong to humanity. This is a position argued well by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his discussion of the ax.1 Whether made of stone or steel, the ax is a technological innovation that humanity understood belongs with the production of fire, wheels, arrows, and much more. The idea that it “belongs” to whoever originally created it is absurd. Moreover, there is a notion of identity and cultural unanimity that brings incoherence to such a notion. Such innovations emerge from individuals and are practiced by communities that, by virtue of being human, communicate them to many others. There is, however, an additional problem with regard to the cultural appropriation thesis. I recall in the early 1990s hearing some seriously great hip-hop bumping from another car while I was pumping some gas into mine. It was so good I was compelled to turn around to ask the other driver about the cut and discovered, to my surprise, a white guy moving his head to the beat in near rapture. What struck me was that he was enjoying the music. And therein is the additional point. The fallacy of the cultural appropriation thesis is the notion that whites appropriate simply by participation. What is thrown to the wayside are the aesthetic qualities of the music. That white guy wasn’t trying to be black; he was simply enjoying music whose origin is black and what we now know as black music, and that particular instance of black music was good. In short, the beauty of black aesthetic production is the baby that is thrown out with the bathwater of critique. The confusion is this. Cultural participation is not identical with historical erasure. What has happened to a long list of black cultural productions is the erasure of their historical genesis emerging from what could be called white historical capital. It is a practice premised on a fallacy that whites are the sole source of historical agency and creativity. It is the same force behind the whitening of African antiquity, such as what was done in the transformation of the name “Kmt” into (Greek) “Egypt,” through to the many technologies of everyday life ranging from the lightbulb to automobile brakes and countless other inventions cataloged in historical memory as white. The second fallacy is authenticity. As this forum limits detailed analysis, I’ll simply say that the problem I have with authenticity is that it collapses into a form of bad faith that turns human beings away from social reality to focus on the self and forms of cultural closure, the result of which is the erasure of human possibility. A prime tendency of authenticity narratives is the collapse into self-sustaining moralistic purity—the search for the genuinely authentic tends to be one for the unadulterated, for what is not polluted by the impact of outsiders. Being primarily internally oriented, a normative assessment 126

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of the external emerges to the point of reduced identity: being good by virtue of being identical with oneself. However, such isolation is not befitting of human forms of reality; the consequence is a failure of sufficient identity with the self, and the whole thing collapses. Proponents of authenticity could object and claim that authenticity demands rejecting purity, isolation, internalism, identitarianism—indeed, all isms. Such an objection, however, would amount to saying that what’s most authentic is to reject authenticity. The cultural appropriation and authenticity theses ultimately rely on nonrelational conceptions of what it means to be human. Again, for the sake of brevity I won’t elaborate my position here. Suffice it to say that a metaphysics premised on human beings as things, as self-sustained substances outside of relations with others, is in fact an effort to make the nonhuman a criterion of what it means to be human. The philosophical anthropology of relational humanity addresses the human capacity to produce human worlds. Here, I summarize my philosophy of culture. Drawing on ideas of thinkers ranging from Ernst Cassirer and Sri Aurobindo on transitions from matter to life to consciousness to mind to signs to symbolic language to culture, I add a theory of dimensionality.2 Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, read such a concept in spatial terms where time, for instance, as a fourth dimension is regarded more as a “place,” in accordance with which one could properly ask about what location in time an event occurs. If we regard such as a metaphor, however, and think of dimension as different kinds of disclosed reality, we might immediately see that dimensions are manifested in their own terms. Thus, consciousness is not simply an emergence but is also a dimension through which mind (another dimension) could come about. The technology of mind moving farther is language, and the degree of richness it offers discloses other forms of reality in the way electricity could produce not only magnetism but also light. One form of reality disclosed through the communicative and symbolic richness of language is culture, or human reality. As culture, too, is a dimension, it affords the emergence of other kinds. Among them, I here claim, is aesthetic reality, wherein the human world lives value as deserving value in its full range from meaning to absurdity, pleasure to disgust, and, of course, imagination to complacent repetition. Understood as such, aesthetics is not a side dish of life or, even less, the dessert after the consumption of what really matters. It is as central to what it means to live a human life as the various converging dimensions of human existence. The error of nonrelationality comes to the fore also in how many of us may conceive of the intervals, relations, or distances between one human activity and another. Consider musical scales. Much of Western music is now conditioned by the intervals between half notes on a piano (e.g., moving from C to C-sharp or backward from, say, B to B-flat). The human voice and range of hearing are not, however, limited to those intervals. Since a half could be broken down to a quarter, the quarter to an eighth, and so on, the possibilities of sound are nearly infinitesimal. Additionally, the spaces don’t have to be so even. Instead of an eighth of a difference between notes, there could be a seventh or seventeenth or more. In short, musical possibilities needn’t be constrained by conventions that, we often fail to remember, were developed for specific purposes and sounds. Consider this 127

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example. A few years ago I was invited to speak at a special meeting of community activists and academics in South Africa. While everyone was gathering, I noticed an old beatup piano in the conference hall. When I went over to play it, one of my hosts stopped me and explained, “It’s out of tune.” “No worries,” I said, and then sat down and jammed for a while on some blues and jazz tunes. When I was done, my host was perplexed. “I thought it was out of tune,” she said, and my cohosts joined her, baffled. “It is,” I replied, which increased their bewilderment. “But it sounded great,” she added. “You don’t need a tuned instrument to play music,” I responded. Reality vibrates in many frequencies. So does beauty. Many spoken languages range in frequencies that vary according to synapses developed during the early years of language acquisition for people from one society to another. For some, playing Euro modern music and engaging in such speech is like trying to place big feet into tiny shoes. It’s just that those who wear such small shoes imagine them to be the size of a reality in which all is supposed to fit. The music that emerged through the mixture or creolization of Euro modern, Afro modern, varieties of First Nation, and Asian modern sounds transcend much of what many presume to be music.3 Blues music, in which there are the famous blue notes and musical rhythms slightly beyond the rigid beats of subscribed Euro modern musicality, is a case in point. Properly played, it’s a sound beyond, matched with rhythms, challenging much of presumed musical reality as offered by hegemonic conceptions of music forged from colonization. In short, it challenges the coloniality of music. This challenge to the coloniality of music is also politically rich. After all, if music could emerge from instruments that are out of tune, couldn’t an equivalent emerge at societal levels for people who are marked by difference? Instead of democracy as having each key placed in a restricted and “well-ordered” place, couldn’t there be something else at work, such as how, through working together, different intervals of performance and achievement could emerge in which new kinds of music, those indigenous and more suitable to the instrument at hand, groove?

Existence in Blue Black existentialism addresses problems of existence endemic to the emergence of blackness. Black people, after all, didn’t exist—appear, come forth, stand out—prior to a colonial world that transformed peoples of the variety of ethnic groups of Africa, South Asia, and Australia into such. This process also created categories of peoples in such continents and regions into something different from other peoples. Thus, not all blacks are African, and not all Africans are black. Blackness, however, as indigenous to Euromodernity, suffers from the condition of rejection from the only world to which it could belong. There is thus a form of loss in blackness; that loss, however, is paradoxical, since one could only lose what one previously had. Having not existed prior to Euromodernity and also being rejected by that modernity, black people suffer a unique form of 128

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melancholia of belonging to a world to which they don’t belong. This contradiction creates an existential paradox for black people—namely, that of creating a home out of homelessness. Such a plight, as I’ve argued in writings ranging from Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism to Existentia Africana to An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, leads to explorations along at least three problematics: (1) what it means to be human, (2) the meaning of dignity and freedom, and (3) the justification of justificatory practices.4 Each of these three things makes sense when one reflects on colonialism, racism, and slavery. Such practices force those on whom they are imposed to question not only their humanity but also what it means to be human. These practices also lead to struggles for freedom and respect. And finally, though not exhaustively, they lead to legitimation crises, because each was accompanied by rationalizations of their ultimate goodness. If reason could be used for such nefarious ends, wouldn’t that mean, paradoxically, the historical presence of unreasonable reason? If so, what resource could anyone have to address such a phenomenon? Frantz Fanon saw the problem well when he pondered the folly of such efforts. In my book What Fanon Said, I formulated the problem as that of having to contend with unreasonable reason reasonably.5 Such efforts require being able to evaluate one’s situation. It requires maturity. The blues, as an art form and philosophical view of life, takes on such a task in form and content. The basic structure of A-A-B-A-C-A (first section repeated, going to a bridge, returning to the first section, a coda, and then affirmation of the first) illustrates this point. Each instance of the “A” section is, as the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips points out, difference in repetition, for to say it again is to not to say the same, since the other instances are restatements of different realization.6 If one imagines reality as that which is difficult to face, as that which could only be taken in small doses, the blues asks for reality through admission of a desire to avoid it. The bridge is often a flight, but by the time the coda hits, one could now face the initial problem with renewed insight. Nearly every blues results in the orator/singer taking responsibility for her or his existence. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks took a similar form.7 The first sections repeated failure on their way to a heroic effort at escape that collapses, at the end of the fifth chapter, into tears. Succeeding them is the initial, difficult effort: facing reality through admission of there being no healthy conception of normality for blacks in Euromodernity while facing the need to take on the responsibility for life through the resources and agency embedded in the human ability of questioning. And what do we question? Fanon’s argument, shared not only by existentialists but also by structuralists, critical pedagogues, and Global Southern theorists, is the human element of human reality. In other words, it is by understanding the constitutive role that human beings play in the world—dimensionally disclosed, by human action—and the role that humans play in sustaining institutions, especially those of power, through which the worlds in which we live are also maintained or, if need be, changed. Existence in blue emerges from the same in black. Blackness, as the analysis thus far reveals, addresses the harsh, displeasing truths of reality instead of taking flight into the pleasing falsehoods offered by systems attempting to erase it. It brings along with it those intervals, interstices, and infelicities, the undersides elided by a world that imagines itself 129

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as complete, in a set of keys akin to quarter tones. The blues, the music and tragic admission of adult life—avoiding suffering, after all, is best done through never having lived—makes the message and role of the blues evident: in demanding reality, the blues is also the leitmotif of Afromodernity’s critique of Euromodernity. Ironically, it makes the blues the de facto leitmotif of Euromodernity as well, of what emerges when it is willing to face reality. That is one of the reasons why, whether in Europe or Asia, in Australia or South America, and perhaps whenever there are human beings working in Antarctica, there is someone listening to, reflecting on, or simply experiencing the blues. This blues sensibility has made its way through varieties of music in the present age, ranging from jazz to samba to reggae to rock ’n’ roll to hip hop and more. It is why much that could simply be called modern music is black music. I wrote at the beginning that rock ’n’ roll is black music. But what is black music? It is music in the sense that theory in black is theory; it challenges the completeness of music through raising, constantly, the human reach beyond closure; it is always theory also talking about theory; it is music also, in its performance, talking about music, especially its suppressed or repressed terms. This is one of the reasons why so many could participate in and also appreciate black music, even when efforts at historical erasure mask its black origins and continued elements.

Jimi Hendrix as Paradigmatic Case Everything is unique about Jimi Hendrix. A detailed discussion of his life is beyond the scope of this essay. For now, I’ll offer simply summaries, which I hope will bring to the fore the overall argument I’m making. Before I continue, however, I would like to make a point about argumentation. Theoretical work, especially among practitioners known as philosophers, often takes the form of arguments whose normative context is debate. This approach resembles fighting, wherein the goal is to win. A problem with such an approach is this: history is replete with many among the victorious who were, in the end, simply wrong. Another model, where establishing healthy relationships with reality and truth is the goal, is to develop practices that enable us to see what we hitherto failed to see, hear what we failed to hear, understand what we failed to understand, and also discover what we thought could not exist. If “demonstration” were to replace “argumentation,” one would see that arguments are but a part of a process of demonstration. There is unusual meeting ground here across many theoretical approaches, for although logicists, historicists, hermeneuticists, deconstructionists, genealogists, phenomenologists, experimentalists, pragmatists, analysts, analecticists, hatatatists, and practitioners of many other approaches may argue with each other, each ultimately must offer some kind of demonstration of a position for its communicability to the other. This fundamental problem of communicability harkens back to the multidimensional forms of disclosure I mentioned earlier. The goal of demonstration is to show, which is in fact the meaning of the term. 130

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So what I hope to show here in summary fashion are resources with which to deal with reality offered from aesthetic life by Jimi Hendrix as a great exemplar. We already see here a different view of aesthetics than conventional ones of taking time out from life, of escape. This model steeps us in reality. Anyone who listens to Hendrix’s music is immediately aware of his virtuosity. At the instrumental level, he is like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane simultaneously on the saxophones and their revolutionary impact of bebop, their contributions to blues music, and free jazz. In fact, freedom, as we have seen, is a fundamental element of existence in black/blue. There are other instrumentalists who could be cited, but the revolutionary status of Parker and Coltrane in jazz is such that Hendrix’s belonging alongside them speaks for itself. Similar to them, his life was marked by the realities of American antiblack racism, the poverty it cultivated, and the tragedies it unleashed as features of everyday life of existence in black. Hendrix’s harsh childhood was such that he had adopted the name “Buster,” in tribute to the actor who played Flash Gordon, as an exemplification of his dreams of escaping to other worlds among the stars. An old onestring ukulele afforded his introduction to performing music. Hendrix’s dedication was such that he figured out how to play his favorite songs on the radio simply by manipulating the one string. He then tied strings along the bars of his bed and managed to play what he wished with those. He eventually secured a rusty acoustic guitar, and as life unfolded he continued playing whatever instrument he could secure. As he was left-handed, this often meant playing, left-hand style, right-handed guitars. He turned the guitars upside down and played them. When he was finally able to afford left-handed guitars, it didn’t matter. He continued to play any kind he could get.8 A feature of string instruments conducive for blues music is the possibility of achieving more sounds and moves through the location of one’s fingers on the strings and forms of strumming. For the desired effect, one could play quarter or even eighth tones, which aren’t possible on, for example, the piano. Thelonious Monk, for example, simulated such sounds through pressing two half notes together such as F and F-sharp. The dissonance compelled listeners to hear or at least imagine sounds that were in between. The instance I discussed earlier of playing an out-of-tune piano is a good example of this. Such a piano enabled me to play such notes with greater precision and effect. On the guitar Hendrix’s creativity thus had no limit, though I’m sure the case would be the same on any instrument he chose. For instance, he used every part of his body to produce music with the guitar: his chin, his nose, his tongue, and even his crotch. A famous story illustrated this point. In the 1960s the white English guitarist Eric Clapton was, in the classic erasure and presumed intrinsic legitimacy of white superiority, dubbed to be so great among his fans that some produced graffiti declaring him the Deity. At a legendary performance in which Clapton was performing with his band Cream, Hendrix asked to jam. Hendrix’s solo on Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Killing Floor,” a song Clapton admitted he found challenging, mesmerized the audience to the point of Clapton disappearing from the stage. When his friend Chas Chandler went to check on him in his dressing room, Clapton said, puffing on a cigarette, “You never told me he was that fucking good!”9 131

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Hendrix had a habit of reminding the white world that claims of achieving the holy amounted to idolatry. A distinction between Hendrix and great musicians such as Parker and Coltrane, however, is his work as a composer. Although each produced instrumental classics, Hendrix was also a gifted lyricist. His songs are among the classics of blues and rock. His mother, who died at the age of thirty-two, emerges in poetic form in quite a few, of which “Little Wing” is perhaps the most known.10 An ironic feature of his lyrics is the extent to which they address reality through seeming irreality, fantasy, and magic. He in effect asks us to see what we fail to see, as the aesthetic realm is “entered,” so to speak, through being willing to let go of the fears and prejudices that block our path from life’s richer significance. That Hendrix was a black man creating beauty in antiblack societies—the United Kingdom, after all, imagined that it was more progressive on race than it actually was—raised an important challenge to black melancholia. Even though rejected by a world to which black people are indigenous, beauty in black, accompanied also by enjoying and celebrating such beauty, inaugurates a radical challenge of mattering— through the practice of deserving pleasure and joy and of valuing—as a right to be valued through the experience of value. Black life in Euromodernity is supposed to be so miserable that black people are afforded no time to remember our humanity. Jimi Hendrix never failed to falsify that thesis. Given the limitations of space, I’m going to here close with two observations about Hendrix’s aesthetic production along the line of black existential transcendence of Euro modern reductionism. The first is afforded by Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.11 Unlike other Euro classicists of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche rejected the idea of Attic tragedy as a progressive movement in which Sophoclean drama (Socrates’s favorite) was the pinnacle. Instead, Nietzsche argued that Aeschylus exemplified the healthiest moment, followed by a decline through Sophocles to Euripides. His challenge was initially conservative and misogynist. He celebrated the moment of dance, celebration, and the chorus (Aeschylus) and lamented the movement to egological reflection (Sophocles) and then feminine equality (Euripides). Offensive though this may at first sound to contemporary, democratic, and feminist sentiments, Nietzsche did identify a pattern that seems to emerge in the life of various art forms. Jazz, for example, began as dance music that was then transitioned into a form dominated by the solo and complex performances. It eventually shifted in the emergence of rhythm and blues as the esoteric forms became more cerebral. The rhythm and blues form offered access to more sexual representations. Rhythm and blues then reinvigorated the dance element into early rock ’n’ roll, which, we should remember, was marked by dancing and a solid role for the chorus. What followed was the emergence of an ego-centered lead singer, long guitar solos, and a decline in dance, followed by a heavily sexualized obsession with the feminine. Think, as well, of reggae. The early period of ska and rock-steady focused on dance rhythms, chorus singing, and celebrations of life, even with the blues and at times a spiritual format. The second stage shifted to the individual protest singer, with guitar solos. The third, dance hall, was overtly sexual and focused in often degrading fashion, 132

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albeit much debated by proponents, on women. Finally, but not exclusively, consider the movements of hip-hop. Emerging first at house and outdoor park parties, the focus was on dancing, and the purpose of the DJ was to encourage the crowd to dance and sing out in chorus. The next stage was the rapper, whose ego and life story dominated the form. Eventually, a collapse into hypersexuality and misogyny dominated, and now splintered forms emerge here and there echoing each stage. Nietzsche’s schema is, of course, not absolute. He is, after all, describing movements of decadence. People at the periphery or the margins of what he considers the life-affirming “healthy stage” suffer, for example, from structured nonappearance in which to do otherwise would be a violation of the system. Blacks, for instance, face problems of illicit appearance, whereby to appear at all carries the weight of violence or violating the system. What is striking, however, is that within black communities (and similar groups facing social exclusion) these movements from growth to decadence emerged. Hendrix played through the movements from dance blues to reflective and lead singer–guitarist mode. Striking, however, was his embodiment throughout. Hendrix was always androgynous. He was, in Nietzsche’s language, Dionysian and Apollonian. Hendrix’s image was clearly Dionysus, and so too was his playing, but there was always the presence of the controlled beauty of form stretched out of its limits in the blues. The feminine in Hendrix did not collapse into misogyny. Even his cover of Billy Roberts’s “Hey Joe” is full of irony. Each performance goes back and forth in call-and-response through a single singer conveying the absurdity of norms through which dignity is accrued through violence and the psychoanalytical significance of a gun. Joe, in Hendrix’s rendition, is stupid. Hendrix achieves irony in his music through manifesting, in lyrics and performance, stages of double consciousness. The concept, emerging from nineteenth-century philosophy, is well known in Africana thought through its various formulations from W. E. B. Du Bois, who explored, phenomenologically, the experience of being seen as a negative term and the awareness of the perspective through which that comes into being.12 In this formulation, to be black is to be a problem instead of a human being who faces problems. In the former, white is right and black is that which disrupts legitimate spheres of existence. In the latter, there is a world created by whites that obstructs the mechanisms, technologies, or options available for black people to live ordinary human modes of existence. Realization of the latter raises what Fanon calls sociogenic understandings of hitherto avowed ontogenic (individual organic) and phylogenic (species-oriented) problems. Such realization places one in a dialectical relationship by virtue of identifying the contradictions posed by false gods (avowed, intrinsically legitimate whiteness). The collapse of presumed universal whiteness doesn’t entail universal blackness, however. Instead, it particularizes both, through an ongoing interaction and unveiling of contradictions in a universalizing process instead of one that posits a presumed complete, universal outcome. This dynamic process Jane Anna Gordon calls potentiated double consciousness.13 I have also referred to it as teleological suspensions of disciplinary practices, by which I mean the paradoxical going beyond systems for the sake of reality. In music, this means performing forms of music beyond music. 133

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Though Jimi Hendrix achieves this in thousands of performances and hundreds of recordings, I believe—since this essay is being written during what are now perilous times in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections—that an example worth considering is his groundbreaking performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in 1969.14 This was a performance that should be seen as well as heard. In every note, in every gesture of his body, Hendrix unveils the flattering self-portrait of the traditional rendition through performing, in every note, the underside, the missing notes, the blue notes, the red notes—the many rendered invisible by what too many are used to hearing when they perform the U.S. national anthem. Hendrix was, after all, Afro–Native American. Red for him was also the blood of First Nations peoples; blue was of a different kind, one marked by black suffering and enslavement; and white, after all, also meant the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and avowed white supremacy. Yet as a statement of addressing reality, that wasn’t only what the combination of colors meant. It also meant the complicated suffering wrought from possibility, and for Hendrix, it meant a statement of nonbelonging in the land of his birth. He performed this song powerfully, juxtaposing the sorrowful military song “Taps” alongside riffs of bullets, grenades, and missiles and screams, shrieks, and tears in front of a majority white audience who, despite their rebellious efforts, continued failing to see what they ought to see, hear what they ought to hear, understand and learn what they ought to if they but took moments to face reality’s displeasing truths. I end my moment of reflection by simply referring my readers to this performance, one through which to think, feel, and imagine more.

Notes 1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). 2. Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910) and Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923–1929); Sri Aurobindo, The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life upon Earth, 2nd ed. (Twin Lakes, MI: Lotus, 2003). 3. For a detailed analysis of creolization, see Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 4. Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995; reprint, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999); Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000); An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5. Lewis R. Gordon, What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 6. Ricardo Rowan Phillips, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2010). 7. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008; original French edition published in 1952).

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Rockin’ It in Blue 8. For this and other biographical details on Hendrix’s early life, see Leon Hendrix, with Adam Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix: A Brother’s Story (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013). 9. Ed Vulliamy, “Jimi Hendrix: ‘You Never Told Me He Was That Good,’ ” The Guardian, August 8, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/08/ jimi-hendrix-40th-anniversarydeath. 10. Jimi Hendrix, “Little Wing,” The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Axis: Bold as Love (London: Track Records, 1968). 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), and Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). 13. Paget Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” in Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader, edited by Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, 27–58 (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). 14. “Jimi Hendrix—Star Spangled Banner (Woodstock 1969),” Vimeo, n.d., https://vimeo. com/90907436.

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PART II DECOLONIZING KNOWLEDGE

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CHAPTER 12 DISCIPLINARY DECADENCE AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE

This article, offered in celebration of CODESRIA’s fortieth anniversary, addresses some recent theoretical developments in the decolonization of knowledge. That knowledge has been colonized raises the question of whether it was ever free. The formulation of knowledge in the singular already situates the question in a framework that is alien to times before the emergence of European modernity and its age of global domination, for the disparate modes of producing knowledge and notions of knowledge were so many that knowledges would be a more appropriate designation. Unification was a function of various stages of past imperial realignment, where local reflections shifted their attention to centers elsewhere to the point of concentric collapse. On their way, those varieties of knowledge coalesced into knowledge of the center, and successive collapses of centers under the weight of other centers led, over time, to the global situation of the center (centrism) and its concomitant organisation of knowledges into knowledge.1 This path has not, however, been one exclusively built upon alienation, for along with the strange and the alien were also the familiar and, at times, the welcomed. Enrique Dussel is a member of a community of scholars who have questioned the logic of self-reflection offered by the most recent stage of centric productions of knowledge.2 The philosophical framework of such rationalisation is familiar to most students of Western philosophy: René Descartes reflected on method in the seventeenth century, grew doubtful, and articulated the certainty of his thinking self in opposition to the fleeting world of physical appearance. A result of such intellectual labour is a shift of first questions from meditations on what there is to what can be known. This focus on epistemology as first philosophy charted the course of philosophy in modern terms against and with which contemporary philosophers and social theorists continue to struggle and grapple. For political thinkers, the new beginning is a little earlier, in the late fifteenth century—through early sixteenth-century reflections on politics by Niccolò Machiavelli. Against these intellectualist formulations of modern life, Dussel raises the question of its underside, of the geopolitical, material impositions and the unnamed millions whose centers collapsed not simply from the force of ideas but sword and musket. That modernity was ironically also identified by Machiavelli but is often overlooked through how he is read today: in The Prince, Machiavelli wrote of the effects of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s victory over the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula.3 His focus on the repression wrought in the name of Christendom presumed, however, the continued significance of the Mediterranean in the commerce of world-constituting activity. Dussel’s (and others’) work argues that the continued conflict spread westward across the Atlantic Ocean, and by October of that year, 1492, a series of new relations 139

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were established with a New World that de-centered the Mediterranean, stimulated a new economy and, with it, an organisation of its management (new epistemologies), and re-aligned the western peninsula of Asia into a new political territory in the form of a continent, namely, Europe.4 Prior to the emergence of Europe, there were maps of the Mediterranean that would have to be turned upside down to be familiar to contemporary travellers, for, as was the case with ancient organisations of locations of regions that included northeast Africa, whose most known civilisation was Egypt (Kmt, as it was originally known before acquiring the Greek name by which it is now known), “upper” pointed south, and “lower” northward.5 One, in other words, travelled up to what became known as Africa and down to what became known as Europe. The birth of new centers produced new geopolitical relations, and as focus on the New World eclipsed the effort to establish trade with southwest and middle Asia, the bourgeoning economies affected the cultural life as well. In the production of cultural considerations also emerged those of new forms of life. A transition followed from Jews, Christians, and Muslims to Europeans, Asians, Africans, and New World peoples forced into some variation of the misnomer “Indians” or “red savages” at first along old Aristotelian categories of developed versus undeveloped “men”. This movement, negotiated through conquest, colonization, disputations, and enslavement, brought to the fore reflections of “man” on “man,” with constant anxiety over the stability of such a category. In such study, the process of discovery, of uncovering, also became one of invention and production: The search to understand “man” was also producing him. Its destabilisation was inevitable as his possibilities called his exclusion of “her” into question. The concomitant reorganisation of understanding him and her is oddly a schema that befits the dominating knowledge scheme of the epoch: Science. The word “science,” although also meaning knowledge, reveals much in its etymology. It is a transformation of the Latin infinitive scire (to know), which, let us now add, suggests a connection to the verb scindere (to divide—think, today of “schism”), which, like many Latin words, also shares origins with ancient Greek words, which, in this case would be skhizein (to split, to cleave). Oddly enough, this exercise in etymology is indication of a dimension of epistemological colonization, for most etymological exercises report a history of words as though language itself is rooted in Greek and Roman classicism. The tendency is to find the sources of meaning from either the European side of the Mediterranean or from the north. There is an occasional stop off in Western Asia, but for the most part, the history of important terms suggests a geographical movement that is oddly similar to the movement of Geist in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History.6 Some further inquiry reveals, however, the relationship of the Latin and Greek words to more ancient Egyptian/Kmtian words Crethi and kotket by way of the Hebrew Crethi, which was derived from the root carath, which means “to cut”. The word Crethi referred to the ancient Egyptian/ Kmtian royal armies, which were split into two classes.7 We thus see here a transition from one form of ancient centre to various others on a course to European modern times. Oddly enough, there is an etymological link during the Latin transition with another Latin infinitive, secare (which also means “to cut”), through which is more transparently connected the Hebrew carath (if one imagines cara as a possible 140

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spoken form). Secare is the source of the English word sex. A link between science and sex brings biology to the fore and the question of life sciences. Such a consideration indicates the importance of life reflections on the unfolding developing of systematic inquiry: As the question of a supreme deity motivated theological reflections and metaphysical inquiry, so, too, did concerns over the generation of life initiate scientific inquiry, although life was loaded with metaphysical content as anxieties and fear over the salvation of the soul without the theological guarantees attested to this day. The subsequent unfolding story is familiar to most of us who study colonization. Along with the expansion of Christian kingdoms into nation-states and their colonies, which resulted over the course of a few hundred years into European civilisation on a global scale, was also a series of epistemological developments that have literally produced new forms of life: new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups of them occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship by which they are indigenous to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong to.8 These people have been aptly described by W.E.B. Du Bois as “problems”.9 They are a function of a world in which they are posited as illegitimate although they could exist nowhere else. I am speaking here primarily of blacks and Indians/Native Americans, and by blacks I also mean to include Australian Aboriginals and related groups in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Such people are treated by dominant organisations of knowledge, especially those falling under the human or social sciences, as problems instead of people who face problems. Their problem status is a function of the presupposed legitimacy of the systems that generate them. In effect, being perfect, the systems that produce their condition resist blame for any injustice or contradiction that may be avowed by such people. They become extraneous to those systems’ functions in spite of having already been generated by them. The contradictory nature of such assessments distorts the process of reasoning and the production of knowledge into doubled structures of disavowals and concealment, at times even with claims of transparency, and more problem people result. A consequence of such reflection is the proliferation of more kinds of problem people. Since 2001, when the US War on Terror was inaugurated, the production of such people has increased. At this point, I should like to make some distinctions that may anchor some of the abstract terms of this discussion. That modes of producing knowledge can be enlisted in the service of colonization is evident. Frantz Fanon, for instance, reflected, in Peau noire, masques blancs, that methods have a way of devouring themselves.10 In doing so, he brought into focus the problem of evaluating method itself, of assessing methodology. If the epistemic conditions of social life were colonized, would not that infection reach also the grammatical level, the very grounds of knowledge? Put differently, couldn’t there also be colonization at the methodological level? If so, then, any presumed method, especially from a subject living within a colonized framework, could generate continued colonization. To evaluate method, the best “method” is the suspension of method. This paradox leads to a demand for radical anti-colonial critique. But for such a reflection to be radical, it must also make even logic itself suspect. Such a demand leads to a distinction between rationality and reason. The former cannot suspend logic, for to be what it is, it must, at minimum, demand consistency. The demand for consistency eventually collapses 141

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into maximum consistency, in order to be consistent. In effect, this means that rationality must presume its method, and it must resist straying from its generating grammar. Reason, however, offers a different story. To be maximally consistent, although logically commendable, is not always reasonable. Reasonability can embrace contradictions. Even more, it must be able to do so in order to evaluate even itself. This means that the scope of reason exceeds rationality. Science is more at home with rationality than it is with reason. Departure from consistency-maximisation would disintegrate an important foundation of modern science, namely, the notion of a law of nature. A law in this sense cannot have exceptions. Since reason at times demands exceptions, a marriage between science and reason would be shortlived. The project of much of modern European philosophical thought, however, has been the effort to cultivate such a marriage. Toward such a goal, the instruments of rationality are often unleashed with the result of the effort to yoke reason to rationality. This effort could be reformulated as the effort to colonize reason. The effort to colonize reason has had many productive consequences. Many disciplines have been generated by this effort. On one hand, there are the natural and exact theoretical sciences. On the other, there are the human sciences. The former set seems to behave in a more disciplined way than the latter. Although disciplining the latter has resulted in a variety of disciplines, the underlying goal of maximum rationalisation has been consistently strained. The source of such difficulty—reality—has been unremitting. Karl Jaspers, in Philosophy of Existence, summarized the circumstance well: reality is not always obedient to consciousness.11 Any discipline or generated system for the organisation of reality faces the problem of having to exceed the scope of its object of inquiry, but since it, too, must be part of that object (if it is to be something as grand as reality), it must contain itself in a logical relationship to all it is trying to contain, which expands the initial problem of inclusion. There is, in other words, always more to, and of, reality. Failure to appreciate reality sometimes takes the form of recoiling from it. An inward path of disciplinary solitude eventually leads to what I call disciplinary decadence.12 This is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognises its own limitations, to a deontologised or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. And in that world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations, or, as Fanon argued, (selfdevouring) methods.13 Becoming “right” is simply a matter of applying, as fetish, the method correctly. This is a form of decadence because of the set of considerations that fall to the wayside as the discipline turns into itself and eventually implodes. Decay, although a natural process over the course of time for living things, takes on a paradoxical quality in disciplinary formation. A discipline, e.g., could be in decay through a failure to realise that decay is possible. Like empires, the presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose. In more concrete terms, disciplinary decadence takes the form of one discipline assessing all other disciplines from its supposedly complete standpoint. It is the literary scholar who criticises work in other disciplines as not literary. It is the sociologist who rejects other disciplines as not sociological. It is the historian who asserts history as the 142

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foundation of everything. It is the natural scientist that criticises the others for not being scientific. And it is also the philosopher who rejects all for not being properly philosophical. Discipline envy is also a form of disciplinary decadence. It is striking, for instance, how many disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences are now engaged in intellectual history with a focus on the Western philosophical canon. And then there is decadence at methodological levels. Textualism, for example, infects historiography at the level of archival legitimacy. Or worse, in some forms of textualism, the expectation of everything being contained in the text becomes evident in work in the human sciences that announce studying its subject through an analysis exclusively of texts on the subject. There are scholars in race theory, e.g., who seem to think that theorizing the subject is a matter of determining what has been said on it by a small set of canonical texts. When appearance is reduced to textuality, what, then, happens to inquiry? What are positivism and certain forms of semiological imitation of mathematical phenomena but science envy? When biologism, sociologism, psychologism, and many others assert themselves, to what, ultimately, are they referring? In the human sciences, the problem becomes particularly acute in the study of problem people. Such people misbehave also in disciplinary terms. The failure to squeeze them into disciplinary dictates, from a disciplinarily decadent perspective, is proof of a problem with the people instead of the discipline. It serves as further proof of the pathological nature of such people. A response to disciplinary decadence (although not often identified as such) has been interdisciplinarity. A problem with this response is that it, too, is a decadent structure. This is because presumed disciplinary completeness of each discipline is compatible with disciplinary decadence. Disciplines could simply work alongside each other like ships passing in the night. A more hopeful route is transdisciplinarity, where disciplines work through each other; yet although more promising, such a route is still susceptible to decadence so long as it fails to bring reality into focus. But doing that raises questions of purpose. It raises considerations that may need to be addressed in spite of disciplinary dictates. I call this process a teleological suspension of disciplinarity. By that, I mean the willingness to go beyond disciplines in the production of knowledge. This “beyond” is, however, paradoxical. In some instances, it revitalizes an existing discipline. In others, it generates a new one. For example, a teleological suspension of philosophy generates new philosophy in some instances, and in others, it may generate new social thought that may not be philosophical. A teleological suspension of topology, chemistry, and biology could offer much to genetics and other sequencing notions of life. Germane to this special forum, it could also transform ways in which one theorises the relationship of dependency to development. Teleological suspensions of disciplines are also epistemic decolonial acts. The discussion I have offered thus far places such acts squarely in, although not exclusive to, Africana philosophy. By Africana philosophy, I mean the exploration of modern life as understood through contradictions raised by the lived-reality of African Diasporic people. Because such people are often linked to many other communities whose humanity has been challenged, Africana philosophy is also a philosophy that speaks beyond the Africana community. Among the pressing themes of Africana philosophy are: (1) philosophical 143

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anthropology, (2) freedom and liberation, and (3) metacritiques of reason. Their presence in this discussion is evident, but to summarize: The first is raised by the dehumanization of people (making them into problems) in the modern world; the second pertains to the transformation of (emancipation from) that circumstance; and the third examines whether the first two, especially at the level of the reasons offered in their support, are justified. I cannot provide a detailed discussion of these thematics here because of limited space. Instead, I should like to close with several additional considerations. The first is regarding the political significance of this critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear, to exist. Colonization involves the elimination of discursive opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It is not that colonized groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech—namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against models of decolonial practice that center ethics. The additional challenge, then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means, then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony, which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity. It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethicscentered approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate. This challenge to ethics raises the question of the scope of normative life. An example of this is the presumed universality of the concept of justice. What many people in the Global South have experienced is that justice could be consistently advanced in the interest of profound suffering simply by rendering illegitimate the humanity of whole groups of people. Thus, it could be claimed that justice was achieved in the United States through the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation it occasioned or that it was accomplished in South Africa through the ending of legal Apartheid and the process of the Truth and Reconciliation commissions, or that the many former colonies that have become what Achille Mbembe aptly calls “postcolonies”.14 These moments of justice (or, 144

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as some readers might prefer, supposed justice) did not transform the question of the human status of black peoples and the presumption of humanness enjoyed by people with, or those who have managed to acquire, the special credit or capital of whiteness. The result has been an effort to seek in normative life what is, in effect, beyond justice. In fact, the particularity of justice could be such that while necessary for a certain dimension of political and legal activity, it is insufficient for the deeper question of establishing a human relationship to human institutions. If this is correct, a more radical inquiry into the decolonization of normative life is needed along with that of epistemic practice. The third is about the imperial significance of standards as a correlate of the second critical concern. Consider the problem of philosophical anthropology. Simply demonstrating that one group is as human as another has the consequence of making one group the standard of another. In effect, one group seeks justification while the other is self-justified. The demonstration itself must be teleologically suspended. Shifting the geography of reason means, as we take seriously such developments as South-South dialogue and what the Caribbean Philosophical Association has called “shifting the geography of reason”,15 that the work to be done becomes one that raises the question of whose future we face. Fourth, at least at the epistemological level, every empire has a geopolitical impact by pushing things to its center. In the past, the range of empires was not global. Today, because global, we face the question of the traces they leave when they have dissolved. In the past, empires constructed civilisations that lasted at least a few thousand years. They soon diminished to several hundred, then to a few hundred. Today, time is imploding under the weight of rapid and excessive consumption (with the bulk of natural resources being consumed in North America, Europe, and increases on the horizon in Asia), and we must now struggle through a complex understanding of decay and the dissolution of empires. As with all empires, the consciousness from within continues to be susceptible to an inflated sense of importance, where the end of empire is feared as the end of the world. Fifth, subjects of dehumanizing social institutions suffer a paradoxical melancholia. They live a haunted precolonial past, a critical relation to the colonial world from which they are born, and a desire for a future in which, if they are able to enter, they are yoked to the past. A true, new beginning stimulates anxiety because it appears, at least at the level of identity, as suicide. The constitution of such subjectivity, then, is saturated with loss without refuge.16 Sixth, the theme of loss raises challenges of what decolonial activity imposes upon everyone. I call this the Moses problem. Recall the biblical story of Exodus, where Moses led the former enslaved Israelites (and members of other groups who joined them) to the Promised Land. Moses, we should remember, was not permitted to enter. Commentary, at least at Passover Seders, explains that Moses’s sense of power (and ego) got in the way, and he presented his might as a source of the Israelites’ liberation. There is much that we who reflect upon decolonization, those of us who seek liberation, could learn from the mythic life of ancient people. Fanon paid attention to this message when he wrote the longest chapter of Les Damnés de la terre, namely, “Les Mésaventures de la conscience nationale”.17 The admonition is this: Those who are best suited for the transition from colonization/ 145

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enslavement to the stage of initial liberty are not necessarily the best people for the next, more difficult stage: Living the practice of freedom. It is no accident that instead of the end of colonization, new forms of colonization, emerge. The movements, in other words, are as follows: from initial freedom to bondage/colonization, to decolonization/initial liberation, to neocolonization, to internal opposition, to postcolonies (neocolonialism in a world in which colonialism is shameful), to concrete manifestations of freedom. What this means is that the more difficult, especially in political and ethical terms, conflict becomes the one to wage against former liberators. Like Moses, they must move out of the way so the subsequent generations could build their freedom. We see here the sacrificial irony of all commitments to liberation: It is always a practice for others. And seventh, but not final, as a consequence of the problem of leadership, Fanon was critical of what is now called postcolonial leadership and ruling groups in many Afromajority societies. This leadership, whose moral evocations led the process of decolonization, continues to formulate capital in moral terms. Theirs is a supposedly or at least avowedly moral leadership. The European bourgeoisie developed concepts, however, in coordination with infrastructural resources with great social reach. We see here another blow to the kinds of liberation argument that prioritize ethics over other modes of action and the organisation of knowledge. The poor, as a category to stimulate an ethical response, need more than submission and tears from their leadership. Meditation on and cultivation of maturity, of how to negotiate, live, and transform a world of contradictions, paradoxes, uncertainty, and unfairness, may be the proverbial wisdom well sought.

Notes 1. On this matter, see, e.g, Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London, UK: Verso, 2008). Cf. also, Lewis R. Gordon, “Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison postcoloniale,” Tumultes, numéro 37 (October 2011): 165–183 and Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 2. See, e.g., Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). This community of scholars includes Linda Martín Alcoff, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta, and Walter Mignolo, works by all of whom, among others, I discuss in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Cf. also Walter Mignolo’s recent, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). To this epistemic challenge, I would also add the problem of the decolonization of normative life. On this matter, see Mabogo More, “South Africa under and after Apartheid” in Kwasi Wiredu, ed., A companion to African Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 148–157. A variety of expanded definitions are offered in Drucilla Cornell and Noyoko Muvangua, eds, Law in the Ubuntu of South Africa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Cf. also Leonhard Praeg, ed., Thinking Africa: A Report on Ubuntu (Scottsville, SA: UKZN Press, 2014).

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Disciplinary Decadence 3. See, e.g., Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 76. 4. For discussion of the historical process and the historians and theorists who demonstrate it, see Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, chapters 1 and 2. 5. E.g., see, Liz Sonneborn’s discussion of the Medieval Islamic empires in the first two chapters of Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Muslim Scholar, Philosopher, and Physician of the Twelfth Century (New York: The Rosen Publishing Company, 2005). Cf. also M. R. Greer, W. D. Mignolo, and M. Quilligan, eds, Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 6. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). 7. See The Academy of St. Louis, Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, vol. 1, 1856–1860 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp and Company, 1860), p. 534. 8. For more discussion, see, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, “Not Always Enslaved, Yet Not Quite Free: Philosophical Challenges from the Underside of the New World,” Philosophia 36, no. 2 (2007): 151–166; “When I Was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night,” Performance Research 2, no. 3 (September 2007): 8–15; and “Décoloniser le savoir à la suite de Frantz Fanon,” Tumultes, numéro 31 (2008): 103–123. 9. See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4, “What Does It Mean to be a Problem?” 10. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1952). 11. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). 12. For more detailed discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (New York: Routledge, 2006). 13. See Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, chapter 1. 14. See Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 2000). 15. See that organisation’s website: http://wwwcaribbeanphilosophicalassociation.org/ 16. For more discussion on this way of reading melancholia, see Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Nathalie Etoke’s Melancholia Africana: L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire (Paris: Éditions du Cygne, 2010), and Lewis R. Gordon, “When Reason Is in a Bad Mood: A Fanonian Philosophical Portrait,” in Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber, eds, Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2011), pp. 185–198. 17. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).

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CHAPTER 13 DISCIPLINING AS A HUMAN SCIENCE

Disciplines are formed. And they are produced as such by human beings. This is not to say their content is anthropomorphic. But it is to say that, as human creations, they come into the world, enjoy some vibrancy, decay, and die. A “living discipline,” I will argue, is animated by a form of humility: that its methodological resources reach to reality but do not capture, colonize, or constrain it. Forgetting this leads to disciplinary practices of attempting otherwise. This problem leads to the question of what it means for such efforts—even in the natural sciences—to be a human activity in which and through which is also formed the human relationship of being, classically, “for-itself.” In disciplinary transcendence (that is, disciplines reaching beyond human reality) are, then, a variety of questions posed to its presuppositions: Is even human transcendence (that is, attempting to go beyond human reality to achieve what is often called “objectivity”), disciplinarily understood, a human relationship? Such is the task of this investigation.

The “Human Problem” The human problem, basically, is a performative contradiction. The human being as knower attempts to know what is beyond human perception, what in principle requires the absence of human interaction. In effect, it is an attempt to achieve objectivity through a vision, a point of view, of the world without at least human beings, what could be called a view from nowhere since wherever human beings are automatically becomes a somewhere. That human beings are involved in such an enterprise already announces the failure of such a project. Yet there is an extent to which failing needn’t be the outcome if the appropriate understanding of human relationships to reality were brought forth. This could be clarifed in the basic effort of “point of view” with which to begin. In effect, we seek insight from the origins of such projects in the frst place—namely, theory. Some etymological refection could be useful in this regard. The word theory emerges from the Greek word theoria (contemplation, speculation, viewing, seeing), from theoros (spectator), from thea (a view, interestingly from which we also get “theater”) and horan (to see), which in the Greek infnitive is theorein (to see, consider, or to look at). The interesting double moment of viewing what one sees occasions refection: not only to see, but also to see that one sees. It is a meta-refective move of double comprehension. To see what is seen and to see also that one sees offers the impression of seeing all . The primordial model of such is already embedded in the root theo, which refers to god. As gods, especially when fully invested with power, bridge gaps between potency and conceptual reach, the conclusion should be clear: embedded in theory is the effort to see what a god would see. Theory, then, begins with a rather lofty goal. 149

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Human beings are not, however, gods. Thus the stage is set for the human problem of attempting to see from the perspective of a god or the gods. Such is the human epistemological condition. It doesn’t follow, however, that it must be a futile one. The metaphor of the gods’ point or points of view occasions not only questions of human imaginative or conceptual reach but also a level of self-refection and realization that at least places our conceptual relation to acts of viewing. The act of seeing what is being seen, including seeing that one is seeing, raises considerations of self-awareness in acts of relating that brings the self into question. This problem of self-questioning is exacerbated by the consideration of its emerging from a relationship of reaching beyond the self in the frst place. Thus, even to reach for the initial relationship is one of transcending it as an isolated, complete reality. Put differently: the human knower could not emerge from a point of initial self-knowledge. It is a boomerang effect of realizing the act of reaching for a greater reality. And since reaching inward raises the same problem—of attempting to hold down a relationship that is established through transcending itself—the consequence becomes one of a reality greater than the effort to contain it. We could call that human reality.1 That formulation may seem at frst particular enough to be contained, but that wouldn’t work, as the whole point of its relationship is that it was never complete in the frst place. It is thus an open category, an ill-formed formula, an incomplete sentence, so to speak. This metacritical refection makes the question of theory in human terms a very different project than that of gods. It involves seeing what one sees while realizing its limitations, which, ironically, is akin to transcendent seeing in the form of also seeing one’s non-seeing, of realizing the limitations of one’s sight. There is, however, more. Realizing the limitations of one’s sight, reach, understanding, comprehension, is not the same as the limits of such efforts. For a limit, as a boundary, is also simultaneously a transcendence of itself. Put in existential terms, realizing a limit raises the anguish of deciding whether to accept or challenge it. Should we choose the latter, we (human beings) would struggle with contradictions of what we initially accepted. Engaging those contradictions is nothing short of movement through realization of false completeness. It’s an expansion through reaching beyond without prior-knowledge. Contingency becomes key in movements that are never accidental. The result is the meeting of the phenomenological (consciousness-of relations) and dialectical (movement through realization of contradictions) movements of thought. Let us know explore these two developments.

Phenomenological Dialectics or Dialectical Phenomenology The human epistemic problem is in effect a problem of orientation to reality. In some models of addressing this problem, the goal is agonal in the classical Greek sense of agonia (struggle for victory): that of fnding an argument through which one could overcome or defeat that which stands in the way of conquering reality (in epistemic terms). There is a presupposition in this model of a clearing wrought from knocking obstacles out of the way. What is missing, however, is the understanding that the obstacles 150

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are often other forms of arguments born of human experience and understanding. Thus, what is being overcome is one human model over another, and in the course of it, the “winner” isn’t necessarily in touch with reality any more than the “loser,” or, even worse, the so-called loser may have been in touch and the supposed winner, simply, wrong. Much of this is well known in the history of thought, where seemingly commonsense models prevailed over what turns out to be correct. For readers familiar with Antonio Gramsci’s thought, the concern here is between common sense and critical consciousness.2 And for those more versed in the history of ideas, the domination of Aristotelianism in the course of the study of nature reveals that a persuasive story is not necessarily a right one, as developments ranging from natural selection to that of a cataclysm from initial high temperatures into the explosion we call the universe or possible pluriverse attest from evolutionary biology to quantum physics. Our concerns could go further into how we think of thought in historical terms as well, for realizations of imposed categories on the past in terms of geopolitical ones of the present would suggest that even the neat model of thinking from ancient Greeks to Euromodern scientifc thought is skewed in an ethno-epistemology of ethnically and racially legitimate movements of knowledge. The ancient Greek world of Socrates didn’t see itself as alien to that of the great ancient architect, astronomer, and philosopher Imhotep in Kmt or ancient Egypt, and as human beings everywhere brought various interpretive resources to understanding their relationship with worlds around and within, the collective constellation of possibilities suggest an ever-evolving (and at times devolving) struggle of contradictions in the face of pragmatic outcomes of what works, if even for a time, and what does not.3 An alternative approach is to bridge gaps between fghting and revelation. Rather than who wins a battle for epistemic space there could be the task of making seen what was previously unseen, overlooked, misunderstood, or blocked because of a lack of conditions for their possibility. This model involves developing a relationship with possibility and understanding. Though not the traditional formulation of phenomenology, this is pretty much what phenomenological work is about. It’s much like the role of Virgil in Dante’s Inferno: guiding us through our mistakes in a process of learning what to let go of in order to see the wondrous stars.4 The closing lines of Dante’s great poem is revelatory, for, as we know, the stars cannot be seen during the day because of the sun’s rays, and it is similarly diffcult in places where there is too much light. There is, here, a subversion of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, where the epistemic hero escapes to see what is revealed by the sun instead of the bodies that cast shadows before a large fame. The metaphorical guide is similar to the metacritical role outlined earlier of theory in that it is also us, doubled, facing the question of whether to admit our relationship of seeing to what is seen or denying that, in effect lying to ourselves in acts of mauvaise -foi (bad faith), and thus closing off what could be ever-expanding relationships with reality.5 The critical question posed to Plato’s epistemic hero is what to make of the light serving also as a blinding element? Light, in other words, is only part of a story symbiotically linked to darkness, which is why, for example, constellations are best seen at night. Phenomenology (the study of phenomena as phenomena), as opposed to phenomenalism (the study of phenomena as all there is), demands simultaneous acts of 151

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reaching forth and letting go. One reaches for a relationship with what appears, a condition for what is by defnition capable of being learned or studied, through letting go of what impedes one’s ability to do such. The familiar phenomenological language (moving from natural attitude to phenomenological reductions in movements of epochē—moments of suspended judgment—on a path to critiques of movements arriving at what Edmund Husserl called the transcendental ego) is pretty challenging for those not familiar with it, but the basic insights are there: detaching ourselves from certain commitments leads to realignment and reorientation of our points of view through which we are able to see, including in terms of our imagination, what we hitherto failed to see, and this involves also understanding not only what we transcend but also what constrains us (evidence). The evidentiality of evidence, for instance, requires not simply seeing evidence but developing a relationship to it. This movement pertains also to acts of imagination, as any writer of fiction, painter, musician, and other creative artists know: even what is created must cohere or fit together. The concept of “fit” is, in the end, also an experience; one cannot imagine something ftting that doesn’t “feel right.”6 The dialectical commitment of learning from contradictions raises the question of what is revealed at moments of contradiction. One sees what one had not before seen, and this revelation raises concerns of what to do with what is revealed. There is, in other words, the responsibility of knowledge and, along with it, the refective relation of responsibility for one’s responsibility. This radically inward realization is responsibility for responsibility, which, as existentialists have shown, raises the question of human study in the face of what human beings could become in terms not only of being but also of what we value being. Failure to see this distinction leads to the illusion of human completeness—to be a thing among other things—and non-normative human possibility. The error is to think of human possibility without its normative dimensions. Evidential constraints on human study of reality entail methodological considerations that eventually take disciplinary form. The results are today’s variety of disciplines. Though a discipline’s purpose may not be concerned with human subjects, the subterranean role of human activity raises the question of the status of the disciplinary enterprise. It is not that all disciplines must be human sciences because produced by human beings. Instead, there is the question of the ascription of disciplinarity to the disciplines themselves. In other words, the organization of disciplines qua disciplines is a human activity that places that meta-disciplinary activity—understanding and theorizing the disciplining of disciplines—under the framework of human scientifc activity. The underlying grammar of disciplines—with their clear connection to a history of disciples—is obfuscated by the illusion of completeness. Thinking back to disciple, which emerges from the Latin disciplus (student, learner, follower), a term whose infnitive is discere (to learn), the immediate signifcance of theological models comes to the fore. In the secularization of the god (who, we should remember, offered theoria), there is now the practice in- and-of-itself as the absent god. The door is then left open for disciplines to take on the form of a secularized theodicy. Theodicean practices involve preserving the integrity of the god in the face of contradictions. This move often involves attributing 152

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infelicities, injustice, to an external source. (I’ll leave to the side the metaphysical problem of an external source that affects a god.) Thus, as rigorously complete, what the god/ discipline offers is what a disciple could acquire through allegiance. Paradoxes result. A discipline, for instance, is complete if its method(s) is complete. The method(s), however, are developed according to the reality it addresses. If the method(s) move from a reality to Reality, then it supposedly in effect encapsulates reality. Where the god moved out, the method moved in, and as the exemplar of the discipline, it offers the discipline similar divine legitimacy. The result? From a theological perspective, this is idolatrous, for only the god should be worshipped. From a non-theological perspective, it takes the form of a human effort’s assuming the achievement of a god’s. If, however, the method functions as the godly substitute, then it subordinates the whole (reality) and thus functions as a fetish. This fetishization of method drags the discipline down along with another substitution: reality falls to the wayside of methodological and disciplinary fetish. Without reality to animate its telos, the discipline collapses inward on its own methodological assumptions as reality itself. The result is disciplinary decadence.7 Decadence is a system of values emerging from a process of decaying. It thus involves dying values. The problem with such values, however, is that they are anti-values, since they are taken as a way of living, which is a contradiction of terms when processes of death are at work. When dying, the proper course is to understand that one is withering away. Life affrmation in such cases involves not standing in the way of the living. There is, then, a paradox: coming to grips with death affrms life. Human ways of life reach beyond themselves despite their mortality. Thus, the specifc instance of human life is humbled by the realization of subsequent generations. Where a specifc human instance fails to appreciate this passing on of practices that will in turn go through their own transformations, there is the delusion of completeness, of the godlike presuppositions to which I have paid some attention thus far here. Such godlike imposition on human life portends its end. There is no human reality without possibility. Thus, such values collapse, ultimately, into anti- value. Its decay, however, is elided. A form of pretended living asserts itself as life, which makes this process of anti-value a form of dying value incapable of seeing admitting itself. It is thus a form of mauvaise-foi. As the divide between the epistemological and normative doesn’t work because of the mediating condition of responsibility for knowledge, the same mediation transforms disciplinary practice into a normative-epistemic sphere. This means, then, that disciplines, and disciplining, as human practices also face the possibility of self-concealment, misrepresentation, and the evasion of displeasing truths—in this case, that of not being capable of encompassing reality. Where disciplines as practiced exceed their scope under delusions of ontological completeness, of being, in other words, all there is , they have turned away from reality. The resulting decay is one in which the methodological commitments and the discipline are fetishized. I call this disciplinary decadence. In disciplinary decadence, human relationships with reality are decreased and, in the extreme, severed, to the point of nonrelationality in which the monad (unit) is supreme. This monadic approach has no “outside,” which leads, in practice, to the erasure of relations. Its concrete form is the subsumption of all, including other disciplines, into 153

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itself as where disciplines such as anthropology, biology, chemistry, history, literary studies, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, or sociology see each other in terms of one. Thus, anthropologism offers itself as an explanation of the rest; historicism does the same as do physicism, psychologism, sociologism, and, yes, philosophicism. Criticizing a sociologist for not being a historian is fallacious in and of itself. A critic could, however, argue that this unfolding argument privileges philosophy as the model of disciplinary validation. This critique wouldn’t work, however, as at no moment in this overall critique am I arguing for the primacy or privileging of philosophy or any other theoretically oriented discipline. As theory must be brought under the interrogative lens of critique, so, too, must philosophy. And herein we fnd another critical concern: what, after all, should we make of the status of critique? I have thus far argued that there is a profoundly existential element at work in human efforts to know and the relationships they embody. Critique is no exception to this challenge. “Critique,” after all, has a relationship with words such as “critic,” “critical,” and “criteria.” Now, oddly enough these words all have origins in the ancient Greek verb krinein (to decide), from which emerged not only the nouns kritēs (judge) and kritērion (means or standard of judgment) but also krisis (crisis). A crisis is a point at which a decision must be made. The term is not, however, associated today with actually making a decision but instead with facing making a decision that one must but does not want to make. The link between critique and crisis emerges, then, at the level of decidability, of what needs to be decided, in the face of not wanting to decide, which, at least in the thought of Jacques Derrida, took the form of undecidability.8 Critique, then, is also a form of crisis. The paradox of decision is, however, at the heart of this undecidability, as nearly any moment of refection would attest: indecision is a form of decision. We return here to our earlier refections on seeing what one sees, now transformed into deciding what one decides. This metacritical realization challenges the goal of disciplinarily decadent practices. Mauvaise-foi, after all, is ultimately ashamed of itself and thus manifests a decision not to appear as a decision. Hiding from reality, it hides from itself even as critique. Thus, the assertion of critique as closure would be an ironic effort eradicating the effectiveness of itself. What, then, can be done?

Decolonizing Disciplines Disciplinary decadence is also a form of colonial practice. In effect, a specifc discipline reaches beyond itself in an effort to yoke and collapse reality, which includes other disciplines, into itself in an ever-enclosing implosion. This imperial epistemic action is colonial in the way all empires have imagined themselves—namely, as eternal, godlike entities. The practitioner of such disciplines must, then, bring into question their presuppositions, including the validity of critical practices. In the case of a discipline such as philosophy, this means being willing to go beyond philosophy for the sake of, say, reality. Expanded, this observation means being willing to go beyond disciplines as currently conceived for similar purposes. The term purpose isn’t accidental here. For in 154

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effect, it involves having a goal, an aim, a telos, and it is because of this I call such practices teleological suspensions of disciplinarity. Søren Kierkegaard wrote of teleological suspensions of moral life in Fear and Trembling.9 Moral life, he showed, faced a problem, for example, in relation to existential paradoxes posed by faith. Abraham, a good man, was an attempted murderer from the standpoint of morality as he fully intended to sacrifce his son Isaac. How, then, could he be a good man? Yet Abraham didn’t endorse murder. He also took seriously the word of G-d. In Kierkegaard’s terms, he loved and obeyed the Absolute absolutely. Kierkegaard made several conclusions from this. One of them was that the individual was “above” the universal. This logic makes no sense for any formal theory of membership and subsumption, where the individual belongs in a series of conjunctive instances of the same. Kierkegaard thus had to explain how it was possible for an individual to make such a leap. To make matters worse, Kierkegaard radicalized the problem by showing it could also be done in terms of demonic absolutes. None of us, in other words, can be consoled by Abraham’s achievement because we relate to it ex post facto. Facing such a possibility, we could fnd ourselves leaping into the arms of demonic failure. The abyss is, therefore, radically contingent. Though Kierkegaard identifed the problem at the level of morals and ethics (the question of discovering our character in what we do), the norms could be expanded from moral and ethical ones to epistemic and other kinds. Thus, to adhere to a methodological system that offers itself as complete is an act of subsumption that fails to account for the possibility of that which reaches beyond absolutely. Thus, the leap in this case is the location of the discipline as Absolute as epistemologically idolatrous. This movement is possible by virtue of a hidden dimension of disciplinary practices themselves: their absoluteness is already foreclosed by the kind of activities they are— namely, human activities. Human reality can, in other words, paradoxically reach beyond itself through admission of its limits or boundaries. In antiquated theoretical language, this is because a human activity is ultimately that which can be otherwise, and this possibility emerges from the human capacity to produce uniquely human worlds premised on meaning. Such practices breathe life into processes of learning, which, when attuned outwardly to the expanse called “reality,” creates living disciplines. Colonial epistemic practices are, therefore, human impositions on reality under the pretense of nonhuman conditions (objectivity). Decolonizing such practices require putting human relations into their proper place—namely, human ones. In effect, then the move from discipline to disciplines means a relationship with the world akin to communities of learning. Such an effort may at frst seem to offer interdisciplinary solutions to decadence, but this would be a mistake. Disciplines that work alongside other disciplines reaching for reality collapse into a separate but equal form of epistemic apartheid. What is needed is an actual meeting of disciplines through which transcending limitations may pose not only different manifestations of each discipline (e.g., philosophy beyond philosophy may result in new philosophy) but also the possibility of new disciplines. Both possibilities are already happening across the sciences as not only new developments in each science emerge but also new relationships and kinds of life from 155

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their results. There is in all this the establishment of new possibilities of relations through which the mirrored image of the knowing subject becomes expanded, transfgured, and, in the face of contingency, what Frantz Fanon announced in his inaugural work as a question: “O my body, make me always a man who questions!”10

Pedagogical Imperatives Teleological suspensions of disciplines raise questions of disciplinary mastery, scope, and transcendence. Disciplinary decadence is a celebration of closure. It in effect renders all that is knowable as already settled within the framework of the chosen discipline’s methodological framework. To know that leaves nothing more to know. It’s a model of epistemic closure. This is disciplinary mastery. The problem with this model is that it presumes the scope of methodological reach as reality, which makes the method isomorphic with it. The master of the discipline then takes on a godly role. The disciples join the discipline, then, in a presumed role of mastery as well. Jane Anna Gordon and I offered critiques of this model. The mastery model presumes completeness of knowledge and by extension disciplinary completeness. This supposed completeness requires in each student a moment of double consciousness. She or he must imagine being seen from a perspective of complete knowing. The student becomes aware of her or himself as an ignorant being (human) before a god (master of knowledge). What happens, however, when the student discovers the master’s limits—that the master is not in effect a god? That student would have to consider what the master doesn’t know and then ask why the master is not attempting to learn it. This shift from mastery to learning transforms the master into a disciple (learner) and raises a new kind of consciousness, a potentiated double consciousness, of a learner among a more advanced learner. Both meet, then, in the project of learning and co-learning. This shared learning process we call a pedagogical imperative.11 Pedagogical imperatives are obligations of epistemic responsibility. They are expectations that commitment to knowing demands the same for learning. Research, from this perspective, demands continuous study. That is an activity that most researchers and scholars do to some extent, but the titles “researcher” and “scholar” are loftier than “disciple” and “student.” Yet, students we all ultimately are precisely because we could only learn more, never everything. The formulation “pedagogical imperative” will no doubt remind readers of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative.12 It should be borne in mind that Kant’s formulation is premised on his effort to articulate a philosophy of morals, which he distinguished from moral anthropology. Philosophical morality, he argued, required no exceptions. That is why the imperative he formulated is categorical. Lacking exception, it becomes a law, which, in formal terms means a maximally consistent sequence without contradictions. That is why he made the subject of the Categorical Imperative rational beings, which Kant was careful to distinguish from human beings. Kant knew that human beings are by defnition not exclusively rational. And although the right thing to do may have a categorical formulation, a diffculty faced by those who may interpret Kant’s formal moral philosophy 156

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as absolutely pertaining to the human world is this: its compliance may be unreasonable. Who, in the end, would could even live with a maximally and consistently moral person? The existentialists would no doubt put it this way: such a person would be lifeless and, even more, moralistic. Kant, however, did not limit his thought to purely formal conceptions of obligations. His thought on maturity, for instance, raises questions of what we should aim to become.13 But he formulates the issue in such individualistic ways that the developmental considerations of living with others are wanting. There is, however, in Kantian maturity an understanding of humility, that the mature subject must also admit what she or he does not yet know and be willing to take responsibility for self-development through tasks of learning. This is, of course, a concern of the ancients of Kmt, China, and Greece, among others. Education (from educare, to bring up, to grow, and educere, to bring forth, lead forth) ultimately means to cultivate one’s growth, strength, and independence— indeed, freedom—through its many complex elements. The process emerges, for instance, through the availability of time for such cultivation, which in ancient Greek was referred to as scholē (leisure time). The idea was that liberated from the necessities of nature (seeking material nourishment, shelter, security), human beings could devote time to uniquely human activity. The quality of that time is part of philosophical debate, but it should be clear that whether scientifc and philosophical inquiry or artistic refection, uniquely human activities place human beings intimately in touch with uniquely human ways of feeling, living, and thinking. A related concept is to edify (from Latin aedificare, to build or construct). The relationship of edifcation to education is the understanding that the latter is achieved through properly built foundations of continued growth. It is this last point where an obligation at the heart of pedagogy comes to the fore with the other elements: to teach people no longer to learn would stall their growth. Thus, an obligation of teaching is the art of continued learning. This obligation of learning to learn and continue doing so is what Jane Anna Gordon and I mean by the pedagogical imperative. Brought into the context of potentiated double consciousness, the pedagogical imperative is an addition to teleological suspensions of disciplinarity. Consider, for instance, what black studies brings to human studies. Problematic human studies treats thought and scholarship as exclusively (white) European activity. It in effect reduces “humanity” to (white) European men. And even more, such study treats categories of objectivity and universality as premised on the exclusion of non-(white)Europeans. Potentiated double consciousness identifes the contradictions of this model as a form of theodicy that collapses such subjects into gods. As gods, they ignore the rest of reality through the delusion that there is no more reality to know. They thus mask their particularity as universal. Revealing their particularity raises questions of what could be learned beyond what they currently offer. It is this beyond that makes possible tasks of continued learning. Thus, the pedagogical imperative of continued learning is also a teleological suspension of pedagogy through the paradox of continued pedagogy. In a different formulation, it involves rejecting the (closed) universal for the sake of universalizing (open) practices. The correlate of such activity is the open, existential philosophical anthropology of human beings as continued questioning, as possibility, as that which is premised on what it also exceeds. 157

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Disciplinary Power At this point, one may wonder what is at stake in the exclusion of universalizing (again, not universal) practices of transcending or teleologically suspending disciplinary decadence. On one hand, knowledge suffers as it retracts and heads toward implosion. On another, it is not only knowledge content but also knowledge communities, participants in the production of knowledge, who are excluded. This exclusion limits the epistemic, social, and political reach of the latter. The question of epistemic reach as a social phenomenon brings forth the question of power. Since Foucault’s meditations on power as power/knowledge, there has been a tendency to treat power in negative terms and, consequently, knowledge in terms of control.14 Thus, the discussion of disciplines, disciples, and disciplining has, from a Foucauldian model, negative connotations. There is, however, a form of a priori assertion of negativity in such models, much of which it isn’t clear Foucault, as a knowledge producer, actually endorsed. Given the argument I’ve advanced throughout this essay, it should be clear that knowledge as a relational enterprise is heavily social because also communicative. It also depends on meaning for its condition of possibility. Conditions of possibility arguments have taken many forms since Kant’s transcendental formulations, which he later articulated as his critical philosophy. The move to structuralism, whether through the neo-Kantian symbolic forms of Ernst Cassirer or the rule-governed systems of meanings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and then on to poststructuralism’s explorations of similar moves accompanied by a vehement anti-essentialism didn’t put to rest Kant’s shadow.15 In between were the transcendental and existential phenomenological turns, which, too, aren’t as far apart as they might seem if one takes seriously the role of intentionality in the relationships and manifestations of consciousness. These European models are not the entire story, however, as examinations of ideas from Sri Aurobindo in India and Nishitani Keijii in Japan would attest, and the same for thinkers in Africa ranging from Zara Yacob to Kwame Gyekye and V.Y. Mudimbe.16 For our purposes, explorations of the relationship between knowledge and power requires more than an archeology of knowledge regimes or the genealogy of systems of control. Often lost in such approaches is the experience of having or lacking power. Worsening the situation is also a tendency to talk more about power than defning it. And in some cases, the discussion of power serves to create more obfuscation. Power, however, isn’t as diffcult to defne as one might think. In a nutshell, it is the ability to make things happen. In this regard, as a movement from one condition to another, it has an intimate relation with force. As embodied creatures, power and force are one in our physical capabilities. Our reach and ability are connected to the extensions of our fesh and its accompanying strength. We could physically extend that with material things such as sticks and stones or whatever we could hurl. The emergence of language and culture transformed this physical reach into communicative practices not only across space but also time. And the technologies of that expanded reach do the same, whether in the form of writing or messages embedded in electromagnetic radiation. Much of the expansion emerges from culture, which is why Freud astutely referred to 158

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culture as simultaneously amelioration and unleashing of human misery in the form of a prosthetic god.17 A god, after all, addresses at least three sources of human misery: the contingencies of nature, the limitations of our physical bodies, and the control of our social environment through the imposition of Law. A problem with systems of control is that they require the subjected to imagine transgression as an evil or at least illegitimate. Thus, actions of reaching beyond must become unimaginable. Freud diagnosed the unhealthy aspects of repressing libidinal forces of desires and even needs under such conditions, and culture took on a very negative light in terms of the Hobbesian model of human beings (selfish, wanton, lascivious, greedy, and so on) presumed in his analysis. Thus, the dimension of eliminating what made life in Hobbesian terms nasty, brutish and short was accompanied by profound dissatisfaction. There are, however, other aspects of culture to consider, such as the forms of meaning produced by an ever-expanding human world of meaning and institutions to facilitate their practice. In that regard, a human being’s “reach” could exceed her or his location in terms of how it affects the bodily activities of others far away. And technologies of reach are such that human beings are now affecting objects outside of our galaxy. Government is an institution that harnesses people’s ability to make things happen. It does through investments of abrogated individual power into a transformation of services giving it the form of a prosthetic god. Where these services are made available, a government has legitimacy and receives continued investment. Where the services are diminished, legitimacy declines. This leads to a transformation of power into specifc kinds of force, where increasingly what happens are coercion, suffering, and death. This is because the physicality instead of the discursive capacities of government prevails. A comparison might be useful. An individual whose power depends on the physical reach of his or her body would have to use physical strength to put others in motion. One whose power depends on legitimacy has a greater reach, as others will act through uniquely normative criteria ranging from respect to authority or even simply from liking the person. And there are others such as respect for agreed rules or expectations of how one appears in relation to the powerful person or, in other cases, institution. The turning inward of power eventually reaches a point of reduction to the body or physical entity. A prisoner, for instance, is locked into the confnes of a controlled space, and solitary confnement pushes the person more inward into her or his body. Some prisoners, such as political ones, sometimes achieve a level of legitimacy that reaches beyond the material walls of the prison. Those prisoners not only have power but also in some cases increase their power by virtue of the reach of their cause. In effect, then, virtues such as respect could increase power, and they are identifed the extent to which the material body of the agent isn’t necessary for the world of effect. Thus, the more brutal a government is the more legitimacy and hence power it lacks. This is not to say it lacks any power, for government brutality depends on a social mechanism that puts brutal actors into motion. This analysis of individual embodiment, social reach, and institutions could also apply to disciplinary practices. Disciplinary power could collapse into illegitimate use of force through in its practice reducing the reach of its practitioners. As a human activity, disciplinary practice could facilitate agency through expanding the horizon of knowledge. 159

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It could also confne agency by turning agents away from reality and enmesh them into the scope of the discipline as locked in the confnes of fetishized methods. To restrict the epistemic reach of others would, then, require, as in the bad government example, harnessing their outward-directed potential and turning it inward to the discipline-initself. The connections between such practices and what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony should be apparent: disciplinary decadence deters knowledge-seekers from an organic relation to reality and forces them—often through restricting their reach in the social world—into an organic relation with a discipline that in turn has also turned away from reality. The result is an increasingly closed parameter—an epistemic prison—of human possibility the result of which is, simply, dehumanization.

Conclusion The stakes are thus proverbially high with regard to how disciplining and the production of disciplines function as human practices. Losing sight of the human element of human relations offers delusions of closure that, in the end, collapse disciplinary production into performative contradictions. As I hope these refections have shown, the many efforts for objective reach without a reaching subject collapse into coextensive exemplifcations of distorted realities where nonrelation, as a goal, has already failed by virtue of its intentional structure. Such is the condition and our plight. It need not, however, be our limitation.

Notes 1. I make no pretense of the originality of this term, as debates around it, as manifested particularly in Heidegger’s objection to Sartre’s use is a well-known part of twentieth-century debates in European philosophy. See Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in The Basic Writings of Heidegger, (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 213–266. For Sartre’s formulation, see L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). 2. See Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 624–630. 3. I discuss these matters in the introduction, frst chapter, and last of Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, “Inferno,” trans. Allen Mandelbaum, (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), p. XXXIII, line 139. 5. I expand on Sartre’s treatment of this concept from L’Être et le néant in Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, (Atlantic Highalnds, NJ: Humanites International Press, 1995), Part I. 6. For more on this view of Husserlian phenomenology, see Maurice Alexander Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infnite Tasks, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), and for my elaborations of my revisions here, especially in terms of transcendental and existential phenomenological conceptions of reality, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Der Realität zuliebe: teleologische Suspensionen disziplinärer Dekadenz,” Der Neue Realismus, ed. Markus Gabriel, (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014), 244– 267, and “Essentialist Anti-Essentialism, with Considerations from Other Sides of Modernity,” Quaderna: A Multilingual and 160

Disciplining as a Human Science Transdisciplinary Journal, n°1 (2 0 1 2 ) : http://quaderna.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ Gordon-essentialist-anti-essentialism.pdf 7. See Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times, (New York: Routledge, 2006). For discussion, see also Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, “Coming Out of the Closet: Phenomenology, African Studies, and Human Liberation,” Radical Philosophy Review 11, No. 2 (2008): 159–173 and Dwayne Tunstall, “Learning Metaphysical Humility with Lewis Gordon’s Teleological Suspension of Philosophy,” CLR James Journal: A Publication of the Caribbean Philosophical Association 14, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 157–168. 8. See Jacques Derrida, “Afterwords,” Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 9. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 10. See the fnal sentence of Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1952). 11. See Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, “On Working through a Most Diffcult Terrain: Introducing A Companion to African-American Studies, ” A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), xx–xxxv; Jane Anna Gordon, “Beyond Anti-Elitism: Black Studies and the Pedagogical Imperative,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 32, no. 2 (2010): 1–16; Lewis R. Gordon, “A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives,” Thresholds in Education XXXVI, nos. 1 & 2 (2010): 27–35. 12. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge UP, 2012, and Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). 13. For example, Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”, trans. H.B. Nisbet, (London: Penguin Classics, 2010). 14. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon and trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 15. For elaboration, see Peter Caws, Structuralism: Art of the Intelligible, (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1988). 16. I discuss the thought of these thinkers under this framework in Disciplinary Decadence and An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. See also Lewis R. Gordon, “Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison postcoloniale,” trans. Sonya Dayan-Hezbrun, Tumultes, No. 37 (October 2011): 165–183, and Kwasi Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Philosophy, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006). 17. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, ed. and introduced by Peter Gay, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). Notice that the original German title is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (“Uneasiness in Culture”).

Works Cited Caws, Peter. 1988. Structuralism: Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press. Dante (degli Alighieri). 1980. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1, “Inferno,” trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York, Bantam Books. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber. Evanston, IL , Northwestern University Press . 161

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon and trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York, Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, ed. and introduced by Peter Gay. New York, W. W. Norton. Gordon, Jane Anna. 2010.“Beyond Anti-Elitism: Black Studies and the Pedagogical Imperative,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 32, No. 2: 1–16. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities International Press. ——. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge. ——. and Jane Anna 2006. Gordon. “On Working through a Most Diffcult Terrain: Introducing A Companion to African-American Studies.” Gordon, Lewis R. and Jane Anna Gordon (eds.). A Companion to African-American Studies, xx–xxxv Malden, MA , Blackwell Publishers. ——. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2010. “A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives,” Thresholds in Education XXXVI / 1 & 2: 27–35. ——. 2011. “Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison postcoloniale,” trans. Sonya Dayan-Hezbrun, Tumultes 37: 165–183. ——. 2012. “Essentialist Anti-Essentialism, with Considerations from Other Sides of Modernity,” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal 1: http://quaderna.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/09/Gordon-essentialist-anti-essentialism.pdf ——. 2014. “Der Realität zuliebe: teleologische Suspensionen disziplinärer Dekadenz.”, 244–267 Gabriel, Markus (ed.). Der Neue Realismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selection from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 2008. “Letter on Humanism.,” 213–266 The Basic Writings of Heidegger. San Francisco: CA , HarperCollins. Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett. ——. 2010. An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”, trans. H. B. Nisbet. London: Penguin Classics. ——. 2012. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. Fear and Trembling / Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Natanson, Maurice Alexander. 1974. Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infnite Tasks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nissim-Sabat, Marilyn. 2008. “Coming Out of the Closet: Phenomenology, African Studies, and Human Liberation,” Radical Philosophy Review 11 / 2: 159–173. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. Tunstall, Dwayne. 2008. “Learning Metaphysical Humility with Lewis Gordon’s Teleological Suspension of Philosophy,” CLR James Journal: A Publication of the Caribbean Philosophical Association 14 / 1: 157–168. Wiredu, Kwasi (ed.). 2006. A Companion to African Philosophy. Malden, MA , Blackwell Publishers.

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CHAPTER 14 THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN THEOLOGY

In this essay, I will examine the ways in which African American history is understood and framed in terms of the development of African American religious identities within the context of the US nation-state. A difficulty of achieving this task, however, is that history, African Americans, and the US nation-state are all modern developments, and religious identities—indeed, religion itself—while correctly applied to the context of these modern convergences are also at times done so through a fallacious retroactive ascription to past groups from which these modern ones are formed. Moreover, the expression “US nation-state” is one to which “nation-state” worked best during a period of a presumed racial integrity of the nation. Without that notion, the United States is properly a post-nation-state, by which is meant a state not premised on a single ethnic or racial nationality. A US citizen or resident could, in other words, be anybody. This discussion will therefore proceed through interrogating each layer before offering a discussion of their synthesis.

History One of the conundrums of history is that the concept itself is historical. There is, in other words, a “history of history,” so to speak, and that involves realizing that people did not always think in such terms about the past. As antiquated time was often cyclical, this meant a greater tendency across human communities to imagine frameworks of eternal returns instead of linear movements or radical breaks.1 The shift required, first, the move to eschatological conceptions of time, where people such as the ancient Israelites thought in terms of a completion of divine tasks. This model was not, however, premised on a principle of rational order but instead an ethical demand. Its fusion with the Greek concept of logos or rational principle created a shift to an explanation of unfolding events. In the thought of St. Augustine, this consideration posed the problem of the relationship of reason to faith, and much of medieval thought addressed this challenge with another fusion—namely, the fusion of theos and logos into theology.2 The fusion of reason and faith raised the question, as well, of the relationship of the natural to the miraculous. This concern led to at least two areas of medieval investigation: (1) theonaturalism and (2) theodicy. The first involves the question of the status of that which deviates, in monotheism, from the omnipotent Deity. The natural, in other words, was simply that which is divinely created. It is also the definition of the miraculous. The unnatural, by contrast, is that which deviates from divine creation. As theonaturalism is

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also normative, such deviation was also a mark of immorality and evil. Thus, as in Dante’s Inferno, the center of hell, where the incarnation of evil stood frozen with hatred, was cold and the farthest point from the radiance of all holy. The theodicean problem emerged from the omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness of the Deity. How, with such reach, could deviation be possible? Would not such a Deity be responsible for all events? If so, would not the responsibility for evil also rest on such a being?3 The theodicean question required an interpretation of past events in a way that questioned future actions. Resolutions to the challenge of theodicy often took at least two forms: (1) demonstrating that the Deity’s will exceeded human finitude and comprehension, which, in effect, amounted to saying that perhaps evil and injustice doesn’t ultimately exist or at least simply appear to be features of the world or (2) showing that the benevolence of such a being requires human freedom, which, if properly understood, requires human responsibility for human actions. The first eliminates deviation; the second permits deviation. The second also raises the question of the human capacity to initiate that which stands outside of the actions of the Deity but that which, as sanctioned by such a Deity’s commitment to human freedom, is compatible with its or his will paradoxically even when incompatible with the laws of that will.4 The great German scholar Hans Blumenberg considered this development the birth of modern history and the modern age. It requires a story of the past in which the genuinely new came into birth and a conception of the future governed by the possibilities of human agency.5

Religion and History Religion emerged in antiquity, whereas theology was a feature of medieval thought. The former was more properly a concept from ancient Roman society, where the empire permitted allegiance to a variety of gods and practices in its territories so long as there was adherence to the Roman legal system, especially regarding taxation. The term religion referred, at least in its etymological links to religere and religare, to practices in which, especially through ritual and text, one becomes bound. This binding took sacred form. It should be borne in mind that not all of the Roman colonies regarded their practices under such a rubric. The people of Judah, for example, regarded themselves as a people living under their set of laws and practices of sacrifice. Thus, in the famous challenge posed to Jesus of following the laws of Cesar (Rome) or G-d/Torah (Judah) through the payment of taxes, the subtext is also one of binding, which was an imposition onto the Judean people. The response of paying Cesar his taxes and offering in the Temple of Jerusalem what belonged to G-d reflected a temporary response that set the stage for what was to come, for the people of Judah faced annihilation as an ethnic group in the midst of an empire. The adoption of various dimensions of Roman law eventually took the form of incorporating the Roman notion of religion, and this led to the transformation of Judeanism (the practices of the ethnic group of Judea) into Judaism (the religion created out of the fusion of that group and Roman laws).6 164

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The Romanizing of Judah created two important fusions. The first was rabbinic Judaism. The second was Christianity. The latter became the Roman religion by the fourth century ACE, which transformed Rome into the Holy Roman Empire. The struggle, however, between the nonreligious conception of pre-Roman Judeanism and similar kinds of struggles for many groups across the empire, such as those in North Africa, East Africa, and West Asia, led to the rise of different movements, among which was Islam. As a reassertion of pre-Roman laws in West Asia, Islam at first offered itself as beyond religion or Rome. Yet, as Islam means “submission,” its significance was quickly, and continues to be, absorbed under the rubric of religion, even though it was a movement that was at first against and perhaps beyond religion in the Roman sense through its attesting to Muhammad as the Last Prophet. Sharia, Islamic law, was supposed to stand not as a law permitted within the framework of the greater legal system and thus a religion that bounded, say, Arabs and the various other ethnicities that adopted it, but instead as the law of laws.7 As the latter, it would transcend religion. Several considerations thus immediately arise. The first is the status of laws and practices through which different peoples’ identities are forged but are not genealogically or culturally linked to the lines from Rome—namely, Christianity and Judaism. Second, if those within the framework and genealogy of Rome have embraced the theodicean resolution of deviation creating the genuinely new, what are they? One difficulty is that these questions are already framed by the concepts of religion and history. Thus, the answer to the first is, simply, paganism, and for the second: secularism.

Africans in America Our discussion of history and religion sets the context for the framework of meaning into which Africans were forced in the modern world. To consider their situation, we should bear in mind first that there was no reason for most of the people of the continent of Africa even to have considered themselves African. Most lived according to the cosmologies and laws of what today could be called their ethnic groups. As the continent was also traversed by vast systems of trade routes, this meant that various groups interacted not only with their neighbors but also with those who traded far away. The foreign and distant included Christians, Jews, and Muslims. For the first, non-Christian groups were either pagans or heathens. For the second, goyim (non-Jews). And for the third, infidels. We should additionally bear in mind, however, that Christianity was in Africa since its early formation in the Roman Empire, which included its northern and eastern regions; the same was the case for Judaism, especially along the trade routes; and larger numbers in the case of Islam as caliphates spread in those regions from the seventh century onward. The period of what could be called Afro-Islamic rule in North Africa spread into the southern parts of Europe that was known in the Middle Ages as Christendom. The Iberian Peninsula became Andalusia until Isabella and Ferdinand overthrew the Muslim rulers, also known as “Moors,” in Grenada in 1492 in what was called “the Reconquest.” 165

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That year is crucial in the transformations that were to come. In addition to the Reconquest in January of that year, there was the intensification of the Inquisition in March, wherein those outside of the framework of Christianity faced elimination or conversion (which, for many, was the same), and the extension of these conflicts to the seas through which Columbus landed in the Bahamas by October of that year and inaugurated the notion of the New World.8 The Age of Exploration, which characterized the period of the expansion of Christendom into a global force and the emergence of global Europe, was not the only kind of expansion going on during that period. The Ottomans rose to power but opted to maintain control over the eastern Mediterranean and focused their energy increasingly eastward. In East Africa, the Solomonid Empire emerged in Abyssinia and staked its terrain into the twentieth century, and varieties of expansion occurred across West Asia and eastern Asia without much concern for the rapid changes going on in the Atlantic. There were varieties of expansion across different parts of the continent, as wars in what is today the Congo, Cameroon, and parts of Nigeria, such as Igbo Land and Yoruba Land, attest. The expansion of Christendom across the Atlantic was accompanied by what could be called a theo-anthropology, wherein “man” was properly Christian and those who deviated from that normative center, such as Jews and Moors (designated under the category raza, which became race), became part of the less human. This order had catastrophic consequences in the New World, where the first-dubbed “Indians,” originally misconceived of as lost Israelites (to be accounted for within the scheme of an allencompassing Bible), were eventually realized outside of the biblical organization of divine concern. The result, in many instances, was genocide, which posed problems under a system offering conversion and salvation. The priest Bartholomé de las Casas realized this contradiction, and his efforts inaugurated the debates leading not only to modern questions of the human being but also the framework, theologically and historically understood, for the question of responsibility for the future.9 Concerns about Amero-Indian genocide matched with the prize of rapidly growing wealth that was transforming Christendom into modern Europe demanded a large supply of cheap labor. Africans, rationalized as deviations from the theonatural center, became the objects of such exploitation. The transatlantic slave trade was born. This trade also joined those in the Indian Ocean as colonies began to spring up around the African coasts. The north was still governed by the Islamic trades. The Middle Passage and Indian Ocean passages transformed many of the various captured ethnic groups on the continent into Africans and eventually “Negroes” and “blacks.” These captives had to negotiate their understanding of reality with those of their captures. As none were of a singular cosmological schema, translations and transformations became the order for some, and in others, as they were already either Christian, Jew, or Muslim, there was confusion since they found themselves in both the familiar and the radically different because of the shifting anthropology from religious membership to racial designation. In short, a black Christian was not equal to what was by that point a Christian, who was presumed white. These shifts took time to occur as 166

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well among Jews and Muslims. The African in the New World, now the Negro or the black, faced a world of white supremacy, black inferiority, and a retroactive realignment of the past in terms of a presumed future in which she or he is expected no longer to exist. This new being, born of the modern world, needed explanations.

Black Religions and Theology The many non-Christian, non-Jewish, and non-Muslim Africans who survived the Middle Passage into the Americas came from ethnic groups with cosmologies and normative schemes with similarities to those of their capturers except for their normative conceptions of time. Those who were Akan, for instance, regarded themselves and the world as such as in declining value according to their distance from the creating Deity. They also, as Kwame Gyekye and Paget Henry have shown, took their lot as indication of being off course from their promised purpose in relation to the originating Deity.10 This meant that there was a sense, always, that there was something they needed to do about their circumstances. Thus, Christianity and the minority Judaism were not simply adopted by these groups but were, as Jane Anna Gordon and others have argued, creolized or brought into a living synthesis with explanatory and critical force.11 In many instances, this took the form of rebellion, often with the blessings of a theologically critical leadership. In other instances, it took the form of innovations among the enslaved, movements among those who were freedmen and women, and theological reflection. As the focus of this essay is the problem of history, the question of how the various denominations, sects, and entirely different religious communities were formed will only be summarized in what follows so as to move on to the problems of history they pose.12 Among the Christians, those who were Catholics and the variety of Protestant denominations were formed under the influences of where they were enslaved and also the abolition movements that joined their liberation struggles. Others, however, engaged the contradictions of the proposed Christian denominations and formed their own in stream with antislavery efforts being formed, especially in relation to Africa, such as the African Methodist Church (founded in 1816). Although there were enslaved Africans who were Jews and Muslims, they were forced throughout the Americas to be in predominantly Christian environments.13 The minority of Jewish enslavers, if they were maintaining Jewish law (Halakha) created conditions similar to their Christian counterparts, which offered Afro-Jewish possibilities.14 In some parts of the Americas, the story of religious membership was complicated by the conditions for baptism and conversion. A child could be baptized Catholic, for example, but the Protestant groups required consent from the petitioned convert. In places such as Curaçao, this meant that some masters sought out Catholic priests to convert newly born enslaved babies. The situation was complicated, however, in instances where Halakha required those enslaved on Jewish plantations to become Jewish upon manumission. One problem of African American history is thus already framed here—namely, that the African enters modernity as black primarily through the framework of Christianity. 167

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The emergence of African American Christians raised the question of their relation to white Christians. If white Christians were the “in” group with regard to conceptions of the Christ, this meant that nonwhites were the deviating or “out” group, although by virtue of religion “in” Christianity. Antiblack Christian tracts supporting this in effect theodicy of black exclusion were written by white theologians and religious leaders, for whom there was no problem of history: blacks, simply, were not agents of that phenomenon.15 The unfolding truth, the creative potential of history in the modern age, as Blumenberg asserted, was not, for white supremacists—worse, could not—be for blacks. There were, however, critical responses from black theologians and religious leaders. The upshot of their position was simply that white Christians were not being, in a word, Christian.16 Black Christological critique emerged, in other words, through the articulation of an eschatology of black presence instead of black elimination. Since Central and South America were primarily Catholic, where the framework of protest and debates were more in the hands of priests beholden to a rich system, with the exception of the thought of las Casas, of hierarchical relations, the focus will here turn to North America, where Protestantism afforded accountability and critique from a fluid set of anointed and lay ministers. The theology that unfolded as black theology began with a focus on several themes: the evils of enslavement and racism, the significance of equality, the meaning of freedom, the symbolic significance of imago Dei, and theodicean problems of justification of theological accounts. At the core of these foci is the central one of a philosophical anthropology of black worth, for the equality of blacks rested in the (denied) humanity of black people. Inequality, in other words, was pernicious because it shifted from earlier models of individuated divine devotion to preordained human membership. In no instance is this more present than in the adage of judgment by content of character instead of skin color. The American Revolutionary War veteran and Calvinist minister Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833) offered such a critique in the New England region through theonaturalistic appeals to natural rights, although a more systematic articulation of theology and the problem of history came from his contemporary Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757–c. 1803) in England. Writing on the slave trade, slavery in the Americas, and its rationalization in the work of European philosophers that included David Hume, Cugoanao articulated the problem of slavery in the colonies in terms also of a theodicy that brought the question of the idolatry of enslavers and colonizers to the fore. No one is a natural slave, Cugoano argued; people are forced into slavery, which challenges the character of enslavers. Cugoano, however, understood that the question of force, pushed to its farthest point, raises the theodicean problem of deific omnipotence. As theonaturalism makes the Deity the force also of nature, Cugoano posed the question of the intelligibility of historical events as the expression or language of the Divine: reality and its historical unfolding is, in other words, the language of the Deity thinking, speaking, expressing. Cugoano thus creatively asserted the first theodicean response in which there is no intrinsic nature in the natural order of things, which, in this case, is also the theological order. He argued, 168

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however, that there is spiritual meaning in events. Thus, the enslavement of blacks transcends the enslaved into a message of sin—namely, slavery. As an expression of sin, slavery must be fought in this view as an imposition onto reality (the Deity’s language). As that which is not intrinsic to the language, it is outside. But meaning properly emerges inside the divine language. Thus, to become meaningful, slavery must enter that language, but in doing so, it would encounter the contradiction of being inside-outside. In effect, Cugoano turned the white supremacist’s schema on its head and reveals it as idolatrous. His theodicy is in effect to undermine the effort to justify slavery in theodicean terms. In other words, he effected a theodicy of theodicy. This extraordinary insight anticipated many to come in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The immediate problem becomes the legitimacy of freedom as the conclusion of theodicean reflection. We have already seen a similar argument in the move from theology to secularism, from eschatology to modern history, and from idolatrous inequality of human beings (treating some groups as gods) to equality (all human beings as human beings). The message, so to speak, that became prevalent from all this in the succeeding nineteenth century became that redemptive suffering in which there was only one acceptable conclusion: liberation. This expectation took at least two forms. The first was the specificity and meaning of black suffering. David Walker’s famous Appeal is one instance of this, and Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) expanded this reasoning in terms of black female suffering. The second form, related to the first, is in terms of the symbolic significance of blackness. Could not, if redemptive, blackness also be a virtue and, further, the personification of beauty and goodness? Martin Delany (1812–1885), as well as to some extent the Trinidadian Edward Blyden (1832–1912) and the Jamaican Robert Campbell (1829–1884) explored this consideration, especially with an eye on continental Africans as exemplars.17 Together, these considerations led to the reading of history in terms of the significance blackness in ways that reverberated to this day; what, in other words, is to be learned from black suffering?18 Consider, for example, the Episcopalian minister and scholar Alexander Crummell (1818–1898), whose version of redemptive blackness was premised on the adaptability of blacks. Crummell turned social Darwinism on its head by making the case for the sustainability and survivability of blacks because of the hybrid potential of black identity. In his days, the familiar “Negro X” or “Negro Y” meant that any version amounted to “Negro + something.” The “Negro” was always in the equation.19 The “fitness” of whites should not be judged by the period of white supremacy, which, in the larger scheme of history, is only a moment in the unfolding path of time wherein birth and decay are constants. Purification is an unsustainable project, and since mixture for whites constitute their disappearance, the future appears brighter for those who could sustain their identity in the midst of mixture—namely, blacks. The problem of history thus returns as a twofold one of appearance: a place for blacks in the future meant a retroactive accounting for blacks in the present and the past. As Christology offered the model of redemptive history, the question of black presence inevitably raised the question of redemptive blackness in terms of salvation in black— namely, the blackness of Christ. Such reflections emerged at the end of the nineteenth 169

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century into the early twentieth century in theological reflections from an odd constellation of thinkers such as Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), whose prophetic ruminations led to a pan-African Zionism that was a major impetus to the formation of Rastafari in Jamaica; W. E. B. Du Bois, especially in terms of his poetic and literary formulations of the returning savior as a man of color; and the poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946), whose “The Black Christ” brought this dialectic to its poetic conclusion.20 The theodicean problem was thus transformed in the Christian framework into the Christological question of symbolic incarnation. The meaning of black presence—and by extension black historicality—became one in which the meaning of black suffering was the symbolic role of redemptive blackness retroactively placed into Christ as colored embodiment. The history of black theology as a liberating one of redemptive blackness thus took several paths with repercussions to this day. One was primarily through symbolic incarnation. Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman (1911–2000), formerly known as Albert Cleage Jr., presented a revolutionary savior in The Black Messiah.21 A similar path was taken by James Cone in his powerful series of books Black Theology and Black Power (1969), Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and God of the Oppressed (1975), and by several of his students, including Jacquelyn Grant, whose White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Theology and Womanist Response, pushed the formulation of symbolic identification to its conclusion with redemptive incarnation in terms of black female embodiment.22 There were, as well, integrationist lines with foundations in the eighteenth century, as seen in the earlier reference to Haynes, in the nineteenth century primarily through the activism and thought of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), and most acutely manifested in the twentieth-century thought of Martin Luther King Jr., where the historical problem was not resolved in terms of embodied redemption but, akin to the Jewish model of the ethical face of the imago Dei, the historical path of ethical and political action. The influence of Howard Thurman (1899–April 10, 1981) is evident in King’s theology of history, where resolution becomes the universalist model of ameliorating human suffering. This makes the actions in which King was involved at his death—fighting a struggle for the rights of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, in addition to his stand against the war in Vietnam—consistent. It should be borne in mind that El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (1925–1965), born Malcolm Little and most known as Malcolm X, although eventually endorsing a model of historical redemption through political action, stressed the importance of human rights over civil rights, which was a point of convergence with King in spite of his rejection of King’s integrationist model.23 Then there is the paradoxical response of Afrocentricity, which rejects the Christological framework while endorsing the underlying logic of historical resolution through the recognition of African peoples’ historical agency.24 Redemptive suffering did not resolve the theodicean challenge, however. William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist? made this problem clear through challenging the evidentiality of the meaning of redemption in suffering.25 While suffering is clear, interpreting it as theological purpose or teleology begs the question of the legitimacy of theological approaches to the problem. The point of theodicy, after all, was about the legitimacy, in ethical and existential terms, of the Deity. If the actions of human beings are 170

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necessary conditions for that resolution, the possible directions in which they could go are contingent. This meant putting the question of agency squarely back into the actions of human beings, Jones argued, which brought forth a peculiarly humanistic conception of agency. The debate stimulated by Jones led to more radical reflections on secular humanism and historical agency in the thought of such scholars as Anthony Pinn and (with regard to the specificity of alternatives in Islam) Sherman Jackson. For our purposes, the basic and continued expectation round the African diaspora’s relationship to history persists: religious affiliation offered redemptive expectations, and in each instance, the meaning of blackness and black people’s relation to America (broadly defined through to the Americas) was fundamental.

Concluding Considerations on Historical Redemption and Contingency That the transformation of African peoples into blacks was a modern phenomenon of colonization and enslavement brought the question of redemptive suffering to the fore and raised important considerations on the meaning of history as a portrait of challenged and fought-for freedom. This is peculiar narrative of modern thought, for it was not only the enslaved who saw freedom as a beacon of redemptive significance but also those who enslaved them. The contradictions, perhaps irony, of the white rebels of the American colonies formulating themselves as fighting for freedom, couched in predominantly Protestant language mixed with Enlightenment notions of reason, were apparent in the concluding protections of the newly founded United States as a nation of slavery. As the historian Gerald Horne recently demonstrated, another interpretation of the American Revolution was that of a counterrevolution—namely, the protection of slavery.26 This counterrevolutionary history took form in the United States’ role in undermining the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and its subsequent historical significance through the policies the consequence of which has been structural dependency not only for Haiti but also for the region. Struggles against enslavement in the region thus meant fundamentally doing so against the United States, a country with an explicit white supremacist national identity well into the twentieth century from which it is reluctantly departing in the twenty-first. A similar story about the meaning of history unfolded, as well, with Marxism, which offered a conception of redemptive history under the auspices of scientific interpretations of the material unsustainability of slavery and its transformation into class stratification. Although a rewriting of Christian eschatology into a dialectical materialist model of history, Marxism, however, faced the problem of erasing its own theological roots as ideological critique. There is not enough space to detail that debate here.27 What should be evident, however, is that Marxism’s significance in the US context led to its fusion with liberation theologies and conflicts with religious, primarily Protestant, movements that sought historical redemption through the accumulation of material capital. What was at stake, in other words, was the meaning of freedom. Where, as in Rastafari, the United States represented biblical Babylon, history means ultimately returning to Zion. The meaning of the latter, however, is more complicated 171

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than a place such as Ethiopia or Israel.28 It is also a form of memory, namely, of what it means to live as free human being, one with high self-esteem and self-love. The dreadlocks, for example, signify embodying Babylon/US dreads: blacks no longer enslaved to whites as standards or measurements of self-worth. Where the United States represents ancient Egypt, the Exodus narrative of seeking a Promised Land emerges. And then there are models of healing the earth, of repair and transformation. The United States is simply part of a larger problem of imperialism and colonization against which humanity must build alternative models for a redemptive future. These narratives of redemption amount to a consistent portrait of African Americans as paradoxically inside outsiders of the modern world. It is paradoxical because African Americans are, as blacks, indigenous to the modern world that rejects them. The problem of history as also that of freedom means, then, that membership also becomes central: blacks are homeless in the epoch to which they belong. The various strategies of addressing this problem included problematizing history itself and facing the contingency not only of blacks in the future or the latter in black but also a multitude of possibilities not hitherto thought of. The paradox of all this, however, is that contingency in the present is nothing short of the dark reminder of reason when it seeks its own necessity across time. In Du Boisian language, it is the potentiated double consciousness of the contradictions by which and through which humanity attempts to move forward.

Notes 1. Although Nietzsche articulated this aspect of Greek chronology, Hannah Arendt offers a rich discussion in her classic The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 2. For discussion and development, see, e.g., Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); cf. also his The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domand (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000). 3. For more on theodicy, see John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, reissued (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). And for discussions most relevant to the African American context see Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1999) and Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and Black Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Cf. also Kwame Gyekye’s An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 4. This is an argument explored in the thought of the classic German idealists, especially F. W. J. Schelling; see his Philosophical Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). For discussion, see Markus Gabriel, Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays on German Idealism (New York: Continuum, 2011). 5. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). It should be borne in mind that Blumenberg was also responding to Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), which he regarded as an overdetermined conception. The discussion that unfolds in this essay will culminate in that tension between theological necessity and existential contingency. 172

The Problem of History in African American Theology 6. For a detailed history and critical discussion of this process, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 7. See Jackson, Islam and Black Suffering. 8. For discussion, see, e.g., Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 9. See, e.g., Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study of the Disputation between Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Gines De Sepulveda in 1550 on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). 10. See Gyekye, African Philosophical Thought, and Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2000), introduction and chapter 1. 11. See Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 12. Historical studies of the formation of the formation of religious groups across the African diaspora are many. For a comprehensive studies incorporating problems of history and historiography, see, e.g., Anthony B. Pinn, The African American Religious Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), Pinn, Introducing African American Religion (New York: Routledge, 2012), and Gayraud Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989). Cf. also Walter Isaac, “Beyond Ontological Jewishness: A Philosophical Reflection on the Study of African American Jews and the Social Problems of the Jewish Human Sciences,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2011. 13. In addition to the previously cited work by Isaac and Pinn, see also Allan Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997). 14. See Isaac, “Beyond Ontological Jewishness.” 15. For critical engagement with some of this literature, see Eulalio Baltazar, The Dark Center: A Process Theology of Blackness (New York: Paulist Press, 1973). This view of blacks in history—and, indeed, with regard to civilization—isn’t peculiar to religion. It was, and to some extent continues to be, an obstacle in the social sciences. See Vernon J. Williams Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), chapter 1. 16. See, e.g., Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery” and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1999). This eighteenth-century text outlined many of the theodicean and rhetorical responses to come, as nineteenth-century writers ranging from David Walker to Anna Julia Cooper demonstrated. 17. See Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for discussions of Blyden and Crummell. See also Josiah Ulysses Young III, A Pan-African Theology: Providence and the Legacies of the Ancestors (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), and for a detailed discussion of Robert Campbell, see Anthony Williams, “Caliban’s Victorian Children: The Poetics and Politics of Black Victorian Prose, 1850–1900,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 2013. 18. See William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Jackson, Islam and Black Suffering; and Pinn, op. cit. Cf. also, Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Introducing Africana Philosophy (NY: Routledge, 2000), chapter 1.

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Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 19. See Alexander Crummell, “The Destined Superiority of the Negro,” in Wilson Jeremiah Moses (ed.), Destiny and Race: Selected Writings, 1840–1898 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 194–205. 20. Garvey’s influence on Rastafari has received many studies. See, e.g., Leonard Barrett’s classic, The Rastafarians (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997) as well as Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1986) and Rupert Lewis, Marcus Garvey: Anti-Colonial Champion (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); for Du Bois, see, e.g., Terrence L. Johnson, Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). And for Cullen, see his The Black Christ and Other Poems (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929). 21. Albert Cleage, Jr., The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 22. James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott 1970), and God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press 1975); Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989). 23. See Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Merit Publishers, 1965). See also his reflections on the same in Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NY: Grove Press, 1965). 24. See, e.g., Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). 25. Jones, Is God a White Racist?. For critical commentary, see Pinn, Why, Lord? 26. Gerald Horne, Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and The CounterRevolution of 1776 Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Cf. also W. E. B. Du Bois’s critique of racist historiography and his analysis of US counterrevolutionary efforts in Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1992), which was originally published in 1935. 27. For discussion, see, e.g., Cornel West, Prophesy, Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, anniversary ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 72–80, and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), and cf. also C. L. R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1980); Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, new ed. (London: Verso, 2004), and Cedric Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001). 28. See, e.g., Michael Barnett, ed., Rastafari in the New Millennium: A Rastafari Reader (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012) for portraits of the creative symbolic representation of Zion in Rastafari across the globe.

Selected Texts Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1958. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Cohen, Shaye J. D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkley: University of California Press, 1999. Gordon, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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The Problem of History in African American Theology Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000. Jackson, Sherman A. Islam and Black Suffering. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, ed. Destiny and Race: Selected Writings, 1840–1898. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Pinn, Anthony B. Introducing African American Religion. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pinn, Anthony B. The African American Religious Experience in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Pinn, Anthony B. Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. New York: Continuum, 1995. Wilmore, Gayraud. African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1989.

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CHAPTER 15 RARELY KOSHER: STUDYING JEWS OF COLOR IN NORTH AMERICA

I offer in this article a brief exploration of some of the difficulties posed by the study of Jews of color, especially Afro-Jews, in the North American and Caribbean contexts, and I summarize the portrait of Jews today (and a little bit of yesterday) that follows from such study. There is much to support the reluctance to conjoin discussions of Jews with discussions of race. This reluctance derives not only from the history of inquisitions, pogroms, and the Shoah, but also from the ironically intimate link between the concepts of race and Jewish history. The prototypical term raza from which the word “race” emerged was, after all, a Medieval Spanish word to refer to breeds of dogs, horses, Jews and Moors (AfroMuslims).1 We could add to this the upheavals marked by the transition of Christendom into a trans-Atlantic force in the fifteenth century and that of the term from its theological underpinnings to its naturalistic aspersions as a science of human division, an anthropology. It is no accident that the later “classic” modern formulation of racism, Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaine (1853–1855), devoted attention to the mixed racial constitution of Jews, and it is also not accidental that a term developed by the French linguist Ernest Renan, “Semitic languages,” eventually became a racialized one: “Semite.” All this is familiar stuff to scholars, not only in the study of race but also in the study, specifically, of Jews.2 This narrative is wanting, however, in many regards— first, because of its seamlessness, and, second, because it doesn’t address the question of why race arose as a negative concept. To begin, there is already difficulty in talking about Jews because of the presumed universality of local manifestations of Jewish people. As Jews traveled through all parts of the globe, nearly every country developed some notion of Jews on the basis of its local Jewish population. This did not pose much of a problem in the past, since international, intercultural, and global communication was limited. But today, “local” versus “global” influence each other to the point of creating hegemonic forms of symbolic life. What is often lost, however, is an understanding of the history of how such dominant representations came into being. Jewish people are thus often studied without the important additions or conditions of how particular groups of Jewish people became repre-sentatives of all Jewish people. This problem of the particular as universal comes to the fore in the study of what could be called “Jews of color.” Now, the term itself would seem odd to prior generations of Jews and antisemities, for both knew that Jews, or at least Judeans (see below), as a group, even when very light in complexion, were certainly not “white.”3 But race is premeable, and as some Jews became white, a misperception emerged, oddly enough, in

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which supposedly most Jews became white (or at least they were popularly perceived as such).4 As there were once no Jews who were white, this strange development means that large groups of nonwhite Jews simply disappeared, or at least disappeared as Jews. The study of what remains in the fallout or disappearing of many Jews is thus fraught with minefields. Most of these are fallacies of presumed legitimacy of the status quo. Thus, the way things currently appear is retroactively placed on the way things were. What is missing, however, is a critical account of how such came to be. The AfricanAmerican social theorist W.E.B. Du Bois identified this problem well in the study of people of African descent. In such study, the people were treated as problems instead of as human beings facing problems.5 This, as we know, is a function of racism. As Jews are treated more as racialized than religious subjects, it follows that antisemitism takes a similar form, where Jews become problems instead of people who face problems.6 Put together, whether as Afro-Jews or simply as varieties of racially discriminated against groups who are also Jews, the methodological challenge that Du Bois identified comes to the fore. This methodological problem is exacerbated by what I have elsewhere called disciplinary decadence.7 That phenomenon emerges when practitioners deify their disciplines and treat their methodologies as all encompassing or godlike in scope. Methodological fetishism results, where the researcher turns away from reality and treats the method as its replacement. Thus, if a group of people don’t fit the discipline or make sense in terms of its methodology, such researchers wonder, “What’s wrong with these people?” The result is an attempt to squeeze the people into the discipline or, worse, render the people nonexistent, instead of adjusting the discipline and its methods to the reality that exceeds them. While these considerations pertain to what could be called Jews of color across the world, there is not enough time or space here to undertake discussion of such a scope. I will thus proceed simply by outlining some of the issues faced in North America and the Caribbean, which I hope will offer insight into the situation in other parts of the globe. Additionally, although the spectrum of color is very broad, I will focus on those that occasion the most anxiety and controversy since, as race discourses go, the tendency is to make the exception the rule with some groups and the rule the exception with others. Nowhere is this more so than with the study of blacks. The Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University was among several institutions I founded or cofounded over the past decade.8 Whenever I mentioned its name, I was often asked, “Your center studies black and Jewish relations?” “Relations” is one of those buzz words in American race politics. There are “race relations” and “relations between blacks and Jews.” Missing in all this, however, is the possibility of blacks who are Jews or Jews who are blacks. So, when I said, “No, we study and encourage research on Afro-Jews or black Jews,” the response was often, “Really?” In time, however, the existence of a center that studied Afro-Jews became not only a source of pride among students and faculty at Temple University, but also a stimulus to a different kind of conversation about Jews and Jewish diversity. For instance, after speaking of Afro-Jews, I usually add that the center actually studied Jews in all our 178

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diversity. So I was then asked, “Why isn’t it called the Center for Jewish Diversity?” I often responded that what most American and European Jews mean by “Jewish diversity” is simply “Ashkenazim” and “Sephardim.” (Oddly enough, a speaker representing the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco pointed out a few years ago at a meeting of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research that whenever she visited American Jewish institutions applying for funds to promote Jewish diversity, by “diversity,” they often meant the handicapped or white Jews with disabilities.) I often responded to the effect that the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies is a name that forces people to think and to ask the right questions. They must consider Jews beyond European and Iberian Jews, and in some cases think what for them may be the unthinkable. And even more, it may lead to their asking about different types of Jews beyond AfroJews, such as East Asian Jews, East Indian Jews, Latin American Jews, Native American Jews, and more.” They invariably got the picture. The discussion thus became what could be called a pedagogical moment, which, after all, is the goal of good research. In addition to helping people to realize the diversity of Jews today, the existence of the center evoked many questions. For example, “How did such diversity emerge?” and, “Were Jews always this diverse?” An unfortunate aspect of the present is that although the second question is more to the truth, it is the first that is hegemonic. The truth of the second is well known among rabbis, which makes its erasure, at least among synagogue-going Jews, rather curious. Rabbinic Judaism emerged, after all, during the first third of the first millennium CE, after the fall of the Second Temple.9 Those years were marked by a transition of a colonized and, in today’s terms, multiracial ethnic group, Judeans, who adopted a proselytizing approach through which 150,000 of them created 8,000,000 Jews in the Roman Empire.10 That the Roman Empire was multiracial is without doubt, since it spanned as far north as Britannia, as far south as the northern borders of the Sahara, as far west as Iberia, and as far east as Persia. What this already tells us is that Jewish history and its demographics take on a different picture if read through the lens of colonization and empire. That the groups who traded with, conquered, and colonized the land known today as Israel included Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Persians before Ancient Rome and the Holy Roman Empire/Christendom and then Arabians afterward make racial and cultural homogeneity a laughable prospect. But, even more, the fact that each empire or hegemonic group had Israelites as a minority group within its borders meant that those groups had an impact along with the emerging centers. Thus, the emergence of the Islamic empires meant a period of high visibility for Arabic-speaking Jews, the most influential example being Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides, also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn and the RaMBam. The same emerged for Spanish Jews during the Spanish Empire, Dutch Jews during the Dutch Empire, and so on through to the British Empire and then to the hegemonic reach of the United States. Germany had its own colonial aspirations, diminished by World War I and then reasserted in World War II. But further, it is important to remember that a Western-centric portrait of hegemonic movements is only part of the story, and, as earlier Israelites and Jews of the Rabbinic Period moved to different parts of the world, their minority status in those areas followed 179

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a similar logic, whether it was through Ethiopia, Medieval Persia, India, or China. Add the vast trade networks across Africa, many of which linked, through ports, to Asia, and the story of past diversity is even more the norm. So, how did the first notion of original Jewish whiteness become hegemonic? In a way, that story is already embedded in the second portrait: Jews in each empire became the Jews, and along with that designation came the epistemic edifice on which their dual identities as Jews and as members of their particular empires was forged. Thus, along with the logic of imperialism, there was also an anthropological appeal to its legitimacy. Christendom eventually became Europe, a place that didn’t offer full citizenship to Jews. Its empires included the colonies of the Americas. Those colonies and the independent countries they subsequently became offered full citizenship on the basis of race. For Jews of Europe, the price for this opportunity was demonstrated whiteness.11 As the logic of the colonized took the form of a profound antipathy toward those who were black, the whitening of Jewishness became such that my asserted conjunction—black and Jewish or Jewish and black—became oxymoronic. So the Afro-Jewish question was born. One of the curiosities of the Afro-Jewish question is that it is a question at all.12 An understanding of Judaism makes the question of the convergence of people of African descent and Jewish people unremark-able. This is even more so as Jewishness diverged from ethno-racialism and more into religiosity. An Afro-Jew thus being an Africandescended person who practices Judaism is of no consequence to this view. But, as I have already pointed out through Du Bois, the issue isn’t really about social practice. It is about identity, and, more specifically, born identity. For those concerned with the latter, the Afro-Jew who became such through conversion occasions a moment’s exhale. The presumed homogeneous Jewish past needn’t be rewritten for such individuals, though they pose a different question for the Jewish future, especially if that individual decides to marry or have children with someone Jewish (if male) or simply have children (if female). Whatever a Jewish identity was, conversion ensures that a Jewish future could be, at least at the level of racial identity, otherwise. What is to be said, however, about Afro-Jews who are born Jews? In cases of European Jewish mothers, a similar moment of exhaling emerges in rabbinic Judaism. But what if the mother were Jewish but not of European ancestry? One response is to chart a genealogy that points either to Ashkenazic or Sephardic origins. But, again, what if the origins point neither to northern Europe (Ashkenazic) nor to southern Europe and North Africa (Sephardic)? Here, the expansion beyond the Ashkenazic/Sephardic presuppositions could bring in those descended from Mizrahim (Middle Eastern/West Asian Jews), but even that story becomes complicated, since, we should remember, groups often transform themselves as they migrate. (This is evident with Yemini Jews who migrated to the Horn of Africa and others who continued to southern Africa and became Lemba, and no doubt with Jews along the African trade routes whose descendants may include those among the Igbo of Nigeria and Kushite Jews of the Sudan and other parts of East Africa.) Given the effects of migration, perhaps entirely different kinds of Jews could have emerged, just as Ashkenazim actually came into being in northern 180

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Christendom and became dominant during the decline of the empires in which Sephardim had influence.13 Added to all this are the many denominations—Orthodox, Reform, Reconstruction, Progressive—and cultural considerations premised on secular identities. Then one must consider groups whose lineage and cultural connections (because pre-Roman and thus not necessarily “religious,” if we take seriously religion as a Roman creation) date back to the First Temple or to priestly Israelism, which is retroactively referred to today as Judaism. The difficulty there is that First Temple communities practiced patrilineality, whereas matrilineality emerged through the Romanized Judeanism that led to rabbinic Judaism. And, in some instances, there is the complex history of rabbinic Jews shaped primarily by migrating males who formed minyans, converted local women, and grew communities in remote areas. (Safe travel for females is, after all, still a challenging task.)14 All these come to the fore in the Americas, and they are becoming increasingly so in other parts of the world as continued migration, premised on a shrinking and heavily populated globe, leads, eventually, to Jews arriving in North America and Europe from different parts of the world with a story to be told but not yet immediately recognizable to hegemonic North American and European Jewish groups. An additional consideration at this point is that of rejecting the expression “mainstream Jews.” Although not explicit, this term is fraught with problems. It’s a nicer expression than, say, “white Jews,” but, in the end, that’s pretty much what it means. Although some communi-ties, such as the Orthodox Ashkenazim, may simply say halakhic Jews, the problems remain: (1) To use the term “non-halakhic” would simply be another way of saying that some avowed Jews are simply not Jews, and (2) some explanation would be needed for why some groups, such as Russian immigrants claiming to be Jews, don’t have to go through meticulous adherence to halakhic assessment versus communities of color from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. Brief discussions with Russian Jews would reveal stories of Russian Christians achieving immigration as Jews in Israel and in North America (through claims of being persecuted as Jews) over Afro-Jews who count back their Jewish ancestry and their adherence to Judaism for dozens of generations.15 This double standard is familiar stuff. We know it’s racist, although it is impolite to call it such. It certainly isn’t kosher. A recurring error in the study of black people and religion is the presumption that Africans entered modernity through Christianization. Thus, even where Afro-Jews are found, the logical conclusion of this view is that they must have at some point been Christian. (The logic of modernization doesn’t work the same way with Afro-Muslims, since, as we have seen, the transition from Christendom to Modernity was premised on the suppression of Afro-Muslim presence in what is today southern Europe. The consequence of Islam as premodern continues in Islamophobic discussions to this day.)16 The Eastern European comparison raises the question of why they weren’t also presumed to have entered modernity through Christianization, especially since they were more certainly located in what was Christendom. As there were premodern Christian Africans in East Africa and wherever there were trade routes, in addition to the routes governed by Muslims, so, too, there were pre-modern Jews in those areas if only in the historic role 181

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of Jews serving as mediators, translators, and negotiators between Christians and Muslims. These considerations raise many challenges for Jewish demography and historiography. Anyone working in this area of research knows there is an obsession with “the numbers.” How one counts Jews depends, however, on who appears as a Jew, and here the difficulty is worsened by some of the factors I have outlined. The late Jewish social researcher Gary Tobin challenged many assumptions of Jewish demography in the United States and argued that there was a much larger population of color than many previous studies had claimed.17 The Jewish Community Federation’s recent studies reveal that Tobin was correct, and this has raised the question of the validity and scope not only of previous research but also of those currently underway.18 Have the criteria and methods been properly scrutinized? A case in point: I have found myself in many situations in which I was invited to speak at events as a black person along with other black people or people of color only to discover at the moment of presentation that we all turned out to be Jews. During one meeting that took place in Mexico City, my Jewish colleagues and I went to a famous restaurant without Judaism being our main concern, since my colleagues were secular Jews. The restaurant, full of what we would call Jews, also had a table of recent European immigrants who were Orthodox Jews. Oddly enough, everyone was there for the same reason, yet from different motives. The place was kosher, but the secular Jews, who weren’t thinking about that, were there simply because they liked the place. For them, kashrut was a way of living instead of an obligation. It struck us that the majority population in the restaurant, most of whom were from Jewish communities going back several hundred years, would probably not have been counted in a study premised on criteria that would have defined only the recent European immigrants as Jews. The historic Latin American and Caribbean Jewish populations were therefore hidden in proverbial plain sight. This problem of invisibility is exacerbated by how race plays itself out in the New World and in colonies in other parts of the globe. Attempts to expand the white populations in settler societies such as Argentina in the south and the United States in the north meant welcoming, albeit with suspicion, people who were not white enough in Europe. Those people often became white in the colonies. Jews, however, faced a complex set of options and choices, interestingly enough, in line with Gobineau’s assertion of us as “mulattoes.”19 While there were European Jewish im-migrants who sought full citizenship through, in effect, becoming white in settler societies, there were also those who became members of creolized, colored, or black communities since the conception of being colored or black was very broad. Among the many stories of Jewish ancestry I received during my years of directing the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies were those of grandparents and great-grandparents from Europe who had settled in majority black neighborhoods and who simply “became” black. As far as their descendants knew, those ancestors were simply light-skinned or olive-skinned black people. I have often quipped that old photographs of so-called black and Jewish activism, where many of the blacks were simply light-skinned black people and many of the Jews were simply olive-skinned Jews, were such that most people today cannot tell who were the blacks and who were the 182

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European Jews. My own maternal ancestry is such that my Irish Jewish Sephardic ancestors were simply known as light-skinned Jamaicans; my Palestinian Jewish (because of nineteenth-century migration) Mizrahi ones were known as the same; and even my stepfather, a light-skinned Jamaican, revealed he was (Ashkenazi) Jewish at the time of my mother’s death. Until then, we only knew of him as anti-religious. I have received testimonies from African Americans who suddenly found European Jewish people showing up at the funerals of relatives, and, in each instance, the family resemblance was palpable.20 The clear counsel, then, is to develop research criteria and methods that facilitate the appearance of communities. It would be good, for example, for Jewish researchers to begin learning about Jewish communities beyond their own. We could call this a relational form of research, where the connectedness and differences are brought to the fore. The differences are important here because of an important feature of research in the human sciences: No human community is complete. Authenticity is therefore an imposed condition on the human world, which raises a paradox: The failure to be authentic is perhaps the most authentic human condition. Research in the human sciences therefore works with a “more or less” model of assessment. This means that Jews are more or less where the researcher expects us to be and, because of “less,” also where we may not be expected to be. I could say, having traveled across most of the globe except for Antarctica, that Jews are everywhere. So, logically speaking, if one wants to find darkskinned Jews, it stands to reason that one should go to places where there are many darkskinned people. Jews will no doubt be among them. There is, as well, much to be learned through knowledge of halakha and race, and how both were manifested in the complex history of colonization that was not only faced by Jewish peoples, but also marked by Jewish participation in such enterprises. Just as Roman colonization led to a transformation and expansion of the people of Judah into a community of millions of people known as Jews, so, too, did other periods of colonization lead to once-non-Jewish peoples being transformed into Jews. The existence of Jewish (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahic) plantations and slave masters in the colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Americas raises the question of the extent to which they were, if the expression is appropriate, kosher. If so, this would mean that their slaves, many of whom were their biological offspring, lived under halakha, which would mean that they should have been fully recognized as Jews when they were freed.21 This, in fact, happened in some places and was denied in others. Those formerly enslaved only knew the Jewish way of life, however, and their condition of post-slavery often led to forms of isolation in which unique forms of Afro-Judaisms or Amerindian Judaisms were practiced. Descendants of those people are manifold across the former colonies. Some have created unique communities under the designation of Israelites or Hebrew-Israelites. A good researcher should, as Walter Isaac has recommended, engage these forms of Judaism or Israelism as part of a Jewish resurgence and growth in the New World.22 Tobin’s argument did not stop, however, at his critique of methods of Jewish demography. He was also prescriptive in the form of actively encouraging conversion in order to grow Jewish communities.23 This means not only reminding Jews of our proselytizing past, interrupted 183

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by edicts from the Emperor Constantine, but also encouraging us to be welcoming of those brought to Judaism, many of whom refer to themselves in the United States as “Jews by choice.”24 Much here depends on the hospitability of congregations and the commitment of rabbis. Those dynamics are unfolding at the time of the publication of this article.

Notes 1. See, e.g., Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o espa-ñola (1611), quoted, translated, and discussed in David Nirenberg, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 71–87. 2. see, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants (eds.), Special Issue: “Historicizing Anti-Semitism,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge VII, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 1–178. 3. Even this claim requires qualification, since I ultimately argue that Jewish people were and continue to be what we would call today “multiracial.” See my discussion bel-low of Jewish proselytizing in the ancient Roman Empire. 4. Historical studies of this phenomenon are emerging. See, e.g., Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). Oddly enough, the desire to be white is presumed to the point of its rarely ever being asked whether other groups of Jews became black. Cf. my discussion below of European Jews moving to the New World. 5. see W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Study of Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science XI (January 1898): 1–23. Reprinted in The An-nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (March 2000): 13–27. For discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 265–280 and Jane Anna Gordon, “Challenges Posed to Social-Scientific Method by the Study of Race” in A Companion to African-American Studies, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), pp. 279–304. 6. see, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, Ramon Grosfóguel, and Eric Mielants, “Global Anti-Semitism in World-Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” in Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge VII, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 1–14. 7. see Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (New York: Routledge, 2006). 8. Although I have now left Temple University, here was the site for the center: http://www. temple.edu/isrst/Affiliates/CAJS.asp. Research affiliates writing dissertations through the center included Walter Isaac, “Beyond Ontological Jewishness: A Philosophical Reflec-tion on the Study of African American Jews and the Social Problems of the Jewish and Human Sciences” (Philadelphia: Doctoral Dissertation in Religion at Temple University, 2011) and Andre Key, “What’s My Name? An Autoethnography of the Problem of Ethnic Suffering and Moral Evil in Black Judaism” (Philadelphia: Doctoral Dissertation in African American Studies at Temple University, 2011). Articles on the center include Erin Mckigney’s “Professor 184

Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America Battles Preconceived Notions about Jews and Race,” the Forward (August 2007): http:// forward.com/culture/11326/professor-battles-preconceived-notions-about-jews-00255/ 9. There are many studies to attest to this fact, but consult, e.g., this group of historically informed rabbis: Shaye J.D. Cohen, The Beginning of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999). Harold M. Schulweis, Finding Each Other in Judaism: Meditations on the Rites of Passage from Birth to Immortality (New York: UAHC Press, 2001), especially p. 66; and Simon Glustrom, The Myth and Reality of Judaism: 82 Misconceptions Set Straight (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House Publishers, 1989), especially p. 150. And there is, of course, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1955), which offers as many historical insights as psychological ones. 10. Ibid. 11. See Brodkin, op. cit. and Goldstein, op. cit. 12. I offer a more elaborate discussion of this question in Lewis R. Gordon, “Réflexions sur la question afro-juive,” Plurielles: Revue culturelle et politique pour un judaïsme Humaniste et Laïque No 16 (2011): 75–82. http://www.ajhl.org/revue_plurielles.html 13. This is not unusual if one considers the descendants of Jewish groups along the Asian trade routes, each of which led to unique communities, such as the Bukharan Jews of Afghanistan (nearly extinct or in hiding, given the bellicose circumstances there); the Cochin, Meshuarim, Bene Israel, and Baghdadi Jews of India; and the Kaifeng Jews of China, just to name several. Interestingly enough, great resources with which to learn about these communities are Jewish cookbooks. See, e.g., Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York (New York: Knopf, 1998). The growing literature on African Jews includes Daniel Lis, Jewish Identity Among the Igbo of Nigeria: Israel’s “Lost Tribe” and the Question of Belonging in the Jewish State (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2015). 14. See, e.g., Siddharth Kara, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See also Jane Anna Gordon, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (New York: Routledge, 2020). 15. Russian Jews, e.g., don’t receive the level of scrutiny and suspicion that Jews of color receive. I’ve known many who even wore crucifixes and nearly none who could offer rabbinic evidence of their authenticity. As with many Jews in the Global South, family history continues to be the basis of authentic membership. 16. For more discussion, see Gordon, Grosfoguel, and Mielants, op. cit., pp. 3–4. Cf. also Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), which recounts Jews paying ransom for Jews abducted during the slave trades (Islamic and Atlantic). 17. See, e.g., Gary A. Tobin and Sid Groeneman, Surveying the Jewish Population in the United States—Part 1: Population Estimate, Part 2: Methodological Issues & Challenges (San Francisco, CA.: Institute for Jewish & Community Research, 2004); also see Diane Kaufmann Tobin, Gary A. Tobin, and Scott Rubin, In Every Tongue: The Racial & Ethnic Diversity of the Jewish People (San Francisco, CA.: Institute for Jewish & Community Research, 2005). 18. See The Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011: http://www.ujafedny.org/ who-we-are/ our-mission/jewish-community-study-of-new-york-2011/ 19. Interestingly enough, although Jews were in North America from the period of Dutch settlement in the seventeenth century, the first record of someone explicitly identified as Jewish was of a man named Sollomon who was also identified in the New Hampshire court records of 1668 as a “mulatto.” See Abram V. Goodman, American Overture: Jewish Rights in Colonial Times (Philadelphia: JPS, 1947), p. 16, and Graenum Berger’s derisive discussion in Black Jews in America: A Documentary with Commentary (New York: Commission on Synagogue Relations/ Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, 1978), 11–12. 185

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 20. Walter Isaac’s dissertation, “White Jews, Black Hebrews” (2011) offers many accounts and references to readings with similar tales. 21. This practice went through debate and transformations from Talmudic writings and subsequent commentaries. See, e.g., Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York: MacMillan, 1919). 22. See Walter Isaac, op. cit. and also his chapter, “Locating Afro-American Judaism: A Critique of White Normativity,” in Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (eds.), A Companion to African-American Studies (Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishers, 2006), 512–542. 23. see Gary A. Tobin, Opening the Gates: How Proactive Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community (San Francisco, CA.: Jossey Bass Publishers, 1999). 24. Cf. Patrik Jonsson, “More Blacks Explore Judaism,” the Christian Science Monitor (July 17, 2008): http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2008/0717/p03s05-ussc.html?nav=topictag_topic_page-storyList. Consult also information on the Jewish think tank organized by Dianne Kaufmann Tobin and Gary A. Tobin, Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), which is perhaps the best single resource on the diversity of Jews in North America and the Americas: http://bechollashon.org/. Cf. also the Union of Jewish Congregations of Latin America and the Caribbean: http://www.ujcl.org/. And, finally, though not exhaustively, see Stuart Z. Charmé’s insightful article, “Newly Found Jews and the Politics of Recognition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 2 (June 2012): 387–410, reprinted in: http://www. bechollashon.org/media/news/5–15-2012–2.php.

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CHAPTER 16 JEWS AGAINST LIBERATION: AN AFROJEWISH CRITIQUE*

For years, Marc Ellis has been arguing for the importance of a Jewish theology of liberation. His efforts fall for the most part on deaf ears, except, for example, Atalia Omer’s Days of Awe and Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism. Those interlocutors fall, for the most part, within a paradigm of Jews who are, as Judith Butler would say, “intelligible,” to those who dominate Jewish identity today—namely, Ashkenazi Jews, especially those living in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Intelligibility in this context refers to forms of appearance, given the rules of legitimate performance, behavior, or embodiment, that makes sense to those perceiving them. Despite the historical influence of Latin American Liberation Theology, Sephardic Jews, historically the most prominent in the Americas, seem to lack a voice and visibility. To make matters worse, the various rifts across the views of Jews worldwide—or at least Ashkenazi Jews—range not only from the ultra-orthodox to secular, but also from far right to radical left. This is despite earlier tendencies among critics from the right and the left to associate such Jews primarily with liberalism. What, however, if we were to consider other Jewish voices, Jews among Jews who are genuinely “others”?

Afro-Jews and White Jews Reflecting on Pesach Consider Afro-Jews. What do such Jews reflect on at Seders during the evenings of Pesach (Passover)? The Seder is a ritual meal involving reflection on Shemoth (Names), popularly known through Christianity as the Exodus story of the Israelites’ liberation from enslavement in Kmt (the ancient indigenous people’s name for the country that eventually became, through Greek conquest, Egypt). It is among the binding narratives of Jews, when even secular Jews often take time for such reflection. During this time of the year, regardless of ideological perspectives, Jews today in and outside of the State of Israel simultaneously reflect on the value of liberation. That is, however, also where many Jews divide. It is much easier to reflect on liberation from enslavement in a story reputed to have taken place in Northeast Africa approximately 3,400 years ago, and one in which Moses—the greatest hero and prophet of the Jewish people—and his biological siblings rose to the occasion in actions reverberating over the ages. Most white Jews (and many white Christians) overlook the story’s philosophical and political significance, however, in favor of the redemptive elements it offers. Moreover, the closing line at the conclusion of all Seders for Jews outside of Israel—“Next year, in 187

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Jerusalem . . .”—poses a challenge for Afro-Jews, Arab Jews, and Jews located among Dalits in South Asia. It makes them think of the plight of non-white Jews living in Israel. For some white Jews, the declaration poses challenges of ambivalence and for others it requires summoning the strongest resources of self-evasion or bad faith because they may support struggles for liberation for oppressed peoples in every country except Israel.

Why Do I Say This? First, reflection on enslavement doesn’t require a huge leap for Afro-Jews. Though much of Jewish history has been whitewashed as Euromodernity offered European Jews possibilities of assimilation in the former colonies through promises of racial transformation, the fact of the matter is that the ancient, technically pre-Jewish people of the Exodus narrative (“Hebrews,” “Israelites,” and “Jews” are not identical), were clearly East African and West Asian. This is the case even accounting for, in today’s parlance, “racial mixture.” That combination makes these people unequivocally, in today’s understanding, people of color. Today’s hegemonic white Jewish populations connect with such ancient peoples, then, in the way Germanic peoples imagine themselves the descendants of ancient Mediterranean peoples from whom they claim to inherit a classical past. Some may be their biological descendants, but not all and probably not most. White Jewish connection with ancient Israelites is mostly symbolic, and when they attempt to make it otherwise, they do so by eliding history and basic facts. This is made easier by simply rewriting the past as white. This whitening emerges from a failure to learn not only the ancient history of East Africa and West Asia, but also crucial moments in Jewish history, such as the events of the first few hundred years after the fall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the unfortunate prohibitions against exogamy enacted in the fourth century CE by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The Judeans who became citizens of the Ancient Roman Empire were a proselytizing people, initially ranging from 150,000 (some critics say 4 million), whose efforts produced about 8,000,000 Jews among the Romans in little more than a century. Such a large influx of people across the Roman Empire pushed to the wayside the earlier Afro-Asiatic peoples and inaugurated a story of hegemony among members who during different periods were at the center of whichever empire displaced others. A line stretching from Rome to Mecca to Andalusia to Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands to Britain to the United States in “the west” reveals one of shifting representations of who “authentically” exemplifies Jewish people. Different lines pushed into Asia, and others through Africa and South America. In all, closeness to enslavement shifted here and there, but for the Afro-Jew from the fifteenth century onward, it is more near than far. If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote. Bear in mind that white Jews aren’t the only Jews for whom identification with enslavement is remote. The history of Arab racism and 188

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enslavement of non-Muslim African peoples raises questions for Mizrahi or Arab Jews as well. I’m not focusing on that group here because, frankly, they are not hegemonic. If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote. Identification with whiteness leaves no recourse from being identified with the enslaver and master. White Jewish evocation of Exodus thus reeks of hypocrisy so long as such a Jew insists on being white. A different basis of connection must supervene, and for such Jews, nothing affords such a connection more than antisemitism and the historical significance of Shoah (the Holocaust). Thus, “long ago” tends to be the Exodus where liberation is less significant, while “near” becomes hatred of Jews, Jewphobia, the importance of twentieth-century atrocity, and the achievement of the State of Israel. Looking at non-Jewish blacks reflecting on slavery, such Jews quickly speak of antisemitism.When confronting Afro-Jews, however, white Jews prioritizing antisemitism face several problems. Where such Jews relate to Afro-Jews as among Jews, there shouldn’t be an issue, that is except for Afro-Jews bringing along both the realities of recent enslavement and antisemitism. That the overwhelming population of Jews massacred in Shoah were Ashkenazi creates a peculiar Jewish problem. White Jews may question AfroJews’ identification of shared loss, but for many white Jews who did not lose family members in that effort at genocide, the question is: Why do they have a more legitimate connection to those victims of antisemitism than their counterparts of color?

Black Dream, White Dread The situation of such ambivalence and dispute has added difficulty. The “nearness” or “closeness” of injustice and oppression for Afro-Jews is not only about enslavement, racism, and antisemitism. It is also about colonialism. Why does colonialism pose a problem? A clue rests in the distancing of antisemitism from racism. Jews were, after all, not historically white. It was the need to create distance from the colonized populations in the Euromodern world that raised the demand for growing populations of whites in the colonies. The result was that many groups who were not white in Europe were offered a ticket to become white in its outposts. Difficulty emerged from Christianity being the dominant religion of European colonies because of the transformation of Christendom into a European identity. New identities were born through the protection of religious freedoms, where a group’s religion could be separated from its “race,” a term that emerged from Andalusia in the Middle Ages through a transformation of the word “raza,” which, ironically, referred to Jews and Moors. If Jewishness could be made exclusively religious, then the bearer of the religion could be racially otherwise. Thus, those light-skinned enough to be accepted as white received membership into whiteness by appealing to their religious identity as separate. This was not a good development for Jews who could not “pass” as white, however, and its impact on Jewish history is palpable as a once majority population of color quickly disappeared in proverbial plain sight. 189

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There are many negative consequences of Jewish whiteness. The first is that it led to a rewriting of Jewish history to match the expectations of Euromodernity. I define “modernity” here as the value of belonging to the future. As such, it legitimates a people’s present and rewrites their past. Thus, if the future of Jewishness is whiteness, then authentic Jews of the present become white, which makes the Jewish story a retroactively affected one of whiteness as a condition of appearance. This was catastrophic for other Jews, because since they supposedly did not legitimately belong to the future, their present was delegitimated and their past erased. This led to an additional false thesis— namely, that non-white Jews must have somehow come to Judaism. Since whiteness afforded Euromodern Judaism’s legitimacy, this meant that those other people could only enter Euromodernity and then become Jews by other means. The standard position is Christianity. If Africans enter Euromodernity through colonization and enslavement, the presumption is that happens through their having first become Christian. Thus, to stand as an Afro-Jew is, by many white Jews, presumed erroneously to do so as a prior Christian. The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be “converts” in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that. “Antisemitism” is thus, for many white Jews, an attractive formulation of hatred of Jews since it disassociates Jews from the dreaded designation of being a race, because, as nearly anyone who has experienced racism would admit—like “gender” with regard to “feminine”—“race” is a term that for the most part signifies being of color. As this discussion is short, I won’t get into the details of why “antisemitism” is a concept saturated with bad faith. I will just state this: Most people who hate Jews are not thinking about religion. They see Jews, even if white, as never white enough. They ascribe, in what existentialists call the spirit of seriousness—the materialization of values—that Jewishness is in the flesh and soul of Jews. There is thus the error of avowedly white Jews rallying for religious freedom in the face of a foe that sees them as a racial threat. They want to defend “us Jews” in the practice of our religion while imagining “us whites” in their daily social lives. If we concede antisemitism as a form of racism, the story is different. As mixed-race people could be hated for both sides of their mixture (think of an Afro-Asian receiving antiblack racism and anti-Asian racism, or Arabs who could be hated as an ethnicity or “race” despite their morphological diversity), the Afro-Jew may ask if both are at work if she or he focuses on racial oppression. These reflections become complicated when we reflect on the passage into whiteness of many Euro-Jews. The story is, after all, a colonial one, and that precious whiteness is indebted to colonialism, enslavement, and racism. Thus, Euro-Jewish investment in whiteness ensnares them in a defense of colonialism, enslavement, and racism. As liberation discourses are patently anti-colonial, anti-enslavement, and anti-racist, this places Jewish whiteness in a logical collision with liberation and struggles for freedom.

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This reactionary position is not, of course, the only historical Jewish story. On the one hand, Jews were so associated with the formation of liberalism that even Karl Marx, a grandson of a Rabbi, saw it fitting to address European Jewish values as ideologically linked to Euromodern liberal capitalism in “On the Jewish Question.” In recent times, the lure of whiteness produced politically neoconservative Jews who moved to the right of liberalism in a desperate embrace of whiteness to the point of, unfortunately, allying in recent times with White supremacist Christians and even, as we see in the United States, politicians supported by neo-Nazi and other fascist groups.

Rejecting Idols, Embracing Ethical Life To the left of all this are many secular Jews, and among Jews who practice Judaism, the complicated matter of religion offers a unique convergence of their Jewish political identity among those in and out of the white umbrella. I cannot here, because of limited space, spell out the many kinds of Jews who live their faith, ethnic, and racial identities outside of whiteness. As I do that elsewhere, I would here simply like to state this: Many Jews of color who are also Jews of faith do not live their lives worried about what white Jews think of them. They are simply people of faith practicing the varieties of Judaism they know. There is, however, a common question posed to all Jews that come to the fore on the question of liberation, and that is its relation, specifically, to Jewish ethics. To illustrate my point, consider the famed early Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists. They are often misunderstood today because of how they are studied by Christian theorists who presume the grammar of a secularized Christian framework. The idea of a critical philosophy, originally formulated by Immanuel Kant as transcendental idealism, was a formal, secularized Protestantism. The transcendental movement through Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel kept the Protestant eschatological elements. In Marx, however, the problem of idolatry was posed as a problem of ideological critique and a rejection of fetishism. Sigmund Freud took these concerns to the inner reaches of consciousness and even the unconscious elements of mind. Adding Edmund Husserl’s effort to explore the critical conditions of consciousness without ontological reductionism, we have three Jewish thinkers (although the first was from a family who converted to Christianity and the third did so on his own) posing what to some seemed the irreconcilable objectives of the material world, unconscious forces, and the social world in which reality becomes meaningfully conscious. Yet the early group of Frankfurt School thinkers—for example, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, all Jewish and committed secularists— took on the task of not only bringing these thinkers together (especially Marx and Freud), but also to do so without collapsing into idolatry, that is, making their intellectual heroes, societal norms, and economic systems into gods. (I regard the post-WWII Frankfurt School, whose main exemplar is Jürgen Habermas, to be a reclamation of

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secularized Protestant Christian thought.) Adorno expressed this Jewish anti-idolatry position well in the concept of negative dialectics and negative theology. This rejection of idolatry is also the basis of a uniquely Jewish position on theodicy. Christian theology poses a deity who must be cleansed of contradictions. Judaism, alternatively, poses a deity who must not be named, constrained, reduced—in short, offered as an image. This is a crucial element for Jewish ethics, since it in effect explains “election” (in Hebrew, bhira) and the significance of striving for kashrut (kosher living) according to Halakhah (“the way,” or Jewish law). Many Christians are surprised, even shocked, when they learn that Jews do not need to embrace G-d as an ontological being or entity. An activist philosopher and social worker friend of mine once put it this way: “I don’t go to shul [synagogue] because I believe in G-d.” This mysterious explanation makes sense for Jews who understand that election or to be chosen does not mean to be better than others. It means to face the fear and trembling of radical ethical responsibility. I add “radical” because the responsibility is for more than specific commandments (mitzvot). Its radicality rests on taking responsibility for responsibility. In Judaism, this means responsibility for the image of G-d on earth, which, as the argument goes, is not an “image” proper, since that would be idolatrous. It is a responsibility, and it is so often in the form of a terrible, burdensome calling. Through the act of carrying the Torah (direction, instruction, teachings) when becoming a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah (daughter or son of the commandments), the honored is also taking on the weight or burden in one reading of ethical life. The seeming conundrum of non-ontological Jewishness is resolved thus. There are Jews who regard G-d as a just being. No Jew, however, should accept the idea of G-d solely as a being. Justice, broadly conceived (because the Hebrew word Tzedek includes but is not reduced exclusively to justice), is the crucial element. Thus, since neither the religious nor the secular Jew would reject the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical face of the universe, my friend’s remark on believing in G-d makes sense. She refuses to be idolatrous, and she insists on the importance of ethical life marked also by righteous action. That friend’s remark was to offer a critique of synagogues that have subordinated Jewish ethical responsibility for responsibility through subordinating it to the fetish of such things as a Jewish state. I should like to add that that friend does not reject the existence of Israel. She is critical of its policies against many of its policies. Fetishizing antisemitism at the expense of fighting against oppression endangers Jewish ethical life. This leads to a form of idolatrous relationship to Jewish people read through Judaism and, as a consequence, places Jews in an antagonistic relationship to liberation struggles against colonization, enslavement, and racism. Where Jewish people become the enemy of liberation, Judaism, from this point of view, is lost. Though I have posed these reflections in terms of white Jews versus Afro-Jews and other Jews of color, there is the reality of ideological critique where beneath white Jews is the paradoxical darkness offering ethical life. There are designated white Jews who make decisions to shed the unethical garbs of white investments in anti-liberation. This reflection from an Ashkenazi mother on her son from her union with an Afro-SephardicMizrahi father concludes these reflections: 192

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. . . there is a general lesson that more fully entering a black world through marriage and parenting has taught me: one must live as if values and virtues and excelling and being a person of integrity matter, for that is what it is to live a human life.

Note * This revised, English version of the author’s “Pourquoi les juifs ne doivent pas redouter la libération,” Tumultes numéro 50 (2018): 97–108, appears here with the permission of Tumultes.

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CHAPTER 17 LEWIS GORDON’S STATEMENT FOR JACQUELINE WALKER’S DOSSIER, 2018

To: Regarding:

The Hearing Committee: Jacqueline Walker

12 August 2018

I write in support of Jacqueline Walker’s petition against suspension for her public statements on the historical reality of multiple acts of genocide against varieties of people in addition to those waged specifically against the Jewish people, of which I am a member. As I understand it, Walker is being condemned for using the word “holocaust” as a connecting term across these events and for her condemnation of white Jewish racism against other groups, specifically people of African descent. She is accused of antisemitism for making these statements despite her being of both African and Jewish descent and the important role of both in her personal life. I am aware that there are Jews who have been accused of antisemitism because of their position not only on the Republic of Israel but also their fellow Jewish people. I write this letter, in other words, not from a position that it is impossible for there to be antisemitic Jews and, indeed, antisemitic people from all walks of life. My conclusion of the error of this accusation with regard to Jacqueline Walker is not based on her identity. It is based on the facts of which she speaks. The Committee may wish to know the relevance of my expertise in this area of concern. I am a professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs in the United States. I previously taught at Temple University, where I founded the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies in the mid-2000s. My academic appointments over the years have included serving on the faculty of Brown University, Purdue University, the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, Rhodes University in South Africa, and the University of Toulouse in France. I am also a member of Be’chol Lashon (Hebrew for “In Every Tongue”), a research and community outreach initiative of diverse Jews linked to the Institute for Jewish Research in San Francisco, California. My other Jewish affiliations are many, as I am the child of a Jewish woman of Irish Sephardic and Palestinian (because of migration from Jerusalem in the nineteenth century) Mizrahi descent. I am active in Chaverim (organized Jewish volunteer groups) and synagogues across the globe because of my commitment to the diversity of the global Jewish world. I have written books and articles in many fields, and those specifically on Jewish issues are available in English and French. The word “holocaust” is from Old French “holocauste,” which refers to sacrifice by fire or burnt offering. It is a transformation from the Late Latin “holocaustum,” which was in turn from the Greek “holokauston” (“burnt whole”). It is from “holos” (“whole”) and “kaustos” (in the infinitive kaiein—“to burn”). By the seventeenth century, it acquired

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the meaning of massacre or destruction of a large population of people. Since World War II, it has become metonymic for the Nazi genocidal efforts against European Jews, although the policies of the Nazis targeted a population of more than 30 million people of which Jews were a part with a catastrophic number of 6 million massacred. It is catastrophic not only in itself because of the horror wrought on that population but also in proportional terms because of the people already being a numerical minority. There was an estimated 9 million Jews in Europe prior to the war, which makes those events a devastation of two-thirds of the population. Given such proportions, no European group in Europe could attest to the same loss. Among Jews, this catastrophe was and is still known in Hebrew as Shoah. The total number of Jews in the world before the Shoah in Germany depends much on how Jews are defined. This is in part the controversy. The details in this short statement cannot be addressed. Those unaware of Jewish history do not know distinctions between Rabbinic Judaism and Priestly Judaism, Second Temple Judaism and First Temple Judeanism, the histories of migration and conversion (of which, for instance, nearly 8 million people in the Ancient Roman Empire became Jews by the second century ACE), and much more. Many do not also know the history of racialization in Iberia and how Jews and Afro-Muslims were human targets of this designation. As well, many avowed experts of Jewish history write about Jews without attention to processes of colonialism, imperialism, racialization, and secularization, all of which affect how Jews emerge in some places, become invisible in others, and, worse, disappear. Many demographers estimate the total number of Jews before Shoah as about 19 million. This figure does not account for Jews across Africa, Asia, and South America, and it ignores the complicated history of people connected to First Temple communities across these continents. The number of secular people outside of the European context is also often overlooked. Today, there are Jewish demographers and historians attempting to rectify these misunderstandings. I should also like to stress that I argue that hatred of Jews is a form of racism. Although “antisemitism” is the preferred term among Ashkenazi groups, one difficulty is that its history followed a path from a variety of peoples being racialized from a term about a catalog of languages into a designation referring primarily to Jewish people, including those who neither speak a Semitic language nor have any inherited connection to the historic peoples of North and East Africa and West Asia who spoke those languages. Finally, although some people link antisemitism to anti-Judaism, I am critical of this view since most people who hate Jews know nothing of Jewish religion. They project onto Jewish people a Jewish essence. It is the projection that historically barred Jewish people from whiteness, regardless of morphology or de facto light complexion. When I mentioned this recently in a public lecture in London, many of the Jewish people in the audience who were morphologically “white”—especially among the elderly—practically exhaled from relief at this admission. They know they’re objects of racial hatred. Returning to the term “holocaust,” non-Jewish peoples also use that word. The Native American demographer Russell Thornton entitled his 1990 study of genocide in the Americas Native American Holocaust and Survival. He uses the term holocaust because of the 96 percent decline of the population, from direct slaughter to the slow but sure 196

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forces of poverty and disease, by 1900. One difficulty here is that many nations comprise Native Americans. This is a similar issue for Indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. What needs to be understood here is that there were specific nations of people who were literally wiped out. This practice of decimating Indigenous peoples is one of the key features of the transformed global practices of conquest, colonization, and enslavement since the fifteenth century. Germany’s first concentration/death camps were built in the then German colony of Southwest Africa, which is today Namibia. This order was implemented between 1904 and 1908 under the leadership of the German general Lothar von Trotha, during which four-fifths of the Herero and half of the Nama people were exterminated. The Germans were not, as Belgium’s and Britain’s histories on the continent reveal, an exception to this rule. This is why the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire described the events in Europe from the 1930s to 1945 that of Europeans turning their values toward non-Europeans onto themselves. The past 500 years could be described as a structural adjustment policy premised on profit and genocide. In addition to “genocide” and “holocaust,” many groups have used descriptions from their own languages, just as Jews chose the Hebrew word “Shoah” (‫)שואה‬, also spelled “Sho’ah,” which means “calamity” and “destruction,” it is important to bear in mind that most Jews during this period did not speak or read Hebrew, except for liturgical purposes among the religious, but instead the local languages of where they lived. It is European Jewish activism since the nineteenth century that developed the hegemonic understanding of Jewishness today, but there was no consensus even among those Jews. As well, there is nothing unusual about the use of terms in one language to communicate the experiences of people from another language and cultural experience. The word “synagogue” for instance is simply from the Greek “sinagoge,” which means place of assembly. What is clear is that by the time of its use in Late Latin and then transformation in French, it became a term associated specifically with a place of Jewish worship, although it used to refer also to mosques and pagan temples. I mention this simply to say that other groups harmed by European genocidal efforts use the word “holocaust” to communicate the severity of their plight. It’s not to degrade or deny the clear catastrophe unleashed against Jewish people in Europe but instead to communicate to Europeans/whites the gravity of their situation. It is unfortunate that Jacqueline Walker’s Jewish identity is called into question. There are many kinds of Jews and many kinds of people of African descent. The two are not incompatible. In Rabbinic Judaism, one is Jewish automatically through one’s mother. Among Reform Jews, one’s father is sufficient, and it helps to have become a Bat or Bar Mitzvah. For anti-Semites—as, for instance, the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany— having at least two Jewish grandparents or, in some instances, just one would suffice. Bear in mind that the 14 November 1935 Nuremberg law added a prohibition against Germans mixing with Roma and blacks. Additionally, a person with one Jewish grandparent in Nazi Germany was a “Mischling” (roughly, “mixed race”), a term that was also applied to children who had a black grandparent. With regard to African descent, many are already familiar with the array of fractioned markers ranging from everyone being so because of the origins of our species to those premised on constructions of “Negroes” and “blacks,” i see no point 197

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in details here. Jacqueline Walker is publicly a person of mixed background of parents and grandparents identifying as African-descended and Jewish descent. The fact is simple in European terms: either sides of her family would have been condemned to concentration camps in Germany in WWII. More recently, the fascist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, consisted of individuals whose hatred of African-descended and peoples of Jewish descent was clear. Their chants, we should remember, included “Jews will not replace us!” An unfortunate issue to consider is that the identities of any racial, ethnic, or religious group is often governed by members of their community who live in the empires of the day. In Jewish history, this meant there were periods of Greek Jews followed by Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, Spaniards, German (especially when Germans dominated the academic world), French, British, and now American Jews and allies of the United States dominating discourses on Jewish identity. A similar story is there with blacks, at least since that identity emerged after the fifteenth century, which is why today African Americans dominate so much of black identity, even though most black people in the world are not U.S. blacks. Made plain: the people of each country think their Jews and blacks are the Jews and the blacks. Each of these countries and their periods of historical prominence brought along their prejudices and, at least since the emergence of racism, racist beliefs. In the United States, this meant that groups who were not white elsewhere transitioned into whiteness so long as they participated in the exclusion of suspect groups. We should remember that countries such as Australia, Germany, and South Africa in fact drew inspiration from the United States for the formulation and implementation of their racist practices. Unfortunately members of minority groups in these countries sometimes invest in this process, which lead to historical splits in their communities. In the case of Jews, there are some who not only invest in whiteness but also antiblack racism and, as we have seen recently, even forms of American fascism. Likewise, there are non-Jewish blacks who invest in the idea that the culprit behind their exploitation is a conspiracy of Jews (whom they presume are all white). There are Jews across the world fighting against this terrible development, just as there are people of African descent fighting against hatred of Jews. I regard Jacqueline Walker as an artist and political figure fighting against both these social afflictions: investments in white Jewishness against all other groups and efforts against Jewish people through constructing us as exclusively white and powerful. I am aware of the lack of nuance in contentious issues of these kinds and the resistance they cultivate against people who embody the meeting of denied histories. People are, however, always more complicated than many would like, and the responsibility of politicians—when they take political and ethical responsibility—is to address the reality of people’s lives. I regard that as what Jacqueline Walker has been trying to do not only in her professional and public life as a politician and citizen but also in her personal life as a human being. If there is anything I can add to this document, please do not hesitate to contact me. Sincerely, Lewis R. Gordon 198

CHAPTER 18 SHIFTING THE GEOGRAPHY OF REASON IN AN AGE OF DISCIPLINARY DECADENCE

This essay addresses some recent theoretical developments that are laying an important role in the decolonization of knowledge. That knowledge has been colonized raises the question of whether it was ever free. The formulation of knowledge in the singular already situates the question in a framework that is alien to precolonial times, for the disparate modes of producing knowledge and notions of knowledge were so many that knowledges would be a more appropriate designation. Unification was a function of various stages of imperial realignment, where local reflections shifted their attention to centers elsewhere to the point of concentric collapse. On their way, those varieties of knowledge coalesced into knowledge of the center, and successive collapses of centers under the weight of other centers led, over time, to the global situation of the center and its concomitant organization of knowledges into knowledge. This path has not, however, been one exclusively built upon alienation, for along with the strange and the alien were also the familiar and the, at times, welcomed. Enrique Dussel is a member of a community of scholars who have questioned the logic of self reflection offered by the most recent stage of centered productions of knowledge.1 The philosophical framework of such rationalization is familiar to most students of Western philosophy: René Descartes reflected on method in the seventeenth century, grew doubtful, and articulated the certainty of his thinking self in opposition to the fleeting world of physical appearance. A result of such intellectual labor is a shift of first questions from meditations on what there is to what can be known. This focus on epistemology as first philosophy charted the course of philosophy in modern terms against and with which contemporary philosophers continue to struggle and grapple. For political thinkers, the new beginning is a little earlier, in the late fifteenth- through early sixteenth-century reflections on politics by Niccolò Machiavelli. Against these intellectualist formulations of modern life, Dussel raises the question of its underside, of the geopolitical, material impositions and the unnamed millions whose centers collapsed not simply from the force of ideas but sword and musket. That modernity was ironically also identified by Machiavelli but often overlooked through how he is read today: in The Prince, Machiavelli wrote of the effects of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s victory over the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula.2 His focus on the repression wrought in the name of Christendom presumed, however, the continued significance of the Mediterranean in the commerce of worldconstituting activity. Dussel’s work argues that the continued conflict spread westward across the Atlantic Ocean, and by October of that year, 1492, a series of new relations were established with a New World that de-centered the Mediterranean, stimulated a new economy and, with it, an organization of its management (new epistemologies), and

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realign the western peninsula of Asia into a new political territory in the form of a continent, namely, Europe. Prior to the emergence of Europe, there were maps of the Mediterranean that would have to be turned upside down to be familiar to contemporary travelers, for, as was the case with ancient organizations of locations of regions that included northeast Africa, whose most known civilization was Egypt, “upper” pointed south, and “lower” northward.3 One, in other words, traveled up to what became known as Africa and down to what became known as Europe. The birth of new centers produced new geopolitical relations, and as focus on the New World eclipsed the effort to establish trade with southwest and middle Asia, the bourgeoning economies affected the cultural life as well. In the production of cultural considerations also emerged those of new forms of life. A transition followed from Jews, Christians, and Muslims to Europeans, Asians, Africans, and New World peoples forced into some variation of the last as Indians or “red savages” at first along old Aristotelian categories of developed versus undeveloped “men.” This movement, negotiated through conquest, disputations, and enslavement, brought to the fore reflections of “man” on “man,” with constant anxiety over the stability of such a category. In such study, the process of discovery, of uncovering, also became one of invention and production: The search to understand “man” was also producing him. Its destabilization was inevitable as his possibilities called his exclusion of “her” into question. The concomitant reorganization of understanding him and her is oddly a schema that befits the dominating knowledge scheme of the epoch: Science. The word “science,” although also meaning knowledge, reveals much in its etymology. It is a transformation of the Latin infinitive scire (“to know”), which, let us now add, suggests a connection to the verb scindere (“to divide”—think, today of “schism”), which, like many Latin words, also shares origins with ancient Greek words, which, in this case would be skhizein (to split, to cleave). Oddly enough, this exercise in etymology is indication of a dimension of epistemological colonization. Most etymological exercises report a history of words as though language itself is rooted in Greco-Roman classicism. The tendency is to find the sources of meaning from either the European side of the Mediterranean or from the north. There is an occasional stop off in Western Asia, but for the most part, the history of important terms suggest a geographical movement that is oddly similar to the movement of Geist in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History.4 Some further inquiry reveals, however, the relationship of the Latin and Greek words to a more ancient, Egyptian words Crethi and kotket by way of the Hebrew Crethi, which was derived from the root carath, which means to cut. The word Crethi referred to the ancient Egyptian royal armies, which were split into two classes.5 We thus see here a transition from one form of ancient center to various others on a course to modern times. Oddly enough, there is an etymological link during the Latin transition with another Latin infinitive, secare (which also means to cut), through which is more transparently connected to the Hebrew carath (if one imagines ’cara’ as a possible spoken form). Secare is the source of the English word sex. A link between science and sex brings biology to the fore and the question of life sciences. Such a consideration indicates the importance life reflections on the unfolding developing of systematic inquiry: As the question of G-d motivated theological reflections and metaphysical inquiry, so, too, did 200

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concerns over the generation of life initiate scientific inquiry, although life was loaded with metaphysical content as anxieties and fear over the salvation of the soul without the theological guarantees attest to this day.6 The subsequent unfolding story is familiar to most of us who study colonization. Along with the expansion of Christian kingdoms into nation-states and their colonies which resulted over the course of a few hundred years into European civilization on a global scale was also a series of epistemological developments that have literally produced new forms of life: new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups of them occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship.7 They belong to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong. These people have been aptly described by W.E.B. Du Bois as “problems.”8 They are a function of a world in which they are posited as illegitimate although they could exist nowhere else. I am speaking here primarily of blacks and Indians/Native Americans, and by blacks I also mean to include Australian Aboriginals and related groups in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Such people are treated by dominant organizations of knowledge as problems instead of people who face problems. Their problem status is a function of the presupposed legitimacy of the systems that generate them. In effect, being perfect, the systems resist blame for any injustice or contradiction that may be avowed by such people. They become extraneous to its functions in spite of having already been generated by such functions. The contradictory nature of such assessments distorts the process of reasoning and the production of knowledge into doubled structures of disavowals and concealment, at times even with claims of transparency, and more problem people result. A consequence of such reflection is the proliferation of more kinds of problem people. Since 2001, when the War on Terror was inaugurated, the production of such people has increased. At this point, I should like to make some distinctions that may anchor some of the abstract terms of this discussion. That modes of producing knowledge can be enlisted in the service of colonization is evident. Frantz Fanon, for instance, reflected, in Black Skin, White Masks, that methods have a way of devouring themselves.9 In doing so, he brought into focus the problem of evaluating method itself, of assessing methodology. If the epistemic conditions of social life are colonized, would not that infection reach also the grammatical level as well? Put differently, couldn’t there also be colonization at the methodological level? If so, then, any presumed method, especially from a subject living within a colonized framework, could generate continued colonization. To evaluate method, the best “method” is the suspension of method. This paradox leads to a demand for radical anti-colonial critique. But for such a reflection to be radical, it must also make even logic itself suspect. Such a demand leads to a distinction between rationality and reason. The former cannot suspend logic, for to be what it is, it must, at minimum, demand consistency. The demand for consistency eventually collapses into maximum consistency, in order to be consistent. In effect, this means that rationality must presume its method, and it must resist straining from its generating grammar. Reason, however, offers a different story. To be maximally consistent, although logically commendable, is not always reasonable. Reasonability can embrace contradictions. Even more, it must be able to do so in order to evaluate even itself. This means that the scope of reason exceeds rationality. 201

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Science, we should remember, is more at home with rationality than it is with reason. Departure from consistency-maximization would disintegrate an important foundation of modern science, namely, the notion of a law of nature. A law in this sense cannot have exceptions. Since reason at times demands exceptions, a marriage between science and reason would be short lived. The project of much of modern European philosophical thought, however, has been the effort to cultivate such a marriage. Toward such a goal, the instruments of rationality are often unleashed with the result of the effort to yoke reason to rationality. This effort could be reformulated as the effort to colonize reason. The effort to colonize reason has had many productive consequences. Many disciplines have been generated by this effort. On one hand, there are the natural and exact theoretical sciences. On the other, there are the human sciences. The former set seems to behave in a more disciplined way than the latter. Although disciplining the latter has resulted in a variety of disciplines, the underlying goal of maximum rationalization has been consistently strained. The source of such difficulty, reality, has been unremitting. Karl Jaspers, in Philosophy of Existence, summarized the circumstance well: reality is bigger than we are.10 Any discipline or generated system for the organization of reality faces the problem of having to exceed the scope of its object of inquiry, but since it, too, must be part of that object (if it is to be something as grand as reality), it must contain itself in a logical relationship to all it is trying to contain, which expands the initial problem of inclusion. There is, in other words, always more to and of reality. Failure to appreciate reality sometimes takes the form of recoiling from it. An inward path of disciplinary solitude eventually leads to what I call disciplinary decadence.11 This is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages reality and recognizes its own limitations, to a deontologized or absolute conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic fashion, the world. And in that world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations, or, as Frantz Fanon argued, (self-devouring) methods.12Becoming “right” is simply a matter of applying the method correctly. This is a form of decadence because of the set of considerations that fall to the wayside as the discipline turns into itself and eventually implodes. Decay, although a natural process over the course of time for living things, takes on a paradoxical quality in their creations. A discipline, e.g., could be in decay through a failure to realize that decay is possible. Like empires, the presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose. In more concrete terms, disciplinary decadence takes the form of one discipline assessing all other disciplines from its supposedly complete standpoint. It is the literary scholar who criticizes work in other disciplines as not literary. It is the sociologist who rejects other disciplines as not sociological. It is the historian who asserts history as the foundation of everything. It is the natural scientist who criticizes the others for not being scientific. And it is also the philosopher who rejects all for not being properly philosophical. Discipline envy is also a form of disciplinary decadence. It is striking, for instance, how many disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences are now engaged in intellectual history with a focus on the Western philosophical canon. And then there is decadence at methodological levels. Textualism, for example, infects historiography at the level of 202

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written or documentation, where the expectation of everything being contained in the text becomes evident in work in the human sciences that announce studying its subject through an analysis premised exclusively on texts on the subject. There are scholars in race theory, e.g., who seem to think that theorizing the subject is a matter of determining what has been said on it by a small set of canonical texts. When appearance is reduced to textual appearance, what, then, happens to inquiry? What are positivism and certain forms of semiological imitation of mathematical phenomena but science envy? When biologism, sociologism, psychologism, and many others assert themselves, to what, ultimately, are they referring? In the human sciences, the problem becomes particularly acute in the study of problem people. Such people misbehave also in disciplinary terms. The failure to squeeze them into disciplinary dictates, from a disciplinarily decadent perspective, is proof of a problem with the people instead of the discipline. It serves as further “proof ” of the pathological nature of such people. One would expect an appeal to interdisciplinarity to be a viable response to disciplinary decadence. Its inadequacy rests, however, in its decadent structure. If each discipline is presumed complete or “whole,” then each would be disciplinarily decadent. Interdisciplinarity in this case would be each decadent discioline working alongside one another. A better approach would be transdisciplinarity, where disciplines work through one another; yet although more promising, such a route is still susceptible to decadence so long as it fails to bring reality into focus. But doing that raises questions of purpose. It raises considerations that may need to be addressed in spite of disciplinary dictates. I call this process a teleological suspension of disciplinarity. By that, I mean the willingness to go beyond disciplines in the production of knowledge. This “beyond” is, however, paradoxical. In some instances, it revitalizes an existing discipline. In others, it generates a new one. For example, a teleological suspension of philosophy generates new philosophy in some instances, and in others, it may generate new social thought that may not be philosophical. A teleological suspension of topology, chemistry, and biology could offer much to genetics and other sequencing notions of life. Epistemic decolonial actions require teleological suspensions of disciplines. A subtext of the argument I have offered is an Africana philosophical approach to decolonial critique. Africana philosophy addresses four questions raised by the emergence of Euromodern colonialism and its effect on Africana peoples: (1) what does it mean to be human? (2) What does it mean to be liberated and free? (3) Is justification any longer justifiable when resources of knowledge and reason have been rallied against the humanity of Africana peoples? And (4), is redemption a complicit and misguided concept in the wake of Euromodern practices of colonization and coloniality? These questions emerge from the misrepresentations of reality required to dehumanize, colonize, and enslave a people and the forms of rationalizations involved in claiming these set of historical events are supposedly justified. In short, all the carnage and suffering were, collqually speaking, worth it. I won’t elaborate these arguments here, as I have already done so in book-length studies. Instead, I should like to add the following. The first is addresses the political importance of this critique. Politics requires discursive opposition. That involves communicative possibilities that rely on the 203

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suspension of coercion and exigency. Repressive forces held at bay, a new kind of appearance—citizenship—appears; indeed, that is another way of looking at what it means to be political: to facilitate emergence, appearnce, and other modes of social existence. Colonization attempts the erasure of these possibilities for the dominated groups. It limits speech (fundamental to political life) and other conditions of livable social life. Despite speaking among one another, colonized groups’ efforts fall on proverbial deaf ears when appealing to colonial institutions of power. As the most expressive part of the body is the face, the effect is the production of faceless peoples. This destroys dialectics of recognition and communication, wherein selves and others could emerge. A new kind—nonselves and nonothers—follow. What is the point of making ethical appeals when the conditions of ethics—relationships with others—have been undermined? The challenge then becomes to build conditions for the possibilities of ethical and political life. The list of first philosophies from epistemology to ethics are questionable. They face their teleological suspensions, especially where they affirm colonial destruction of human relationality. A critic may object on the grounds of ethics as a necessary for the recognition of the Other, but the challenge posed here is that blacks and Indigenous peoples are often forced outside of the Self-Other relationship. As not even the Other, where do they stand in relation to ethics? Isn’t it obvious that ethics, in and of itself, is insufficient to address this problem? Doesn’t this problem reveal the need for political conditions, of building options, for the possibility of ethical life, which means there is an additional obligation—namely, that of political life? And doesn’t this consideration pose a problem to liberal hegemony, which demands the supervenience of ethics over politics, in the Euromodern world? What is the conclusion here but for the political centrality of projects of liberation? The second addresses the imperial significance of standards. In philosophical anthropology, for example, problems arise whenever attempts to demonstrate a group’s humanity is premised on comparing its members to the hegemonic group that makes the comparison. It has the consequence of making one group the standard of another. In effect, one group seeks justification while the other is self-justified. The demonstration itself must be teleologically suspended. Shifting the geography of reason means, as we take seriously the South-South dialogue, that the work to be done becomes one that raises the question of whose future we face. Third, at least at the epistemological level, every empire has a geopolitical impact by pushing things to its center. In the past, the range of empires was not global. Today, because global, we face the question of the traces they leave when they have dissolved. In the past, empires constructed civilizations that lasted thousands of years. Today, time is imploding under the weight of rapid and excessive consumption (with the bulk of natural resources being consumed in North America and increases on the horizon in Asia), and we must now struggle through a complex understanding of decay and the dissolution of empires. As with all empires, the consciousness from within continues to be susceptible to an inflated sense of importance, where the end of empire is feared as the end of the world. Fourth, subjects of dehumanizing social institutions suffer a neurotic situation of being constituted by predetermined loss of being shackled to their past, whether real or 204

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imaginary. Their struggle for liberation and freedom appear suicidal at a metaphysical level, since there would be nowhere and nowhen in which, by virtue of their identity, they would belong. Fifth, decolonial activity imposes the challenge of loss upon everyone. Recall, I call this the Moses problem. As related in Exodus, Moses led the former enslaved Hebrews (and members of other groups who joined them) to the Promised Land, but he was not permitted to enter. Commentary, at least at Passover Seders, explain that Moses’ sense of power (and ego) got in the way, and he presented his might as a source of their liberation (instead of G-d). There is much that we who reflect upon decolonization, those of us who seek liberation, can learn from the mythic life of ancient people. Fanon paid attention to this message when he wrote the longest chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, namely, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.”13 The message is this: Those who are best suited for the transition from colonization/enslavement to the stage of initial liberty are not necessarily the best people for the next, more difficult stage: Living the practice of freedom. It is no accident that instead of the end of colonization, new forms of colonization emerge. The movements, in other words, are as follows: from initial freedom to bondage/ colonization, to decolonization/initial liberation, to neocolonization, to internal opposition, to postcolonization/concrete manifestations of freedom. What this means is that the more difficult, especially in political and ethical terms, conflict becomes the one to wage against former liberators. Like Moses, they must step aside so other generations could build their freedom. We see here the sacrificial irony of all commitments to liberation: as practices for others. And sixth, but not final, there is the problem of postcolonial leadership and ruling groups in many majority-black postolonies. This leadership, whose moral evocations led the process of decolonization, continue to formulate capital in moral terms. Theirs is a supposedly moral leadership. Yet, what the poor and dispossesd need is not pity for their suffering; they need creative, organic responses to their conditions marked by courage to face contradictions and the determination to build institutions whose impact would exemplify nothing short of much sought wisdom.

Notes 1. See, e.g., Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). This community of scholars includes Linda Martín Alcoff, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta, and Walter Mignolo, works by all of whom, among others, I discuss in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 2. See, e.g., Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76. 3. E.g., see, Liz Sonneborn’s discussion of the Medieval Islamic empires in the first two chapters of Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Muslim Scholar, Philosopher, and Physician of the Twelfth Century (New York: The Rosen Publishing Company, 2005).

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Works Cited The Academy of St. Louis. 1860. Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis. Vol. 1, 1856–1860. St. Louis. MO : George Knapp and Company. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. Dussel, Enrique. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Humanities. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. ——. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press. Gordon, Lewis R. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge. ——. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. ——. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2007. “Not Always Enslaved, Yet Not Quite Free: Philosophical Challenges from the Underside of the New World.” Philosophia 36.2: 151–66. ——. 2007. “When I was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night.” Performance Research 2, no. 3: 8–15. Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures in the Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Jaspers, Karl. 1971. Philosophy of Existence. Trans. Richard R. Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Shifting the Geography of Reason Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2005. The Prince. Trans. Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sonneborn, Liz. 2005. Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Muslim Scholar, Philosopher, and Physician of the Twelfth Century. New York: The Rosen Publishing Company.

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The project of decolonizing philosophy depends on what it means for philosophy to be colonized. Philosophy, after all, is a discipline that, at least in principle, offers itself as a testament to freedom. What could a celebration of thinking and reasoning be if doing so were shackled? Constraints on philosophy, however, could take many forms, some of which are also paradoxical. For example, knowledge, a philosopher could argue, should be free, but already implicit in such a declaration is epistemology or the theory of knowledge at the center of the philosophical enterprise. If philosophy is more than the pursuit of knowledge, then the advancement of knowledge over the practice of philosophy could be a subordination of philosophy to one of its subfields. Other such concerns abound where philosophy is held subordinate to various ways of understanding what the pursuit or love of proverbial wisdom may be. There are, however, very specific ways in which avowed colonization of philosophy could be understood beyond the formal statement of disciplinary subordination. First, there is the historical rise of a particular cultural group as the self-avowed sole progenitor of philosophical practice. This hegemonic declaration accompanied historical forces such as the spread of Euromodern colonialism from the fifteenth century onward. In its rise followed a biconditional presupposition of Europe as a cause and also an effect of philosophy—that is, philosophy “must” be European or, in another formulation, “Western.” Second, there is a shift to the set of norms through which colonialism is supported. This is what decolonial theorists call coloniality. Within this system of norms is the presupposition of philosophy as ultimately a discipline in the service of colonial orders of knowledge. Third, there is an extension of the second in varieties of theodicean systems in which “the market” is among them. Philosophy in this sense is colonized as a commodity of the academic market place. Fourth, there is another sense of colonization in which philosophy falls prey to a logic or grammar in which it shackles itself. We could call that philosophy as a form of disciplinary decadence. Fifth, there is philosophy not only as self-shackling but also self-defeating through presuppositions of purity that collapse it into itself. We could also call this, as an extension of the fourth, philosophical solipsism. Each of these models has its decolonizing or decolonial antidotes. As the initial claims could be paradoxical, however, so, too, could be the cures. Philosophy, after all, has offered itself as a cure for bad thinking for more than 4,000 years. Could its fate be jeopardized by those offered as its salvation? 209

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Not Only European The fallacy is familiar to the point of invisibility in its practice. The use of a term from European language is often confused with the concept and its origin. Imagine someone arguing that chairs are and were invented in Europe because of the English word “chair.” One could point out its etymology through the Old French word chaiere, which had in turn evolved from the Latin cathedra (seat). As there were languages older than English, French, or Latin, one wonders whether the thing called chair waited for the oldest of those languages to come into being. As the much older Mdw Ntr (language of ancient peoples of Kmt and Nubia) had such objects that they called pHDw and Htmt (and more formally st and nst—e.g., “throne”), the error in reasoning should be evident. Yet, this is what often occurs in the discussion of philosophy. The conjunction of Greek words philo (loving) and sophia (wisdom), the claim is that philosophy’s origins are in ancient Greece, and thus its legacy becomes not only Greek but European, despite most Europeans not being or ever having been Greek. “Ancient Greeks,” for instance, is a construction that gained much currency in the French and German Enlightenment to refer to ancient Greek-speaking peoples of the Mediterranean. Those people included northern Africans, western Asians, and southern peoples of what later became known as Europe. As the presumption is that the earliest practice of philosophy was among the ancient peoples of Miletus (today in western Turkey) and Athens, the term acquired a near sacred association with the ancient citystates of Greek-speaking peoples, a group of whom referred to themselves as Hellenic. Understanding that the Hellens were but one set among other Greek-speaking peoples to have emerged in antiquity reveals the fallacy. It is as if to call English-speaking peoples of the present “English.” The confusion should be evident. A product of Euromodern imagination, with a series of empires laying claim to the coveted metonymic intellectual identity for posterity, Ancient Greeks stand as a supposed “miracle” from which a hitherto dark and presumably intellectually limited humanity fell sway to what eventually became, through Latin, “civilization.”1 “Human beings,” Homo sapiens, have, however, been around for little more than two hundred thousand years, and evidence of intellectual leaps abound throughout. A species that at times faced extinction, what secured its survival was intelligence. The idea that our species remained limited until we reached the Mediterranean is farfetched. Moreover, a few thousand years of writings before those inscribed in Greek should not be ignored. If the Hellenic people were not the beginning, on whose ideas did ancient Greek-speaking people’s reflections rest? The obvious answer is their ancients, and for them, as for those of us who sift through the past today, we should bear in mind that they were both not “us” and yet “us.” They were not us in the sense of a single line of cultural inheritance, yet they were “us” in that their achievements belong to all of us, to “humanity” (see, e.g., Misch 1951; Nelson 2017). Thus, the following reflection on philosophy held as much resonance for ancient Athenians as they might for readers of today: 210

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The philosopher [the lover of wisdom] is he or she whose heart is informed about these things which would be otherwise ignored, the one who is clear-sighted when he or she is deep into a problem, the one who is moderate in his or her actions, who penetrates ancient writings, whose advice is [sought] to unravel complications, who is really wise, who instructed his or her own heart, who stays awake at night as he or she looks for the right paths, who surpasses what he or she accomplished yesterday, who is wiser than a sage, who brought himself or herself to wisdom, who asks for advice and sees to it that he or she is asked advice. (Inscription of Antef, 12th Dynasty, Kmt/Ancient Egypt, 1991–1782 BCE2). More than a millennium before the Presocratic philosophers (sixth century BCE), Antef ’s reflections offer no doubt about discussions of early philosophers and philosophical thought. Even more, his reference to other “ancient” writings offers additional intellectual resources that, given the conceptual framework of “upper” Kmt being southward in his context, lead us into a world in which the night offered the beauty and wonder from the stars and the journey of human reflection. As the architect, philosopher, and physician Imhotep (twenty-seventh century BCE), as did subsequently Hor-Djed-Ef (twenty-fifth century BCE), Lady Peseshet (twenty-fifth century BCE), Ptah-Hotep (twenty-fourth century BCE), and Kagemni (twenty-third century BCE), pondered several thousand years earlier, the night sky in Antef ’s time also stimulated awe and reflection, as it could for those of us today who embrace such an opportunity. Returning to the word “philosophy,” we find a fallacy similar to what we observed with the word “chair.” To stop in the Greek language presupposes no earlier source of the Greek words. Consider sophia. It is from the Ntr word Sbyt (“wise teachings”). The related word Sba (“to teach” or “to be wise”) was transformed through the Greek tendency to transform the Mdw Ntr “b” to “ph” or, as pronounced in in English, “f.” The path to such understanding is even more circuitous than discussion would afford here, however, as the problem of prejudice we are now exploring with regard to philosophy is evident, as well, in etymology and archaeolinguistics. Ending one’s investigations into the origins of words repeatedly in Greek and Latin eventually leads to the false presumption, as found, for instance, in the thought of Martin Heidegger, that thinking began with the birth of those languages (though he was not particularly kind to Latin).3 Having lost hope of radical differences between Africans, Asians, Europeans, and Oceanic peoples at the biological level, the commitment to radical difference moved to linguistic polygenesis, despite logic suggesting linguistic creativity and adaptation from where language had to have begun—that is, among the earliest peoples of Africa (see Finch 1977; Massey 1998; Diop 2003). The people of Kmt, after all, had many nuanced ways of thinking about concepts such as knowing, learning, and wisdom, ranging from Rkh (to know), to rkht (“accurate knowledge,” “science,” in the sense of inquiring into the nature of things [kht]) and good (nfr) judgment (wpt, often transliterated as upi). The word wpt/upi means “to judge,” “to discern,” that is, “to dissect.” The cognate tpsSmt (often transliterated as upset) means 211

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“specify.” The word sAt (prudential wisdom) set the stage for sAA (wisdom), which also refers to the wise person (sAA) who also seeks sAw (saiety) through being sAi (wise). To ask if this “satisfies” the reader should, through a pun, reiterate the point. The intellectual meeting of worlds that historically communicated in every other respect was not new, and what should be noticeable is that throughout such meetings, reflections on what such intellectual work was about immediately followed. Antef, after all, was reflecting both on philosophy and the philosopher. Later on, in his Symposium (approximately 385 BCE), Plato similarly reflected on the love of wisdom and the difficulty of loving its lover. The scene, a drinking party in which the participants decided not to drink but instead offer meditations on love (first eros and then a slide into philia), culminated in Socrates’s lover Alcibiades crashing the party and relating the difficulty in loving (erotic and filial) Socrates, the impish-looking philosopher whose ugliness masks his extraordinary inner beauty. Thus, the origins of philosophy on the continent in which humanity evolved (Africa) versus the one (Europe) that subsequently dominated much of the globe were not as distant as many scholars of their subsequent intellectual histories led most to believe. Beyond that south-to-north movement, there were, as well, many others in which human beings, as thinking creatures, produced ideas while migrating in every direction. Wherever human beings were afforded sufficient time for reflection, ideas on organization and the makeup of reality followed. Philosophy, then, should be separated into the plethora of human efforts to understand our relationship to reality, which includes each other, and the subsequent professionalizing of that task into the academically formalized discipline housed in universities today. This distinction offers additional challenges, since it is possible for the latter to become so focused that it ceases to offer intellectual contributions beyond the demonstration of skill, as seen in analytical philosophy and certain forms of (Euro)continental intellectual activity such as deconstruction. The former thus always speaks to humanity whereas the latter at times does such, though not always intentionally so. What philosophers do is also a complicated and fluid matter. Some proponents regard its activity as a battle for truth. In that version, one “wins” through “knocking down” one’s “opponents” through demonstrating the “weakness” of their arguments. A problem with that approach, however, is that it is possible to win arguments, become hegemonic, and yet be wrong. What makes an argument “weak” is at times a component taken to be false because of a system of presuppositions against it, such as the presupposition of the absolute reach and completeness of the language that deems it unintelligible. And what makes one “strong” could be its form despite its clearly being false. Think of the proofs against motion and time offered by Zeno of Elea. Acknowledging the validity of their form, one could simply check one’s watch, get up, and walk on one’s way to one’s appointment. Think also, for example, of the once presumed absolute reach and completeness of Euclidean geometry as we now realize we live in a world of curved space and more. Or think, perhaps, of the presumed failure of languages without the copula “is.” Truth, that in which one should invest one’s faith, can be preserved without stating, “x is y.” 212

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Another model of philosophy holds metaphors of midwifery, communication, collaboration, collective curiosity, in short, working together to appreciate, hear, see, and understand—and at times, even discover—what we often fail to engage or comprehend. In this version, philosophy is not only a communicative practice but also a social enterprise of increasing or unleashing human intellectual potential. In this sense, philosophy is humanity reaching beyond itself. It is no accident, for instance, that many of its metaphors, from antiquity to recent times, are about the human struggle to escape prisons and caves of ignorance. The focus of philosophy in different parts of the world over the ages varied according to the priorities of where it was practiced. Among ancient East Africans, for instance, astronomy, architecture, and medicine offered paths to philosophical reflection, and the complicated negotiation of power among increasingly dense populations of peoples occasioned much reflection on balance, justice, laws, right, and truth. In Kmt (Greek name, Aigyptos), the concept of MAat addressed such themes. Among the Greekspeaking peoples, dikaiosuné was similar, despite the tendency of many translators to translate it simply as “justice.” In East Asia, similar concerns about learning, order, rule, and respect emerged, especially in Ruism, most known today as Confucianism. A trend of perfecting or at least improving marked these developments, and questions flowed over the ages as human beings struggled with concerns of eternity and change, appearance and reality, right and wrong, to a point of generating questions that, despite the various preferences across philosophical groups and individual philosophers, amount to familiar concerns with matters ranging from nature and the natural to the knowable and the possible. Questions about what must be, what exists, for what human beings should aspire, the meaning and possibility of freedom, proper, correct, or justified forms of reasoning, the reach and conditions of knowledge, the good life, whether reality has a purpose or purposes, the best organization of power, and value of all things, among many more, connect philosophers across time and cultural divides. These questions generate various “fields” in which thinkers address them under the now specialized terms of metaphysics, ontology, ethics, logic, transcendentalism, epistemology, aesthetics, political philosophy, axiology, and approaches such as phenomenology, pragmatism, and hermeneutics. Drawing upon and extending beyond these are also constellations of ideas and challenges under rubrics of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture, Africana or African Diasporic philosophy, existentialism, decolonial philosophy, feminism, philosophy of liberation, transcendentalism, and vitalism. These are not exhaustive, but they give a sense of the fecundity of philosophical expression.

Colonial Philosophy There has been and unfortunately continues to be, however, the use of philosophical reflections also for rationalizations and evasions of human responsibility not only to each other but also to other aspects of reality. Philosophy, thus, also historically faced, as we see from the beginning of this discussion, its own integrity. Euromodern colonialism, 213

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for instance, stimulated lines of ethnophilosophical movements often disguised to themselves simply as “universal” and “primary.” Thus, European continental rationalism and primarily Anglo-empiricism paved paths to what are today known as (European) continental philosophy and Anglo-analytical philosophy. African and Asian philosophies orient themselves in professional philosophy in relation to these, and First Nations and Indigenous peoples of many kinds among colonized countries stand in relation to these hegemonic organizations of philosophical identity. Euromodern philosophy, in other words, exemplified a form of hegemony and epistemic colonialism or, as Anibal Quijano would formulate it, drawing upon ideas from economic dependency theory (see, e.g., Amin 1988), coloniality (Quijano 1995, 2000). Additionally, Euromodern interpretations of the history of philosophy have led to a false presupposition of neat divides between religious and theological thought on the one hand and secular naturalistic philosophy on the other. Despite disavowals of conceptual and normative commitments from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic resources, many normative presuppositions of these “world religions” could be found in so-called Western philosophical thought as those of other traditions such as Akan or Yorùbá in Africa or Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Asia or Aztec or Mayan in Central America.4 Last, but not exhaustively, appeals to universality and primary or first questions made epistemology take the historic stage as first philosophy in Euromodern thought. Much of what is called Anglo-analytical philosophy and Eurocontinental philosophy rests on this presupposition, though there has been no shortage, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault, of internal critics. A crucial point of convergence, however, is that while debates emerged over whether epistemology, ethics, or metaphysics should stand as first or fundamental philosophy, the people whose humanity was challenged in Euromodernity were not afforded the luxury of thinking through which one of these was ultimately prevalent—since, as many learned, each philosophical road leads to another. Instead, a historic question of humanity came to the fore. In an age of challenged membership in the human world, philosophical anthropology proved inevitable among the dehumanized. We come, then, to philosophical questions of “application” and endemic concerns. The former simply applies philosophical presuppositions to the study of ideas produced by people from what Enrique Dussel calls the underside of Euromodernity. The latter, however, questions the applicability of such presuppositions. The first presumes the universality of Euromodern philosophy. The second raises concerns of metaphilosophical critique; it places philosophy, in any form, under critical scrutiny.5 Consider philosophy produced by people of Africa and its diaspora. Today most Africans, or at least what most people mean when they call people “African,” after all, are also black people, and the history of ideas and science offer no short supply of scandalous rationalizations of human degradation in their regard. History has also shown that black people, as philosophers and social scientists such as Anténor Firmin in Haiti, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many others have argued, do not always fit into many Euromodern disciplinary norms except as “problems.” In short, their “fit” is paradoxically one of not fitting. A theodicean form of reasoning about application follows, where a discipline is presumed 214

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intrinsically complete and valid, which means failure to fit or, perhaps more accurately, “behave” is an expression of the subject’s infelicity. Something “must be,” in a word, “wrong” with such people. Du Bois observed doubled levels of experience and research in such circumstances. Phenomenologically, there is double consciousness—the realization of how black people are perceived and the lived reality of black consciousness. Where the system of knowledge, the philosophical presuppositions, is questioned, a movement of realized contradictions results in a dialectical unleashing of knowledge. This dialectical movement, of examining the contradictions inherent in making people into problems at epistemological, sociological, and political levels, is a core insight of the kind of philosophy that took a path from black philosophy to Africana philosophy.

Africana Philosophy This kind of philosophy takes three fundamental questions posed by black people’s relation to Euromodernity seriously: (1) What does it mean to be human? (2) What is freedom? And (3) how are justificatory practices justifiable in light of the historic and continued challenges to reason posed by colonialism, enslavement, racism, and cultivated dependency not only as material and political projects but also intellectual enterprises? The third question stimulated a unique branch of inquiry, as it raised the question of whether material impositions entail epistemic ones. Put differently, what could be done when colonialism produced colonial forms of reason? This led to a crisis of reason. Working backward, each question is symbiotically linked to the other, for dehumanization presupposes humanization, fighting against enslavement demands freedom, and the kinds of reasoning involved in all three, including offering a critique of reason itself, brings them together. Africana philosophy has a rich history of debates on the questions of being human, free, and reasoning outlined here. The Martinican revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon was among those who formulated the philosophical plight for Black philosophers (capitalized because thinking for him was a matter of agency and committed struggle, which transformed racial objects from blacks into human subjects— Blacks): where even reason is made unreasonable, the challenge for African philosophers (and by extension all in the African diaspora and those designated “black”) is to reason with unreasonable reason reasonably. This strange formulation brings to the fore ironically a relationship with philosophy beyond Euromodernity in a connection with the ancient Antef and, as well, to descendants whom none of us today will ever know. This concluding reflection brings forth an additional element of philosophical concern. The movements from double consciousness to a dialectical relationship with the Euromodern world pose the following. Euromodernity produced a special form of alienation through the transformation of whole groups of people into categories of “indigenous”/“native,” “enslaved,” “colonized,” and “black.” Such people suffer a unique form of melancholia (bereavement from separation), as they are indigenous to a world 215

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that rejects them by virtue of making them into problems. Their “home” is, unfortunately, a homeless one. A critic may ask about what this means specifically for “the” African, who, in her own home, “belongs.” For her, looking at Africa is much like its etymological origins of looking to the opening of the Ka (whose connection to the subsequent Hebrew word chai, and perhaps the Chinese word chi/ki/qi, should by now be apparent). On that matter, we need simply admit the globality of the Euromodern age. The homelessness of which I speak is not geographic. It is temporal, even where one is geographically in one’s home. The African, in other words, struggles paradoxically, as do the African diaspora, with being homeless at home. This observation of being homeless at home is, as should be obvious, not exclusive to the African diaspora. Native Americans, Indigenous peoples of Australia, and the plight of various similar groups, such as Palestinians in Israel/Palestine face a similar, if not identical, contradiction. Realization of that problem as a function of Euromodernity is also a form of transcending it, which entails two considerations. The first is that the particularizing of Euromodernity raises the question of other modernities. The question of what it means to be modern shifts, then, to a question of time and the future. “Primitive,” after all, means belonging to the past (from primitus, “at first” or “earlier”). Once posed as having a future, Africana philosophical reflection also becomes an expression of Afromodernity. This means, then, the possibility of agency in history and responsibility for a future whose specificities are open. The struggle with reason, then, becomes a form of reason beyond reason as presently conceived, and, in turn, it leads to metaphilosophical reflection of Africana and other anticolonial philosophy as the paradox of philosophy being willing to transcend itself. This effort is, in effect, a call for the decolonization of philosophy, which means, then, that a critical consequence is one against philosophical parochialism (false claims of universality) and a demand for ongoing, universalizing philosophical practices in which ideas connect across disciplines, fields, and peoples without collapsing into delusions of completeness (see Gordon 2014, 2018; Sekyi-Otu 2018). Philosophy understood in this way, despite protest throughout the ages, is also an expression of humanity’s search, at the level of ideas about our relationship with reality, for a home to which one does not return; it is what one builds along the way through and alongside decolonization.

Disciplinary Decadence Decadence refers to a condition of decay. Each stage of decaying has its accompanying features. In societies, these features or symptoms take the form of values and the forms of knowledge that support them. We could call those dying values and thought. By contrast, when there is not a process of decay but instead one of growth, there are also values and their epistemic support. We could call those living values and thought. A symptom of a dying age is nihilism, and its epistemological consequence is the leveling of knowledge and truth often into “opinion” as evidence ceases to offer evidential 216

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affect and effect. This negative development affects disciplines—organizations and practices that produce and communicate knowledge—through making them insular. Where this occurs, they speak only to themselves, which makes the impact of what they produce relevant only to their adherents. The discipline then collapses into epistemological solipsism. Where such thought becomes the world, then the absence of an outside creates the illusion of omniscience. The discipline becomes godlike. As such, its precepts and methodological assumptions become all its practitioners supposedly need to know. They thus apply those resources without expectations of external accountability. They turn away from reality and truth (beyond the precepts) because, as godlike, the discipline becomes all there is and thus all to learn. As we have seen, I call this phenomenon disciplinary decadence. A familiar feature of our times is the tendency of practitioners of disciplines to reject ideas from other disciplines on the basis of those ideas not being their own. Readers are no doubt familiar with natural scientists who criticize practitioners of the human sciences for not being “scientific.” In specific terms, biologists, chemists, and physicists may criticize historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and sociologists for not offering biological, chemical, or physical analyses. Those they criticize are not immune to this practice. There are historians who criticize others for not being historical, literary scholars who criticize others for not being literary, philosophers who do the same regarding those who are not philosophical, and sociologists for those who are not sociological. To understand this fallacy, just add “ism” to the discipline, and one has biologism, chemistryism, physicism, historicism, literary textualism, philosophicalism, and sociologicism. Philosophicalism is a peculiar one here, for there is already something awry with reductivism in philosophy. In effect, it makes philosophy not philosophical. To unpack that one, addressing the various approaches to philosophy reveals much. Analytical philosophers, for instance, often treat analytical philosophy as philosophy in toto. To do so, they often reduce philosophical practice to one of its subfields such as logical analysis or epistemology governed by such argumentation. In doing so, they forget that philosophical argumentation is not always formal, and philosophical practice is not exclusively about avoiding contradictory arguments, but also about demonstration and articulating insight. Their critics, often through Eurocontinental philosophy, frequently point to a lack of contextualizing in analytical argumentation. They then, however, often offer textual analyses for context, and the result at times returns to a form of historical textualism in which European thought functions as the textual basis of thought itself. Critics of that position point to its Eurocentrism, but the problem is deeper, and even conservative exemplars of Eurocontinental thought have identified this problem. Such criticism is there as early as Edmund Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” and arguably even earlier, if we take Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as an exemplar. As there was no properly European continental thought in Rousseau’s time, Husserl is the better candidate, even though he later collapses into the fallacy of equating European man with reason. Others, such as Heidegger, are well known for the same equivocation. Philosophy, however, extends beyond the two contemporary dominating camps of the Western academy. We could offer others, such as pragmatism, but beyond them there are 217

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philosophical practices across Africa, Asia, and Indigenous thoughts of Australia, Abya Yala (Central and South America), and more. What all offer is a basic critical point: reducing philosophy to epistemology and logical analysis is a distortion of philosophy. Rejecting those reductions also leads to the question of what other dimensions of philosophy should practitioners of the discipline reject and where to reach out beyond questions of what they can know and support with formal argumentation. This includes addressing the limits of philosophy. Karl Jaspers was aware of this problem, which is why he insisted on philosophers remembering that reality is always greater than what philosophers can imagine. In doing so, he joined the ranks, though not intentionally, of non-Western philosophers such as Sri Aurobindo of India, Keiji Nishitani of Japan, Ali Shariati of Iran, and a long list of philosophers from Africa ranging from Zera Yacob of Ethiopia to V. Y. Mudimbe of the Congo, and P. Mabogo More of South Africa. In all, philosophers collapse into decadence when they lose disciplinary humility. Philosophers who understand this are willing to reach out to the world and others without the approval of philosophical orthodoxies. Although there are critics of philosophy, many of whom refer to themselves as “theorists,” many commit the performative contradiction of doing so through the constant evocation of (mostly European) philosophers to legitimate their thought. This has been peculiarly so among poststructuralists who became prominent during the rise of the neoliberal academy. The marketability of European philosophers in a Eurocentric academy is such that their hegemony is even aided by their critics. Today this element of poststructuralist thought continues under the revitalized nomenclature of “critical theory.” Different from Immanuel Kant’s “critical philosophy” and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, the new form continues the poststructuralist metacritique of theory through which theory as an object of study becomes its own center in need of decentering. This movement of thought brings to the fore the initial observation of disciplinary decadence, as the tendency to turn inward and fetishize the practice’s methodological assumptions returns.

Theodicy of Market Colonization An aspect of disciplinary decadence to consider is its structural grammar of a theodicy. The aim of theodicy is to demonstrate the intrinsic validity of the divine through externalizing lived contradictions. Where the god is normatively perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient, it is difficult to account for the presence of life’s infelicities without compromising the intrinsic goodness of a god with the power of preventing evil and injustice. In an age where legitimacy rejects theological accounts, other elements have taken the stage. Where capitalism is deified, capital and an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good market is the substitute. This could be done with models of knowledge, such as science, or with cultural idols, such as “Western civilization.” As disciplinary decadence is also a form of theodicy, so, too, are the prevailing norms of assessing these institutions. Capitalism, for instance, lacks any principle of verification, since it is premised on a purist model in which its proponents can have their cake and eat it, too. If there are crises 218

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of employment, environment, and other social maledictions of scarcity, the response is that there is an insufficient amount of free market in practice. Capitalism thus becomes external to the causal mechanism of such afflictions. Where there is flourishing, however, a strange causal potential comes in of what could occur if there were more radicalized fertile soil for capital. What, in other words, would be a sufficient or even ideal amount? Where capital is deified, the answer is complete privatization understood through a process of capital access. This amounts to a simple principle: everything is commodifiable. Or even simpler: everything and anyone could be bought. We are already witnessing this credo in the subversion of other institutions, including other markets, to the fetishized and deified notion of “the Market.”6 Thus, failing to think of markets other than the Market, this abstraction makes a market out of everything else: instead of knowledge of the market, there is the market of knowledge; instead of education markets, there is the market of education; instead of religious protection of the sacred from the market, there is the market of religion in which there is also commodification of the sacred; instead of political control of the market, there is the market of politics. The list could go on, but the basic point is already evident; crucial institutions that historically controlled the scope of what is marketable have been subordinated to the Market. We could call this the market colonization of society (Gordon 2010; see also Boggs 2009). Where the Market colonizes institutions of power, the Market becomes its sole exemplar. In the case of politics and knowledge, this entails the market colonization of political life and knowledge. In the case of the latter, this involves all kinds of knowledge including the imaginative practices of inquiry. It means, then, there is also a market colonization of imagination.

Philosophical Purity We come now to a consequence of these critical reflections on formalism, reductionism, and, in effect, philosophical monism. After all, where one model battles it out to stand atop the mountain of ideas, it in effect stands there alone. It does not take long to realize that this lone status requires eliminating all that without which it would not be selfsustaining. This means form must be repetition of itself, all that is must be reduced to itself, and as standing by, in, and of itself, it is one. Anything otherwise would contaminate this achievement. A presumption of purity prevails (Monahan 2011). There is, however, the matter of the mountain on which it stands. Standing is an unusual phenomenon. Can one stand without something on which to stand? One could float upright, perhaps, but without orientation, how is that different from lying down? The mountain, foundation, or pole on which to begin the unraveling of this tightly knit fantasy is absent. Philosophical purity offers a model of philosophy supposedly free of contaminants. Philosophy, pure onto itself, stands by itself in solipsistic closure. Relation then collapses into manifestations of the same in the way the equal sign (“=”) signifies but an affirmation of that which, in and by itself, must be one. 219

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There are many egregious examples of this perspective across various avowedly “Western” philosophical divides, such as analytical philosophy and (Euro)continental philosophy. I have analyzed both as ultimately decadent through fetishization of their methodological presuppositions (Gordon 2006). In analytical philosophy, it is conceptual analysis on the basis of syllogistic and formal logic. In (Euro)continental philosophy, it is primarily through textual interpretation. Both “work,” so to speak, where their methodological presuppositions are “complete,” despite their various discoveries and at times acknowledgment of their incompleteness and interpretative limitations. The subtextual completeness is in their shared Eurocentric presupposition of philosophy itself and who thinks or produces it. Although analytic philosophers may not like, or for the most part even understand, Heidegger, they share a common commitment to a form of purity at the heart of which is the notion of being “Western.” As Eric Nelson observes, Heidegger articulates this position through a series of circular and ultimately xenophobic arguments. The avowed intellectual case is that philosophy is born from a movement from beings to Being that constitutes “thinking.” This “miracle” supposedly took place among the Ancient Greeks and is thus the birth of Western thought. This light of thinking in effect brought humanity out of darkness, and the torch emanating this light was carried down to its proper inheritors in the line understood as Western philosophy, whose primary exemplification is not only European but also specifically German. This portrait is a movement from the ontic (beings) to ontology (Being). Joining Hegel, the story also has a geographical movement. Poetic and religious efforts rose in the East but the “mature” (and hence philosophical) development is in the setting sun of the West. This understanding also mirrored a racial logic in which there is a form of intelligence without thought forged by peoples of the East, which makes their intellectual resources possible threats against reason, where there is intelligence wedded to thinking in the West. Given this framework, what hope could there be for those in the South? The line from East to West, after all, presupposes the Northern East through West. Looking Southward, there is neither intelligence nor thinking, despite the aforementioned reflections on philosophy from at least 4,000 years ago. Not all Northern European theorists thought this way. I write “theorists” because for someone like Heidegger, those critics in effect revoked their membership in the union of philosophy. The long, varied debates about those who count as philosophers and those who do not are part of this response in which circularity is evident. They are rejected because they avow plurality where the orthodox demands monism and purity. Or, worse, they are rejected even where they share appeals to purity primarily because of their not being able to do so by virtue of their embodiment. Fanon summarized this attitude succinctly in the case of the black philosopher: where he entered, reason fled. This flight of reason is, however, undertaken through appeal to reason, which, in effect, makes it a form of unreasonable reason. After all, what else is a black philosopher attempting to do in that situation but to reason with those who regard themselves as apostles of reason? Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsh·āq as·-S.abbāh· al-Kindī addresses this form of appeal to purity as uniquely linked to one kind of people: 220

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We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him. (Freely 2011, 49) Here, Al-Kindī anticipates a response of many Africana and Global Southern thinkers in the face of bigoted defenses of philosophy. Such positions degrade a major concern of philosophy; they betray truth. There is also professional prejudice. This is where the resumé, so to speak, is unacceptable. Though not explicitly stated, “philosopher” today primarily refers to individuals with degrees in philosophy, preferably the doctorate, and whose academic appointment is in that discipline. Both amusing and ironic in this regard is the fact that the greatest philosophers even in the conservative ranks of Western philosophy were not trained in philosophy but instead came to philosophy through encountering limitations in their disciplinary training when addressing problems greater than their initial discipline. I call this willingness to explore resources beyond one’s discipline a teleological suspension of disciplinarity. Many Western-trained professional philosophers often forget that Aristotle, John Locke, William James, and Jaspers were physicians; René Descartes, Gottlob Frege, Edmund Husserl, and Bertrand Russell were mathematicians; Ludwig Wittgenstein was an engineer; Nietzsche was a philologist; John Stuart Mill was—well, so many things, as he was taught by his father and explored matters from economics to logic; St. Augustine, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Hegel were theologians; and in each of these other disciplines, there are many who could be mentioned, who produced great works of philosophy without formal, or at most minimal, philosophical training. Looking beyond formal or professional training among those engaged in philosophical work in the rest of the world would facilitate the acknowledgement and use of ideas from across the globe produced by agronomists, artists, anthropologists, economists, engineers, historians, lawyers, pedagogues, physicians, sociologists, theologians, and more, such as Sri Aurobindo, Steve Bantu Biko, Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, Anna Julia Cooper, James Cone, Du Bois, Fanon, Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin, Paulo Freire, Paget Henry, C. L. R. James, William R. Jones, HeYin Zhen, Oyèrónké· Oyèwùmí, Ali Shariati, in addition to so many from past ages before many of these disciplines were formally constructed. Where, however, the conveyor of the shared message of purity is welcomed, the critique demands more. The history of philosophy is rich with subfields avowing themselves as the totality of the discipline or practice. Whether epistemology as the center from which all others emanate or acquire their legitimacy—or aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, etc.—the evidential circularity is philosophy being whatever is the proponent’s project. That becomes the “origin.” In response, I often begin my introduction to philosophy courses with the following exercise. What is the most important question one could ask? As students debate through from the normative to conditions of possibility—from 221

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what should I do, to what can I do, to what can I know, etc.—eventually the students see the interrelatedness of these questions, since radicalizing one’s critical reflection on any question ultimately leads to the others. Beyond the intellectual realization of what is involved in doing so—in other words, simply making the effort of addressing any of them radically while ignoring the others—the empirical facts are clear. Are ethicists, political philosophers, aestheticians, and logicians only philosophers when they explore the epistemological aspects of their subject of study? The ontological ones? These concerns could be radicalized, as well, as we saw in the reflection on content, through questioning the legitimacy and scope of the philosophical menu, so to speak, from aesthetics to ontology. The notion that doing philosophy limits one to that set of fields exclusively presumes, in philosophical terms, that only such concerns matter. If reality is greater than philosophy, the possibility of new and perhaps more pressing “ultimate” questions and their concomitant fields are yet to come. Thus, contra the purists, this reflection by Georges Misch offers affinity across North and South, East and West, and, of course, beyond such geological paradigms: “. . . the echo [philosophical concerns] awoke in us may just be something that the natural course of human life awakes in every human, quite spontaneously, at one time or another” (Misch 1951, 25). Antef would add that most people may do so for a fleeting moment; philosophers are those whom they captivate and stimulate into prolonged meditations on their implications, resolutions, and understanding. What should be evident here also is the purist’s error of nonrelationality as a condition of legitimacy. In other words, the notion of that which is real and that which is legitimate is only that which can or, worse, must stand by itself is problematic. The terrain here is familiar. It is the search for that which could function as a god, which is in effect to offer an idol. Idolatry is a form of bad faith that affects not only disciplines but also methodological efforts. Where the latter also becomes an idol or a fetish, reality falls to the wayside, and the discipline and its method become the world. It is, in other words, a form of intellectual solipsism. Thus, returning to Heidegger, the notion that thinking is only such through a movement from being to Beings fetishes a specific form of thinking for what it means to think. It is a form of subject decadence through which philosophy collapses into the bad faith and idolatrous path of disciplinary decadence. This collapse is also theodicean, since it should be obvious that, functioning as godlike, there cannot be an “outside” of this framework. Contradictions become infelicities properly relegated to the outhouse. Instead of asking what may be wrong with the model, the response becomes dismissal of the challenges. It is no accident that Heidegger became obsessed with the formulation: “Only a god can save us.” Yet, establishing salvation and purity as misguided goals entails acknowledging and understanding multiple sources and practices not only of philosophy but also thought. Recognizing philosophy as a form of thinking instead of thinking itself facilitates a teleological suspension of philosophy, which means being willing to go beyond philosophy for the sake or purpose of establishing a relationship with reality. 222

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This question of relation already challenges metaphysical notions of purity and selfcontainment, for it is not possible to be in a relation with something without its having any relationship to oneself. Where the latter is treated as contamination, purity is lost. It demands a nonrelational metaphysics. This discussion should be evident in any quest for the decolonization of philosophy. In effect, philosophy becomes a colonizing practice when it takes itself too seriously. Taking what transcends philosophy into account entails reaching beyond philosophy with the understanding that reality cannot be “contained” in philosophy but instead offering a reminder of humility and hope. This would require philosophy becoming, in a word, a good citizen of the community of knowledge and its quest for wisdom. It would require practices of communicating and the cultivation of new relationships through which learning continues. The supposedly base levels are part of that practice, which means then a kind of thinking premised on South—North or North—South without presumed East—West horizons but instead an understanding that such orientations are already premised on arrogant axes. This acknowledgment demands not only a teleological suspension of philosophy but also, through communication and humility, creolizing philosophical practice. Such an effort entails, as Jane Anna Gordon (2014) has shown in her work on political theory, the realization that the content need not be closed. It is a call against epistemic closure not only at methodological and disciplinary levels but also with regard to content. Curiously, this insight is akin to the spirit of what could be called tran-scendental phenomenological accounts. Although it would be tempting to consider this observation a moment of European triumph—as some critics could only think of phenomenology in Husserlian terms—the metatheoretical question to address is the teleological suspension of phenomenology as well. If, in other words, phenomenology is willing to place itself among approaches to thinking that must also be placed under interrogation, it must not presume its own legitimacy. This means, methodologically, that it cannot argue for its own validity nor assert it. It must in effect let go of such attachments and acknowledge what remains. This letting go for the sake of not blocking possibilities could be called what Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2008) calls a “decolonial reduction.” Without being named as such, the relation of thinking a thought or posing interpretation, meaning, and theory stands, and what is that if not at least the form of intentionality—an intendingintended realization of a reality greater than the act itself?

What of Liberation? An abstract decolonization amounts to nothing more than an additional resource with which to stand still. Movement requires understanding, as Catherine Walsh (2018) recently argues, decoloniality-for. It requires not being reactionary—responding only to what one is against—but instead understanding the kinds of relationships and possibilities to which one should be committed. This understanding brings together ideas of teleological suspension, creolization, and praxis in the task of acting and building without 223

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forecast or, in the extreme, mediation. Put differently, broken idols offer no bridges to the future. Instead of a hand reaching from the heavens, there is instead the task of building, moment by moment, that upon which the future is built. That future, however, has political dimensions, which means power—the ability to make things happen—comes to the fore without the concrete face of the affected. This is because, as beyond the present, the future is ultimately anonymous (Gordon 2018). This question of anonymity raises additional questions such as the motivation for action, since the notion of “we” in such tasks transcends the self. After all, “I” do not belong to the future even though subsequent generations may claim “me” or “us.” The work, then, of letting go of colonial practices of philosophy involves also letting go of the self. If done well, it offers ideas for which subsequent generations will be thankful.

Notes 1. Critical sources are many. See, for example, Peter J. Park (2013), Eric Nelson (2017), and Kwasi Wiredu (1996, 2004). For a recent example of a proponent of the Greek “miracle” idea, see Eric Weiner (2016). 2. This well-known inscription is discussed in Obenga (2004, 35). See also Obenga (1990) and Asante (2013). The translation offered here is mine. I add the disjunction “he or she” because Antef was not exclusively referring to males, as there were female philosophers in Kmt/ Ancient Egyptian and Nubian societies. 3. Documenting Heidegger’s many infelicities would take up too much space here. An elegant critical discussion is available in Nelson (2017). 4. For critique of the notion of the “West,” see Appiah (2016). 5. For elaboration, see Gordon (2008). 6. Heilbroner (1999). See also Woods (2016, 2017) for more recent discussions addressing themes such as globalization and regional kinds of capitalism in postsocialist societies.

Works Cited Amin, Samir. 1988. L’eurocentrisme: Critique d’une idéologie. Paris: Anthropos-Economica. Appiah, K. Anthony. “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization.” The Guardian, November 9, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reithlecture?CMP=share_btn_fb. Asante, Molefi Kete. 2013. The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten. Chicago: African American Images. Boggs, James. 2009. American Revolution, 2nd ed. New York: Monthly Review Press. Diop, Cheikh Anta. 2003. Cheikh Anta Diop: L’homme et l’oeuvres. Paris: Présence Africaine. Finch, Charles. 1977. Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden. Decatur, GA : Khenti Inc. Freely, John. 2011. Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam Helped to Shape the Western World. London: I.B. Tauris. Gordon, Jane Anna. 2014. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Decolonizing Philosophy Gordon, Lewis R. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge. ——. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press. ——. 2010. “The Market Colonization of Intellectuals.” Truthout, April 6, 2010. http://archive. truthout.org/the-market-colonization-intellectuals58310. ——. 2018. “Re-Imagining Liberations.” International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies 1, no. 1: 11–29. Heilbroner, Robert L. 1999. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic, Revised 7th ed. New York: Simon & Schuster. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Massey, Gerald Massey. 1998. The Natural Genesis. Baltimore, MD : Black Classics Press. Misch, George. 1951. The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophy Primer. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Monahan, Michael J. 2011. The Creolizing Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Nelson, Eric Nelson. 2017. Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Obenga, Théophile. 1990. La Philosophie africaine de la période pharaonique: 2780–330 avant notre ère. Paris: L’Harmattan. ——. 2004. “Egypt: Ancient History of African Philosophy.” In A Companion to African Philosophy, edited by K. Wiredu, 31–49. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers. Park, Peter J. K. 2013. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830. Albany: SUNY Press. Quijano, Anibal. 1995. “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America.” In The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, edited by Michael Arona, John Beverly, and José Oviedo, 201–16. Durham, NC : Duke University. ——. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3: 533–80. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. 2018. Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. New York: Routledge. Walsh, Catherine. 2018. “The Decolonial For: Resurgences, Shifts, and Movements.” In On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, edited by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, 15–32. Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Weiner, Eric. 2016. The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wiredu, Kwasi. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——. 2004. A Companion to African Philosophy. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers. Woods, Ellen Meiksins. 2016. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. London: Verso. ——. 2017. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso.

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CHAPTER 20 A PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVE OF PEDAGOGICAL IMPERATIVES

Let me begin by saying how honored I am to be a recipient of the James and Helen Merritt Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to the Philosophy of Education. Thank you, members of the selection committee, for publicly announcing such recognition of my work, and thank you to James and Helen Merritt for founding this award. A travesty in the academy has been the derision of critical thought, of reflection, in the study of education, especially with regard to its significance for the cultivation of citizenship and human well-being. To choose to honor those whose life work is devoted to thinking, to those activities that transform the human animal into the human being through a transition from sign to symbol, to choose such in times where nothing is more feared in our nation’s political life than an informed public, is an act that goes beyond intelligence to the realm of wisdom. As Dr. Linda O’Neill, a member of the committee, would attest, our correspondence after notification of my selection reveals my profound gratitude for being acknowledged for what brought me to the academy in the first place. The story is as follows. I was working as a professional musician, playing drums and sometimes piano, before going to college. My decision to go to college was personal, not academic. I wanted to spend more time with my girlfriend. Playing jazz, blues, funk, and being in the orchestra pit for some off-Broadway theater meant performing on many long nights, and since the income was low, spending many long days in minimum-wage jobs. At first, I enrolled in many of my girlfriend’s classes, but the experience reminded me of how much I loved to write. I had devoted much time to writing in my childhood. That energy was spent on genres ranging from short stories to novellas, and on exploratory essays on matters such as how blood vessels absorb the pressure of a heart beat and more abstract matters such as whether there would be a pure Being if all material things and all energy ceased. Yes, I was an odd kid. I did not realize that, however, because of how absorbed I was with such matters. Today, such interests would seem even more odd in virtue of my also being Black. As stereotype would have it, there were, and continue to be, too many distractions in the lives of Black children, especially those living, as I had, in the “inner city,” namely, the Bronx, that should have made such absorption impossible. But I should add that my own experiences varied because, being raised by my young mother who was also taking care of my brothers and extended relatives, my family moved a lot. I can think of only one home in which I have lived longer than three years, and that occurred in my recent adult life.

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Writing, then, functioned as a multitude of things that included the ongoing narrative of life. Reality, in other words, continued through layers of written realizations. Although I never kept a diary, my writing and thinking became one. I even considered music a continuation of writing. So, attending college, where I was expected to write, and write often, was not a burden but an affirmation of something I held dear. I took as many courses as I could and was eventually invited to participate in an experimental honors program, the Lehman Scholars Program, an offer I almost declined but for the director’s love for jazz. I heard some Charlie Parker (it may have been the composition “Confirmation”) playing on his old LP player in his office and struck up a conversation with him on jazz. Two years later, I graduated through that program with the wealth of experience and skills of a liberal arts education, which I have not tired of sharing and from which I continue to learn. That enthusiasm led to my becoming a New York City high school teacher in the 1980s and to my creating The Second Chance Program, a resource for in-school truants at Lehman High School. Given the challenges raised in teaching such students, the principal had told me that a 10% retention rate would have been sufficient for the success of the program. It was fortunate that I was young, enthusiastic, and naive. All that enabled me to try things that many thought would fail, and the results were, instead, an 85% rate of those students completing high school. I was asked to write up a study of the program, which I did, but it struck me that there were several dimensions of my work with those students that I could not formulate in that report. How does one quantify and thematize, in my limited understanding of social scientific assessment at the time, that my colleagues and I succeeded by respecting the humanity of our students? The answers were not available to me then. I decided to explore them in the world of philosophy, at the time thinking that Aristotle’s theory of potentiality offered much fruit for such inquiry. It was thus the case that problems of philosophy of education and its relation to the human condition, of what it means to be a human being, were preoccupations of mine from the beginning of my graduate school career. I offer this autobiographical narrative because I see a great deal of commitments have come full circle in my receiving this award. It was announced to me at a time in which I was reflecting on work over the past two decades. You see, my professional academic career was inaugurated by my dissertation on bad faith and antiblack racism. That work was subsequently expanded and published at a time when there was much pressure to examine human reality in oversimplified extremes of structures without individuals on the one hand and individuals devoid of structural realities, negative and positive, on the other. I characterized these extremes as forms of bad faith. They involved allegiance to false views of reality, the consequence of which was a set of lies about ourselves. Social structures without individuals could only exist where they are not dependent upon the activities of living people, of creatures with agency and their day-to-day activities. Individuals without structures would have to have been born “whole,” so to speak. That human beings have to acquire language, a social skill, proves that we are developmental 228

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and highly social-dependent creatures. Both extremes, in other words, collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. One of the dimensions of bad faith is that it hates to be revealed as what it is. The closer bad faith comes to seeing itself, the more enraged it becomes. That is because it is a consciousness that is ashamed of itself. Shame, as we know, is about being seen in doing what we would prefer remain hidden. To be “seen” calls for the perspective of another or others. Bad faith, then, is also about anxiety, and at times fear, of what evidence reveals, for the latter is a species of revelation: It is an uncovering of that which unveils additional things. Acts of disclosure, of unconcealment, bring things to the fore that call for us to make decisions. They exemplify a concept in philosophy of education that is presented perhaps more often than any other, namely, that of being critical. The words critic, critique, criterion, and critical come from the ancient Greek word krinein, which means “to choose” and “to decide.” To do this, one must judge or make a judgment. And to make a judgment, one must be informed, so one must consider the things that will compel one’s judgment. Thus, the related word krités (judge) bring everything together with kritérion, which is used to make judgments. A striking thing about the Greek origins is how this unfolding understanding of judgment and evidence, that which appears and compels seeing what needs to be seen, is connected. Another word sharing etymological roots with krinein is crisis. But here, the more anxiety-ridden dimensions of having to choose come to the fore: In a crisis, we face making decisions we wish not to make. We attempt to freeze time, to stop the future, because that difficult choice lurks within the coming moment. In some cases, the choice to be made is not very clear, for the outcomes are unpredictable, but we know that whether good or bad, either instantiation carries with it, by virtue of our decision, our responsibility. Bad faith is an effort to hide from responsibility. For the purpose of this lecture, this anxiety brings an ethical dimension to our epistemological demands, to our theory and practices of producing knowledge. Bad faith here becomes our attempt to hide from the responsibility we have as producers and discoverers of knowledge. Although I am using the language of ethics, I should like to remind everyone that bad faith is not always unethical and immoral. In a society in which nearly everyone is afraid of judgment, the idea of being criticized as such rallies forces of resistance, of (as is by now obvious) bad faith, but a retreat into bad faith makes sense in abusive situations. It also makes sense in a paradoxical admission: Sometimes we seek bad faith as a refuge against an unbearable fact (e.g., the loss of a loved one). The reflections offered here are not condemnations of people who do such. Most of us must prepare ourselves to take on—which often involves returning to—trauma. The ethical concern here is toward our epistemological claims and their development. Our epistemological development, what we learn and thereby come to know, is another way of referring to our education. Many of us are familiar with the etymology of education, in the Latin infinitive educare, to bring up, which in turn is related to educere, to bring out or to lead. Both terms suggest assisting another in the process of maturation, of growth. The goal of education, read in this way, is to transform children into adults. 229

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But, as our discussion of bad faith reveals, some, if not most, of us are afraid of the responsibility of adult life. Education, then, is also a struggle against bad faith. This task of education is linked to several matters that I cannot develop in this lecture but shall present in short form in the hope of enough discussion time for elaboration. The first is that we may be tempted to reformulate this task as an effort to develop good faith. One can, however, avoid reality in good faith, as I have suggested with trauma. One could choose in good faith never to grow up. As instances mount, the inevitable realization makes its appearance: Good faith is also a form of bad faith. Good faith is not the opposite of bad faith. What is needed is attention to the critical norms of evidence, of criteria by which good judgment comes about. Being evidential, these norms must appear in their nakedness, they must be revealed, which in principle means that they must transcend the self into its relationship with others. They must, in phenomenological language, be intersubjective. We are drawn into a dimension of reality when we recognize and respect a world of others. We learn that our inner life echoes outer meaning, and we face bringing in layers of reality as understood within the framework of human experience. Let us call this intersubjective framework of experience the social world. In bad faith, we attempt to hide from the social world. A way of hiding from that world is to dehumanize it. We treat it as an ossified structure, as an unyielding force against which our decisions do not matter. If our actions make no difference, how, then, can we be responsible for them? I have never been ashamed to call my work humanistic. It is an admission for which I have received criticism in the postmodern academy. My argument, however, was, and continues to be, that failure to articulate the human dimensions of human phenomena leads to acts of evasion that often collapse into repression. To make human beings into what we are not requires rallying our social forces against us. I characterized this in my first book as institutional bad faith. It involves constructing norms, rationalizations, social edifices, symbols, places, and anything that could influence social life in ways that facilitate self-deception and the erosion of the human spirit. As expected, a prime example of this is what has been done to many schools, but especially public ones. The recent emphasis on testing, in, for example, the No Child Left Behind national policy, is an effort to make thought routine and devoid of critical reflection. The logical consequence of a generally unthinking public is now our fate. And it is so at a time when humanity is facing unparalleled ecological, economic, and political dangers. We face the first of many pedagogical imperatives: to make ourselves intelligent. Jane Anna Gordon and I raised the concept of a pedagogical imperative in our introduction to A Companion to African-American Studies, which Jane Anna Gordon has also discussed in her article “Beyond Anti-Elitism: Black Studies and the Pedagogical Imperative.” It was introduced in the Companion to make explicit what was implicit in the outrage we noticed many students felt toward correlated disciplines that were subfields of African American Studies but of which the latter was often presented as a subfield. For example, African American philosophy is considered a subfield of philosophy, but in African American Studies, philosophy enters as a subfield. In more prosaic form, the discipline of philosophy is supposed to be universal whereas the field of African American philosophy is supposed to be particular. What we noticed was that students were often surprised at the array of 230

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critical questions they could discuss in African American philosophy or in African philosophy courses versus those listed simply as “Philosophy” or “Introduction to Philosophy” or even, as is oddly more acceptable, “Anglo-Analytical Philosophy” or “Continental Philosophy” or “Ancient Philosophy.” The last two often require the adjective “European” and “Greek” or “Greek and Roman” to become precise. In African philosophy and African American philosophy courses, students often draw upon resources in philosophy beyond things African or African American. In other words, there is a constant reminder of the scope of the inquiry. In the other approaches, the discussion is often offered by proponents as though the other perspectives did not and do not exist, or as though if they were to exist, they would be illegitimate. There, universality is espoused through denial of its limit; it is a rejection of the “outside” by denying its existence. Reality, from such an approach, is constantly contracting. The students’ outrage is stimulated, however, by the realization of what I shall call epistemological laziness in the case of some instructors and willful ignorance in those of others. It is from realizing that the educator has not made the effort to learn and appreciate the scope of reality. Rephrased: Part of teaching is learning. To teach, one must learn, but not just learn. One must also learn to learn. Research and scholarship have received much derision in American political life in recent times. There have been attacks on research universities, especially by political agitators demanding the reprimanding of professors who expect students to expand their historical and political horizons. In typical bad faith, these agents of naysay claim actually to be defending an expansion of civic discourse through what they call “balance.” But this so-called balance is often reduced to the political identity of professors, as though one’s political identity is like one’s racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual identity. Although an exception could always be found for each rule about human communities, we should remember that thinking often challenges one’s political views over time, and in other times involves holding a variety of political positions on different issues across a spectrum. A forced “balance” promises to become a superficial imposition of other factors on thought, and the adjustments and at times acts of coercion necessary to create such a result will divert the energies of research to begin with. It is, in other words, a disruption of a relationship by which critical reflection may come about. That there is fear of critical thinking today means that these disruptions are efforts to saturate our educational institutions with bad faith. As many of us already know, there are many scholars who no longer discuss certain subjects in their classrooms, and these are often matters in which they are at times the leading experts. Philosophers among us may immediately think of Kant’s categorical imperative when I speak of pedagogical imperatives. Kant, as some of us know, thought much about maturation as well, especially in his reflection on enlightenment. I do not always agree with Kant, but I do agree with him on more matters than I often expect. The question of maturation gains its categorical character from the silliness of posing the question to the immature. To the child, it is a question for which appreciation and gratitude belong to the future self. Freud, by the way, in his essay “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming,” reflected: “The play of children is determined by their wishes—really by the child’s one wish, which is to be grown-up, the wish that helps to ‘bring him up’ ” (36). 231

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I love Freud’s candor. The connection of this observation to the thoughts presented in this lecture should be apparent. He offers some insight to the disruptions, to the bad faith, of which I have been speaking: [The child] always plays at being grown-up; in play he imitates what is known to him of the lives of adults. Now he has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult it is otherwise; on the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to play any longer or to day-dream, but to be making his way in a real world. On the other hand, some of the wishes from which his phantasies spring are such as have to be entirely hidden; therefore he is ashamed of his phantasies as being childish and as something prohibited. (36–37) We see here some of Freud’s familiar concerns about frustration and repression. But we also see an insight into adult life often overlooked: that adulthood and maturation are not always identical. A difference between an adult and a child is that the former is responsible for her or his maturation. The child wants it; the adult must, often begrudgingly, accept it. This is so for the adult because of the ever-incomplete reality of being human. The child knows that it must become she or he who in turn is to become something more. But the adult is always not-quite-there, and the determination of what it is to become must be taken on more than given. Reality, the adult discovers, is always bigger than any of us. Save G-d. But we do not have to discuss that here since this is a human story, not a theological or metaphysical one. In more recent writings, I have argued that a failure to take heed of the pedagogical imperative of expanding our horizons, of taking heed of reality being bigger than we are, is decadent. I call it disciplinary decadence. In its various forms, disciplinary decadence involves turning away from reality through a variety of obsessive absolutes. We could make our methods deontological, by which I mean treating them as absolute imperatives. The problem is that our methods are often developed as a response to problems posed by reality. But the piece of reality addressed by a method, especially one that generated a particular discipline, may only be part of a larger puzzle, or worse, may cease to exist, which would make attachment to the method impractical at best and neurotic at worst. In the case of the latter, the method has become a substitute for reality, and the practitioner attempts to squeeze reality into the method, and the discipline, or even more perverse, the subfield of the disciplines. One’s perspective, in this instance, becomes the world, and more extreme: all of reality. It logically ceases to be intersubjective. Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary philosopher and psychiatrist from Martinique, identified this methodological problem as entailing a form of epistemological colonization. It involves the generation of colonizing practices at the levels of presumed validity of methods. Thinking through Søren Kierkegaard, one of my favorite writers and, although he would espouse otherwise, philosophers, I offer a teleological suspension of disciplinarity as an alternative. This means being willing to suspend (not get rid of) one’s discipline or perspective for the sake of reality. It means recognizing there is a there that enables each 232

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of us to announce a here. This at first complicated expression reminds us of purpose, that we should, for example, understand how reality places limits on our ways of learning about and living it. That we are part of that reality means that we should also take seriously the role we play in our own pursuits. Since I have argued for the pedagogical imperative of teachers being learners, which is the spirit of research, it follows that a teleological suspension of disciplinarity is a pedagogical imperative. It offers learning not only for the researcher, but also for whom he or she educates. Recent political conflicts, especially those regarding the rhetoric of politicians, have led to much public distrust of political institutions, especially government. Critics warn against inefficiency and other supposed dangers of public (i.e., government-run) institutions such as public schools and national health funded hospitals. Yet in spite of the many failures of private-controlled institutions of public resources, of their inefficiency and corruption, the public is called upon by ideologues to place more faith in those institutions than those that, by virtue of being extensions of the government, are accountable to the citizenry. As we know with such matters, the collapse of reasoning that leads to the same evidence presented for the future of an institution in one context is offered for its success in another. The rhetoric in support of the latter often conceals important considerations that would subject it to the same criteria of the former. How can we defend regulatory and deregulatory practices whose purpose was to make “us” wealthier as they make most of “us” poorer? How can we do the same when it makes most of “us” less educated, less physically healthy, and more psychologically confused? The hidden answers rest on the meaning of “we” and “us,” and this rhetoric is sometimes masked in the language of “understanding.” I recall two colleagues arguing over the general stupidity of the American public who seek politicians who are like them. The critic said intelligent people would prefer someone who is not like them, someone from whom they could learn something. The other colleague at first agreed, pointing out what at first may seem similar to my point about educare, that one should not aim at remaining the same. My response, however, was that what many supporters of such politicians are saying is that people who are more like them are more likely to understand them and may better be able to serve their needs. This at first sounds good, but it is only so through presuming that the politician who understands them is not simply an opportunist. As many of us know about situations of abuse, it is those who know and understand us most who can harm us the most. Think of how much worse it could be if what they understand is our stupidity. The ability to know and understand us without harming us is a profound act of love. It is no doubt the basis for the profound devotion and overwhelming sense of gratitude Christians have for their god. To walk among humanity with such power and not destroy most around one requires extraordinary forbearance whose effortlessness could only be explained by love. (Some might add disinterest, but that would contradict the whole point of walking among humankind.) Intelligence demands, then, more than a call for understanding. We return here to the argument about critical norms of evidence, about what needs to be teleologically suspended, about the imperatives of learning, about pedagogical imperatives. 233

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I could very well have chosen examples from a variety of other disciplines and social practices, as I have in Disciplinary Decadence, but the context of this lecture is education, so I have focused on that. Education is politically charged today because our society has placed it as a public good. In many other societies, especially ancient ones, what is to be learned by most is simply to take the place of their parents, and what is available to few, which is often connected to replacing their parents, is knowledge of how to rule. When all, or at least most, are expected to play a role in some dimension of ruling, which amounts to learning how to rule themselves as each other, intersubjectively, taking the place of one’s parents is not always clear. One may take on one’s parents’ social role but with different tasks. The range of things to learn includes activities to master, and among them is clear thinking. Such thinking requires mastery of a list of related things that include language and writing. These affect an essential element of political life, namely, speech. It also affects one’s ability to decipher what others are saying, which means knowing, for instance, when one is being had. In a wonderful essay entitled “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell concluded with the following counsel: . . . the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists [we often forget that left-wing extremism is not socialism but anarchy]—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. (120) I began this discussion with some reflections on bad faith because, as I am hoping is now clear, I am arguing against the evasion of reality. An aspect of reality that human beings seem especially to be afraid of is human reality. We seem to be so ashamed of ourselves that we attempt to conceal ourselves from our institutions. The effort to construct human institutions that could take on the pedagogical imperative of liberating our pedagogical imperatives in many dimensions of human life is an option we are fortunate to have as our choice. It means, echoing Orwell’s understated optimism, that there is still much that can be done and, thus, much to do.

Works Cited Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamm Markmann. New York: Grove. Freud, Sigmund. 1963. “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” trans. I.F. Grant Duff, in Character and Culture, edited by Philip Reiff. New York: Collier Books, 34–43.

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A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives Gordon, Jane Anna. 2010. “Beyond Anti-elitism: Black Studies and the Pedagogical Imperative,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies Studies 32, Issue 2: 1–16. Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Gordon, Lewis R. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge. Gordon, Lewis R. and Jane Anna Gordon. 2006. “On Working through a Most Difficult Terrain,” in A companion to African-American studies. Malden, MA : Blackwell, xx–xxxv. Kant, Immanuel. 1959. “What Is Enlightenment?” in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis, IN : Bobbs-Merrill, 85–92. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983.  “Fear and Trembling” and “Repetition”: Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 6, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press. Orwell, George. 1984. “Politics and the English Language,” In Why I Write. New York: Penguin Books, 102–119.

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The topic of Ubuntu lends itself to so much, primarily because of the shifts and efforts for a native English speaker to grapple with an important concept that oddly speaks to the core of African thought on the one hand and, as I will argue, to the normative challenges of the modern world on the other. It is similar to the task of articulating African diasporic philosophy, what is also called Africana philosophy, which I have argued is a fundamentally modern philosophy; it brings some of these elements to the fore in ways that question some of the tendencies that would make Ubuntu collapse into the particular, rare and exotic (Gordon 2008: 21–33). Engaging with a concept of African humanism no doubt stimulates tendencies toward what the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) calls “the savage slot,” where the presupposition of a form of premodern, sometimes pristine and noble, other times corrupt and vicious, existence is advanced under the rubric of “tradition.” Although there are no human communities without traditions, the use of the term has a peculiarly insidious connotation in the study and political debates over and with indigenous peoples. As Franz Boas showed, the tendency is to look at such groups as somehow located outside of modern time, which makes them, to some extent, more like ghosts of the present: effects in the now that belong in the past.1

Modernity, Modernities An immediate criticism of the presumption of the premodern temporal location of values is that it requires Indigneous people to cease thinking, living and creatively and critically engaging with the world around them at the moment of conquest and colonization. Frozen at, if not just before, the moment of contact with the “outside world,” which simply means Europe or the “West,” indigenous peoples, in this formulation, hold their breath on their values. There is, however, another portrait of what transpired in the modern world. As one group of people enforced its portrait of reality on others, an antagonistic relationship emerged in which dominated peoples not only resisted what was imposed on them, but also evaluated their presuppositions about the world. This process took on a dialectical quality of give and take, which led to new problems of value and meaning that also affected the people who dominated them. The modern in this view, then, is not a singular, homogenous event, but instead a variety of tensions through which the present emerged. It is not, however, peculiar in this regard since this story of confluence and

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synthesis precedes the form of modernity that we have come to treat as the phenomenon itself. Now, one may object that modernity is an invention of late nineteenth-century French thought and artistic practice. A problem with this view, however, is that it presupposes the particular naming of an event, experience, or practice as that which brings its reality into being. An examination of the dynamics of modernist thinking reveals some features that connect it to practices that precede its baptismal moment. Enrique Dussel, for example, has shown that there have in fact been modernities, instead of only one modernity, and that for the people on whom it is imposed, it often means the catastrophe of a haunted future, of a disruption of time, wherein a new set of problematics of continued existence comes to the fore. Thus, while European triumphalism looks to modernity in terms of modern philosophy or the epistemic rationalization of the bourgeois revolution from the 17th century onwards, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas mark it as the beginning of a regime of genocide from the 15th century onward. The story of modernity shifts, then, when it is read through its colonial correlate. Colonialism imposes a peculiar crisis on colonized peoples, since every colonial regime offers itself as the only viable future for its subjects. Colonized subjects face possible futures of (1) their disappearance, either through genocide or cultural erasure or assimilation and/or (2) their adaptation, through transformation often in the form of hybridisation and synthesis (see Gordon and Gordon 2009: Chapter 5). Looking to the antiquated past, imagine what Kmt/Egypt looked like to peoples brought into its borders by conquest.2 That it, too, was colonized by the Greeks who renamed Kmt (using the Greek name for Memphis — Egypt) led to the fusion of worlds made manifest in the region. The Roman Empire, too, offered a vision of no choice to those it conquered but to become Roman. A familiar example of this is the historical transformation of values that emerged from the conquest of Judah, which the Romans and Greeks called Judea. The process from Greek to Roman control was one in which Judah had at first expanded into the Hasmonean Empire, which at first led to an expansion of the reach of the laws of Judah. Rome, however, asserted its control, which led to important debates over colonization, many of which are portrayed in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Recall, for instance, the famous baiting of Jesus on the matter of taxes, where he encourages the people to give unto Caesar what is his and unto G-d what is G-d’s.3 The more pressing question for the priests rebels, and everyday people of Judah, however, was about which set of laws would prevail, Roman or Judean. In this framework, Rome represented the modern and Judah the traditional. What followed could be called the script of the relationship of tradition to modernity from antiquity to the present. It may seem odd to talk about ancient modernity, but we should bear in mind what ancient Rome represented politically, sociologically and technologically to those it conquered. As the asserted center of the world, it was also its presumed future and the designation “eternal city” was a reflection of this aspiration. So, for the people of Judah, the dilemma was about being “purely” Judean or becoming Roman. Some, however, offered a third way: becoming a hybrid of Rome and Judah. The Roman 238

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concepts of relegere (go through again, to read over and over, to repeat, as in ritual) and religare (to bind), from which emerged the term “religion”, offered conditions of citizenship and other forms of membership, through which gods and state could be separated by systems of taxation and gender-specific lineage of birth. The Israelites of Judah had determined patrilineal conditions of born membership until their transformation under Roman rule into matrilineal membership and what became Rabbinic Judaism. There were approximately 150,000 Judeans in Rome in the period leading up to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. A hundred years later, there were 8 000,000 people under the emerging identity now known as “Jews.” What happened was a transformation and adaptation of Judean laws (Halakha) with Roman laws, a process that included proselytizing. Rapid growth in their numbers would have continued had the Emperor Constantine not converted to Christianity, their rival group, in the fourth century ACE, inaugurating the theological-political constellation of Christendom, which brought with it edicts of capital punishment against Jewish proselytizing.4 The meeting of Alexandria, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome was not only political and juridical, but also epistemological and cosmological. The world of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, governed by a mythopoetics of cyclical permanence and eternity, was fused with that of the Judeans, an eschatological world with a beginning, an ongoing process of perfecting, and a future end, telos, or purpose. Christendom, mediated by the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism, brought a different problematic to the understanding of history and time. For antiquated histories, as found in the writings of Herodotus, the story was primarily about the past. This newly emerging fusion of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the now diasporic Judah, worked through past, present, and future, where rituals of the past were primarily preparations for the future. History came to assume a new form of understanding the present from the perspective of a proposed time to come —a consideration that took a decisive turn when a revolt against religion, in the Roman sense outlined here, emerged in the seventh century with the birth of Islam. As a critique of religion, of the Romanisation of West Asian laws and values as modernity in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, Islam advanced a conception of law that through conquest also ironically offered itself as a new and better modernism.5 It was ironic since it was advanced as a return to a truer set of laws beyond religion, but it did so through incorporating itself into the conclusion of the future to come. Thus, it posed a challenge to Christendom in its Afro-Arabic form from northern and western Africa into southern Europe as far north as southern France. To the east, the challenge went all the way to the Indian and Pacific oceans. But central here is that it set in motion the series of conflicts that led to Christendom moving across the Atlantic Ocean in the 15th century. This conflict was well under way by the seventh century when Muslim control of trade across the Mediterranean plummeted Christendom into an economic depression. This dire circumstance lasted nearly 800 years, during which the “higher civilisation” was Islamic and the historical representation of that trauma is characterised in the West as the “Dark Ages.” The “reconquest,” achieved by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in Grenada in January 1492, pushed this conflict into the Atlantic Ocean 239

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along the coasts of western Africa and across to what became the Caribbean. These events inaugurated both a new epoch and a new world. The story thus far reveals that “modernity” is not the right designation, but instead modernities. In each instance, the dominating civilization posed itself to the dominated as no less than the future, hence the dilemmas of extinction or hybridization. While the people who became Jews resolved this question through Rabbinic Judaism — where Halakha fused with much of Roman law — and the Arab world offered a response to Christendom in the form of sharia — whose legal structure incorporated and debated ideas from Greek antiquity, Rabbinic Judaism, and the varieties of challenges posed from its own forms of conquest from the Atlantic to the Pacific — a striking shift emerged when Christians, Muslims, and Jews encountered people who were none of these formulations, not even in the form of a faint hybridization. This epistemic challenge was also a rupture at the core of presuppositions of what it means to be a human being, which for Christians was presumed to be Christian; for Muslims, to be people of the Book; and for Jews, more or less the same, with privilege and obligations imposed upon the elected. The upheavals that followed created crises of justification, as the worlds of Indigenous peoples of the New World fought a series of impositions that posed a future completely without them, at worst, or with a modicum of their former numbers, at best. For the invaders, the crisis was at the level of theological naturalism and a theological-epistemic order: With the breakdown of theological rationalization, other forms of justification became necessary, such as accounting for nature and humanity without the creative intervention of a deity. Without preordination, the future held the possibility of the genuinely new (see Blumenberg 1985). The shift from a theological-naturalistic anthropology to a secular anthropology arose, but the normative underpinnings of theological rationality remained. Thus, the grammar of deification was shifted to epistemic and social orders, which led to a theodicy of the new era. Theodicy is the accounting for the legitimacy of G-d in the presence of injustice and evil. If G-d is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, why doesn’t He or She do something about injustice and evil? Or worse, given the criterion of omnipotence and omniscience, shouldn’t G-d be considered the source of injustice and evil? The classic response is to shift responsibility for life’s infelicities onto humanity through at least two arguments: (1) human beings are finite and are thus not able to grasp the greater good of G-d’s will and (2) G-d endowed human beings with free will, which they have abused. Both formulations place the blame on humankind — the first, in terms of perception and the second, in terms of deed.6 The deification of an epistemic or social order has similar results, in the sense that the integrity of the system depends on externalizing its contradictions. Thus, proponents of the imposed order regard poverty, disease, high mortality, and social misery as intrinsic to the condition of conquered peoples, instead of as afflictions imposed on them. The result is an anthropology of “problem people.” The modernity marked by this process differs from prior modernities precisely in the manner in which its philosophical anthropology did not only place whole groups of people outside of ongoing time, but also transformed the idea of the dominating group into a geographical reach that was 240

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genuinely global, while locating the dominated group outside of that terrain in what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of nonbeing” (see, for example, Dussel 1995, 1996, 2013; Gordon 2008: Chapter 1, Chapter 2; Mignolo 2012; Robinson 2001). In anthropological terms, “Christendom” was changed into “Europe” (which transformed the lives of Christians who were not north of the Mediterranean) and Europeans, deified but still asserting a mythos of the heavens above, became “men” below, against whom was now posited the rest of humanity. As sub-humanity, the anthropological order of modern racialization took its now well-known course. People did not, however, stop living, thinking, and fighting in the “zone of nonbeing“; neither did this struggle always assume the form of cultural authenticity. In some instances, it was more a matter of building on normative resources at hand with which to deal with the new, imposing epoch and which also challenged the theodicean presumptions of that system. Thus, as peoples across the globe faced the question of European laws versus so-called “traditional laws,” they also interrogated the problems of the age that inaugurated such dilemmas. Such inquiry led not only to a transformation of their indigenous concepts, but also to those that were being imposed on them. This is because, as scholars of Africana thought and decolonial studies have shown, the underside of modern life reveals its contradictions and thereby offers a broader picture of the epoch.7 Let us call this phenomenon “potentiated double consciousness,” a term coined by Jane Anna Gordon, who, through her engagement with the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paget Henry, pointed out that there are at least two kinds of double consciousness: (1) firststage double consciousness, where one sees oneself as constructed by the eyes of the (often hostile) Other and (2) the second stage, where one realises the errors of that false construction of the self and the society that cultivates it (see J. Gordon 2005 and 2014; Henry 2005; L. Gordon 2000). Realising the contradictions produced by a society that makes people into problems, critical reflection then turns to the society or social system. This movement brings the original presupposition of universality into question and particularizes it. The result is a subversion of false universality that proceeds by unmasking its actual particularity — a movement through which claims to universality are assessed with humility by distinguishing between universalising and universal practices.8 Potentiated double consciousness raises a question of the kind of critique the underside of modernity offers our understanding of not only the epistemic claims of the modern world, but also its normative claims.

Modern Ubuntu Because Ubuntu is Modern Ubuntu in the contemporary South African context is a serious matter on which not only case law, but also human lives depend. According to Mabogo P. More: In one sense ubuntu is a philosophical concept forming the basis of relationships, especially ethical behaviour. In another sense, it is a traditional politico-ideological 241

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concept referring to socio-political action. As a moral or ethical concept, it is a point of view according to which moral practices are founded exclusively on consideration and enhancement of human well-being; a preoccupation with “human”. It enjoins that what is morally good is what brings dignity, respect, contentment, and prosperity to others, self and the community at large. . . . uBuntu is a demand for respect for persons no matter what their circumstances may be. In its politico-ideological sense it is a principle for all forms of social or political relationships. It enjoins and makes for peace and social harmony by encouraging the practice of sharing in all forms of communal existence. (2006: 149, 156–7) Ubuntu has descriptive and prescriptive dimensions.9 Descriptively, there is its history and the empirical elements, as part of the moral anthropology of norms in the southern African context, often referred to as “traditional law.”10 (Oddly enough, British traditional law is simply called “common.”) On the other hand, it is the articulation of a critical philosophical position on norms offering not only its internal metacritique, but also one by which norms of the West, which European settlers presumptively asserted as norms of humanity, could be brought under scrutiny. As Drucilla Cornell and Nyoko Muvangua (2012) point out, in terms of its relation to Hobbesian and Kantian expectations of social order — the former premised on necessary conditions for social order and the latter on regulative ideals for freedom — Ubuntu offers a humanistic critique and constructive demand of whether human worth and dignity are indeed maintained through conceptions of rationality and reason, the consequence of which has been human subordination. A rational being includes, but is not reducible to, human beings and since there are dimensions of human beings that are outside the purview of rationality, any system that measures human worth solely in rationalist terms is bound to encounter the human being as a problem of systemic limitation and insubordination. The descriptive course also reveals affinities with ancient struggles against and with imperialism. As seen in the discussion of ancient Judaism, such efforts affect normative systems of regulation, such as Halakha or Jewish law. The normative framework for Jews was one in which the ethical face of G-d is the responsibility of the human being and this face takes the form of human dignity, exemplified in the rabbinic positions that emerged on, for instance, death.11 It was not always the case that Jewish burials required simplicity. Once lavish and ornate, the price of burying a loved one became so expensive that some families abandoned the deceased’s remains. Such a development was surely not the ethical face of G-d, reasoned the early medieval rabbis and they offered rules covering Jewish burial, premised on this mandate of dignity, which became Halakhic. Ubuntu, born of the normative debates of different African communities in what became known as South Africa, raises the question of the ethical face of humanity from people who faced the negation of dignity under conditions of colonization. Since colonization poses a crisis of indigenous values, critical reflection on those values reaches 242

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metanormative levels where the colonized peoples of South Africa (and, in truth, all colonized peoples) have to face not only their values and the responsibility for those values, but also the responsibility for responsibility. This raises a variety of philosophical questions, including that of human evasion or bad faith. A first-order conception of responsibility rests, for instance, on simply adhering to a command or following the normative rules. Valuing such rules, however, demands self-reflection and where there is no external source of value, the responsibility for such a value falls on the shoulders of the valuing agent. Such a burden may be too much for some of us to bear and we may attempt an escape through the denial of our responsibility for values in the first place. This effort, however, is premised on the conditions that brought about such an onus — the ability to accept or reject them, in other words, choice — which make it a form of selfdenial or bad faith.12 This conclusion depends not only on self-accountability, but also on accountability in itself, a public phenomenon that transcends the self. In the realm of ethics, this amounts to realising that the radicalization of oneself as an exception becomes an assault on sociality, with the performative contradiction of relying on the social, in order to be an exception in the first place. One cannot be an exception to a rule without there being rules. Thus, whether as the only point of view or as the rejection of being a point of view at all, the meaning of either requires a point of view from which to be differentiated from the other. Put differently, any human effort to be in a nonhuman relation is already thwarted because of its being a human aspiration in the first place. A danger consists, however, in making the rules into a fetish, one that collapses rules into what existentialists call seriousness, where one makes oneself forget that human responsibility for rules also requires knowing when such rules should be broken.13 To evade sociality — and, by extension, the conditions of evidence and accountability— also requires, then, attempting the same in relation to humanity. It would be a mistake, however, as Cornell and Muvangua have pointed out, to presume that the assertion or acknowledgement of sociality entails the affirmation of humanity (2012: 9–10, 14, 30). The Kantian model premised on “rational beings” could, as some of us have argued, affirm a “Kingdom of Ends,” a universal community that may not necessarily be a humane one.14 Take, for example, the liberal, neo-Kantian political philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness (1971).15 Rawls raised the importance of thinking through justice at the level of the basic institutions of a society, with the goal of constructing a just society. Justice, he claimed, is the basic virtue of all social institutions. This concern of Rawls is taken for granted as a project of universal import primarily because of the presumption of the universal translatability of the English word “justice,” even though, as anyone working through the concepts even within the Indo-European linguistic framework would attest, such translation is an extraordinarily presumptive one. Is “justice” as Rawls and many of us in the English language use it, mediated by its French usage, really identical to the Latin iustitia, which in turn was from iustus, often not mentioned in philosophical discussions that reach across time to the ancient Greek δίκη (dikē) or, when engaged philosophically, δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosunē) — that is, the ancient Greek notions? Or how about the Kmt or ancient Egyptian word—symbolized as an ostrich 243

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feather, at other times as scales or a primeval mound) — MAat or MAat?16 As we trudge through the variety of normative concepts with which to examine the proper ordering of a society, why can we not bring to the table normative ideals, that to which to aspire at the societal level, from the elements of a society that reaches out and attempts to speak to the rest of humanity? In other words, what might emerge from reformulating the question not only as one about the justice of Ubuntu, but also of the Ubuntu of justice? Formulated differently, is the scope of justice sufficient to incorporate Ubuntu or might the latter be a form of potentiated movement into a normative field where justice is simply not enough?17 This rather odd formulation to some should rightfully suggest a point of continuity and differentiation. For it would be correct to say there are points of normative convergence between justice and Ubuntu, but the extent to which they are identical should occasion pause. I say this for the same reasons of consideration with dikē and MAat (although MAat is closer to Ubuntu than dikē because of its significance also for truth). Here, I am drawing upon an insight from the famed Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu who, in his excellent and underappreciated Cultural Universals and Particulars (1996), argues simultaneously for universality and specificity, through a focus on the human capacity for communication. Although not all cultural concepts are translatable — that is, there is not complete linguistic isomorphism across human languages — it does not follow that their meanings cannot be learned. Anyone who has acquired language can, in principle, learn a concept from another language in its own terms. Thus, the significance of Ubuntu is not so much a matter of definition and translation, although that intellectual exercise is not short of importance, but of understanding. Thus oddly enough, although many in the African diaspora were not aware of the term “Ubuntu,” there are early 20th-century instances of arguing for the substance of that concept. Take, for instance, Charles Houston, who was the mastermind behind the legal stratagem that led to the legislation against segregation in the United States.18 Houston did not know about Ubuntu, but he thought about humanity and justice and he had formulated principles of justice akin to Rawls’s, but with a different outcome from Rawls on the metacritical question of assessing the principles. Rawls, as is well known, argued that justice in the United States (and possibly all Western liberal democracies) should be ordered according to two principles: one that prioritizes civil liberties and another that responds to inequalities and disadvantages.19 The latter, he contended, is fair if inequalities actually benefit the least advantaged members of the society. If, however, there were a situation in which these two principles were in conflict, Rawls advocated prioritizing the first principle over the second. In other words, civil liberties, which Rawls regarded as necessary conditions for the formation of moral persons, must be protected, even at the expense of the least advantaged people. Houston, who formulated these principles nearly a quarter of a century before Rawls, argued the contrary (see Houston 1935a, 1935b, 1935c, 1936, 1940).20 Where the two principles conflicted, he defended the material transformation of inequalities over the prioritising of liberties — the second principle over the first. His rationale was interestingly based on the kind of argument that Rawls was also engaged in, namely the 244

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articulation of the conditions of possibility for a just society. Houston pointed out that liberties are meaningless without material conditions from which to enact them — which amounts to questioning the formation of moral persons outside of a materially significant framework for sociality and reflection. Rawls argued as though a principle could serve as both necessary and sufficient condition for its manifestation, although this was clearly not his intent, given his overall goal of articulating, through his notion of a basic structure, a just society. We see here different positions on a fundamentally human question. Because Rawls writes from a perspective that imagines the capacity to create material conditions so long as liberty is maintained, his heuristic model is much like that of the once-imagined Robinson Crusoe. What Houston understands, however, is that the Crusoe model is fallacious precisely because it posits the human being in the person of Friday outside of society, when the question at hand is about a just society. Crusoe’s welfare depends on Friday, whose erasure as a human being in the narrative enables Crusoe to appear selfsufficient. That the problem already presupposes a world of others means that the inherent sociality of social conditions has to be taken into account. We are on the road here to another fundamental difference, namely between a conception of the human being as a substance in isolation versus that of being a relationship that presupposes a world of others and in which struggle is required for things that really matter. This is one reason why, in spite of their shared concerns for a just society, Houston’s and Rawls’s genealogical paths point in different directions. Houston’s places him in affinity with revolutionary thinkers on law and society, while Rawls’s theory points to reforms of a society that is presumed to be basically decent. Both are premised on fundamentally different philosophical anthropologies. The relationality of the human being is, in other words, the task through which not only justice must be cultivated, but also the human being (and human well-being). That Houston was a jurist brings to the fore his connection to Ubuntu and to Cornell and Muvangua’s wider question of its relation to law. The notion of Ubuntu as “the Law of law,” of course raises questions of its metanormative significance and also, given the postcolonial context in which it is raised, the question of whether it collapses into the neocolonial relations admonished in the thought of Fanon and more recently in Achille Mbembe’s reflections in On the Postcolony (2001). According to Mbembe, the period of colonial independence is unfortunately not the eradication of colonial relations because there is the continued epistemic and normative structure of a colony without the formal legal apparatus or status. Thus, the postcolony is really a new kind of colony. Mbembe does not use the term “neocolonialism” because that model offers too neat a picture of agents (former governors) and passive subjects (people of the neocolony). In stream with Fanon, he argues for the analysis of complicit relations, of entangled networks of agents, whose actions constitute a colony that is disavowed as such. The postcolony raises the problem of what decolonial theorists call “decolonization.” This project is often addressed in epistemic terms as challenging also the meaning of material conditions of colonization. Epistemic decolonization becomes the focus. The portrait I have been offering here raises an additional level of decolonization, however. 245

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While a necessary condition, epistemic decolonization is insufficient because of its failure to get at the core of normative life. The decolonization of normative life is also needed, which is hard to imagine outside of an epistemic framework, precisely because of the scope of epistemological imposition on modern life. This is why I have argued for analyses premised on the fundamental and symbiotic relationships across questions of identity, liberation and critique or, in more formal terms, philosophical anthropology, freedom and metacritiques of reason.21 Returning to Ubuntu, we should consider its similarity to notions such as Halacha in Judaism and sharia in Islam. The specificity of these, however, is the mediating role of the Roman Empire, the emergence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Roman concepts of relegere (to read again) and religare (to bind), through which religion emerges as a category eventually separated from legis (genitive of lex, “law”), in the modern separation of state and religion. Ubuntu, however, while posed in the context of colonial imposition and resistance, is not a religious notion. It is a calling for a society to rise to a standard beyond those imposed on it. It is, in other words, a realisation that while the illegalisation of apartheid was a form of justice, the cultivation of a post-apartheid society is an ongoing project, through which the responsibility for justice means appealing to a higher standard than those posed by a world in which epistemic and normative practices have been, in a word, colonized. Addressing the emancipatory potential of Ubuntu, then, requires transcending the expected relativising of it posed by unfortunate epistemic and metaethical attitudes toward things African, often posed in patronizing terms, such as “tradition”. It demands, I dare say, taking seriously its universalizing elements, not simply those elements that are aligned with extant hierarchies, but also those that would enable us to aspire to a better future. This does not suggest an imperial imposition on the rest of the world — which is no threat, given the realities of power and the status of states in the international arena — but instead, simply an encomium from the distinct perspective of struggle in a world that is patently global. It means admitting that the purported universal normative language is limited and that each generation of humanity has the task of raising the standards of what we claim to be the best in all of us. As I have already argued, this means taking seriously Du Bois’s theories of double consciousness and potentiated double consciousness. Recall that the first involves understanding the perspective by which Africa is seen in the world, while the second requires a critique of the contradictions of that perspective by bringing global hegemony under investigation and critique. In effect, that critical evaluation particularizes hegemonic conceptions of universality in ways that expand knowledge and justice, while also taking into account the fallacy of closure on such efforts. In effect, the practice is universalizing without collapsing into closed universality. In other words, it remains open to self-critique and the human capacity to think, act and build otherwise.

A Concluding Thought Reading Cornell’s Defending Ideals (2004), one can easily see why Ubuntu is a concept that she, an Irish-American woman committed to a world of human decency, embraces. 246

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Society, she contends, must always strive to become better. I would add to this that the responsibility for that responsibility is a crucial element of any society that takes seriously the question of movement as project. The call to Ubuntu, then, means a scale of accountability that is no less than radical, for it means that it must account not only for the question of its emancipating potential, but also for the subject of such practice and the conditions by which both are taken into account. As such, drawing on the work of Philip Iya, Mabogo More, Yvonne Mokgoro, Albie Sachs and many others, the notion of Ubuntu as “Law of laws” calls for a consideration dreaded and rebuked in an age of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, namely the radical idea that law and the mechanisms by which society is governed should, at the end of the day, exist for the sake of human well-being.

Notes 1. On this matter of “ghostlike existence,” see the last chapter — “Existential Borders of Anonymity and Superfluous Invisibility” — in Gordon (2000) and “On the Temporality of Indigenous Identity” (Gordon 2013a: 60–78). 2. “Kmt,” sometimes written as “Kam,” “Kamit” or “Kemet,” meaning “dark lands,” was the original name of what is now known as Egypt, the Greek name for the area (see Gordon 2008: 2). 3. As I am Jewish, I use this convention of not fully spelling out the name since the monotheistic formulation collapses into a proper name instead of a general referent. 4. An excellent history of this process of transformation is offered by Cohen (1999); see also Gordon (2011: 75–82). 5. The debates within Islam, including between various groups, such as the Sunni majority, Shiite minority and the various other sects, are not my main concern here. What they all have in common is the view that Islam offers a better understanding of the human being’s place in the universe, which for them requires a critique of Judaism and Christianity (among others). For a treatment similar to some of what I will be arguing here, see Shariati (1981). 6. There are many classic discussions of theodicy. For provocative recent discussions from Africana thinkers, see Pinn (1999) and Jackson (2009). Although theodicean arguments are well beyond Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s metaphysical reflections on the subject, as seen in the thought of Saint Augustine in the early Middle Ages, I refer to these two black scholars’ recent reflections because of the obvious modern context of anti-black racism. 7. For Africana thought, see Gordon (2008), and for decolonial studies, see for instance, Mignolo (2012) and Maldonado-Torres (2008). 8. For more on this distinction, see for example, Gordon (2012). A similar consideration is made in Buck-Morss (2009), while Jane Anna Gordon also discusses this distinction in Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 9. Various expanded definitions are offered in Cornell and Muvangua (2012). 10. For a critical discussion of this tendency, see Sachs (2012: 303–16), Serequeberhan (2000) and Gordon (2008: Chapters 1 and 2). 11. For discussion of death in Rabbinic Judaism, see for instance, Schulweis (2001) and Glustrom (1989). 12. For a detailed discussion of this concept, see Gordon (1999). 247

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge 13. On the spirit of seriousness, see Gordon (1999). On the fetishising of rules in contemporary times, see Comaroff and Comaroff (2006: 1–56). 14. I am referring to Kant’s classic discussion of the “Kingdom of Ends” (1997); see also my critical discussion in Gordon (1999: Part II). 15. Rawls’s critics covered every spectrum. They ranged from libertarians of radically different kinds, such as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, to welfare-state liberals, such as Ronald Dworkin and Michael Sandel, to Marxists, such as G.E. Cohen and many more. That Rawls prioritised the first over the second principle makes it difficult, however, for his brand of liberalism not to collapse into neoliberalism, the brand of market fundamentalism premised on the preservation of individual liberty and the rejection of group rights. See, for example, the debates in Daniels (1989). 16. For a detailed discussion of MAat, see Karenga (2006). The Greek and Latin concepts have received much attention, but see MacIntyre (1984) for a similar set of critical concerns about presuppositions on justice from antiquity to modernity. 17. Other chapters in this volume offer insights into this debate. 18. For rich discussions of Houston’s life and thought, see Conyers (2012). 19. See Rawls (1971) for his classic statement of his position; Rawls (1993) for his revisions, especially along lines of cultural specificity; Rawls (1999) for a later attempt; and Rawls and Kelly (2001) for considerations interestingly in the direction of Houston. For standard debates on Rawls’s theory, see for example, Freeman (2002), in addition to Daniels (1989). 20. As is evident from these articles, Houston believed in getting to the point and being brief. For a biography and discussion, see James (2010) and Friedman (2008). 21. I outline these considerations in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008) and address them specifically in terms of what I call the decolonization of normative life in No Longer Enslaved Yet Not Quite Free (forthcoming 2014). For related discussion, see also Gordon (2013b: 25–9).

References Blumenberg, H. 1985. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by R.M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT Press. Buck-Morss, S. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Cohen, S.J.D. 1999. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley: University of California Press. Comaroff J. and J. Comaroff. 2006. “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction”. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, 1–56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conyers, J., Jr (ed.). 2012. Charles H. Houston: An Interdisciplinary Study of Civil Rights Leadership. Lanham: Lexington Books. Cornell, D. 2004. Defending Ideals: War Democracy, and Political Struggles. New York: Routledge. Cornell D. and N. Muvangua (eds). 2012. Ubuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence. New York: Fordham University Press. Daniels, N. (ed.). 1989. Reading Rawls: Critical Studies of Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice”. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Dussel, E. 1995. The Invention of the Americans: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by M. Barber. New York: Continuum.

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Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu ——. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. ——. 2013. “Anti-Cartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical Anti-Discourse of Modernity”. Journal of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge XI (1): 25–30. Freeman, S. (ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to John Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, M.J. 2008. Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Washington, DC : US Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs. Available at http://www. america.gov/media/pdf/books/free-at-last.pdf#popup. Glustrom, S. 1989. The Myth and Reality of Judaism. West Orange: Behrman House Publishers. Gordon, J.A. 2005. “The General Will and Political Legitimacy: Secularization, Double Consciousness, and Force in Modern Democratic Theory.” Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science Dissertation: The University of Pennsylvania. Gordon, J.A. 2014. Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon. New York: Fordham University Press. Gordon, L.R. 1999. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst: Humanity Books; originally published by Humanities International, 1995. ——. 2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge. ——. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——. 2011. “Réflexions sur la question afro-juive”. Plurielles: Revue culturelle et politique pour un judaïsme humaniste et laïque 16: 75–82. ——. 2012. “Essentialist Anti-Essentialism, With Considerations from Other Sides of Modernity”. Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal 1. Available at http:// quaderna.org/ wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Gordon-essentialist-anti-essentialism.pdf. ——. 2013a. “On the Temporality of Indigenous Identity”. In The Politics of Identity: Emerging Indigineity, ed. M. Harris, M. Nakata and B. Carlson, 60–78. Sydney : UTS ePress. ——. 2013b. “Thoughts on Dussel’s ‘Anti-Cartesian Mediations’”. Human Architecture XI (1): 25–9. Gordon, L.R. and J.A. Gordon. 2009. Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. New York: Routledge. Henry, P. 2005. “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications”. C.L.R. James Journal 11 (1): 7–12. Houston, C. 1935a. “Cracking Closed University Doors.” Crisis 42 (December): 364. ——. 1935b. “Educational Inequalities Must Go.” Crisis 42 (October): 300. ——. 1935c. “The Need for Negro Lawyers.” Journal of Negro Education 4 (January): 49. ——. 1936. “Glass Aided School Inequalities.” Crisis 43 (January): 15. ——. 1940. “Saving the World for Democracy.” A series for The Pittsburgh Courier, 20, 27 July; 2, 17, 24, 31 August; 7, 14, 21, 28 September and 5, 12 October. Jackson, S.A. 2009. Islam and Black Suffering. New York: Oxford University Press. James, R. Jr. 2010. Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Kant, I. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Edited and translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karenga, M. 2006. Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt; A Study in African Ethics. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press; hardback edition published in 2004 by Routledge. MacIntyre, A.C. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edition. South Bend: Notre Dame University Press. Maldonado-Torres, N. 2008. Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. 249

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mignolo, W. 2012. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press. More, P.M. 2006. “South Africa under and after Apartheid.” In A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. K. Wiredu, 148–60. Oxford: Blackwell. Pinn, A.B. 1999. Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. New York: Continuum. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1999. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. and E. Kelly (eds). 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Robinson, C. 2001. An Antrhopology of Marxism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sachs, A. 2012. “Towards the Liberation and Revitalization of Customary Law.” In Ubuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence, ed. D. Cornell and N. Muvangua, 303–16. New York: Fordham University Press. Schulweis, H.M. 2001. Finding Each Other in Judaism: Meditations on the Rites of Passage from Birth to Immortality. New York: UAHC Press. Serequeberhan, T. 2000. Our Heritage: The Past in the Present of African-American and African Existence. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Shariati, A. 1981. Man and Islam. Translated by Fatolla Marjani. North Haledon: Islamic Publications International. Trouillot, M-R. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wiredu, K. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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CHAPTER 22 TELEOLOGICAL SUSPENSIONS FOR THE SAKE OF POLITICAL LIFE

What follows is an exploration of the decadence imposed on contemporary political life and the stifling of the imagination it occasions. Much of this emerges not only from the assertion of capitalism as the age’s theodicy but also its accompanying normative liberalism turned neoliberalism on the road to neoconservatism and fascism. The result is morality collapsing into moralism at the price also of political life. What would it mean to think the political under such circumstances? I will argue it means also committing a teleological suspension of epistemology through a commitment to the demands of a world that transcends the self. One must act, in other words, on the basis of what one cannot know in advance.

Decadence, Disciplinary and Otherwise Decadence refers to a condition of decay. Each stage of decaying has its accompanying features. In societies, these features or symptoms take the form of values and kinds of knowledge that support them. We could call those dying values and thought. By contrast, when there is not a process of decay but instead one of growth, there are as well values and their epistemic support. We could call those living values and thought. A symptom of a dying age is nihilism, and its epistemological consequence is the leveling of knowledge and truth often into “opinion” as evidence ceases to offer evidential affect and effect (Nietzsche 1968; Kierkegaard 2010). This negative development affects disciplines—organisations and practices of producing and communicating knowledge— through making them insular. Where this occurs, they speak only to themselves, which makes the impact of what they produce relevant only to their adherents. The discipline then collapses into epistemological solipsism. Where such thought becomes the world, then the absence of an outside creates the illusion of omniscience. The discipline becomes godlike. As such, its precepts and methodological assumptions become all its practitioners supposedly need to know. They thus apply those resources without expectations of external accountability. They turn away from reality and truth (beyond the precepts) because, godlike, the discipline becomes all there is and thus all to learn. I call this phenomenon disciplinary decadence (Gordon 2006: passim, but especially chapters 1 and 2). A familiar feature of our times is the tendency of practitioners of disciplines to reject ideas from other disciplines on the basis of not being their own. Readers are no doubt familiar with natural scientists who criticize practitioners of the human sciences for not

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being “scientific.” In specific terms, biologists, chemists, and physicists may criticize historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and sociologists for not offering biological, chemical, or physical analyses. Those they criticize are not immune to this practice. There are historians who criticize others for not being historical, literary scholars who criticize others for not being literary, philosophers who do the same regarding those who are not philosophical, and sociologists for those who are not sociological. To understand this fallacy, just add “ism” to the discipline, and one has biologism, chemistism, physicism, historicism, literary textualism, philosophicalism, and sociologism. Philosophicalism is a peculiar one here, for there is already something awry with reductivism in philosophy. It in effect makes philosophy not philosophical. An aspect of disciplinary decadence to consider is its structural grammar of a theodicy. The aim of theodicy is to demonstrate the intrinsic validity of the divine through the externalizing of lived contradictions. Where the god is all-good, allpowerful, and all-knowing, it is difficult to account for the presence of life’s infelicities without compromising the intrinsic goodness of a god with the power of preventing evil and injustice. In an age where legitimacy rejects theological accounts, other elements have taken the stage. Where capitalism is deified, for instance, capital and an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good market is the substitute. This could be done with models of knowledge, such as science, or with cultural idols, such as “civilization” (Appiah 2016). As disciplinary decadence is also a form of theodicy, so, too, are the prevailing norms of assessing these institutions.

Rule Over Politics Recall the example of disciplinary decadence. Where the discipline is ontologized, there is nothing its practitioners can do but work within it. Where it is understood as a human system, as a living expression of human actions, it could then be transformed through its practitioners’ willingness to go beyond it. I call this a “teleological suspension of disciplinarity” (Gordon 2006: 44). It means going beyond a discipline for the sake of purposes that transcend it. Where disciplines are created to address human relationships with reality, such a purposeful suspension of the discipline could be for the sake of furthering our relationship with reality. We arrive, then, at a problem on at least the Western side of the Euromodern world. That side emerged with the rise of capitalism, which brought along its forms of subjectivity. This includes its philosophical anthropology, which in the end is the individual consuming subject. This subject brought along with it a position toward political life. As premised on legitimacy through and onto itself, such an individualized subject cannot articulate objectivity and reality because that would require being accountable to something beyond itself. If it makes itself objective and all that is real, the concepts would collapse. There would be no subjectivity from which objectivity could make sense and vice versa. The same would happen to the real and the nonreal. Thus, if conceding there is a world of others, what that subject must do is question the hold they 252

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may have on the individual self through creating a form of nominalism of the world. In other words, there are physical things of which some are selves onto themselves, and beyond that a world of differing ways of relating to them. It is not long before truth is jeopardized and what at best could be offered in the company of others is “opinion.” Euromodern liberal political theory grew out of this philosophical anthropology. As politics, classically understood, involved power as manifested in speech and negotiated conflicts and social aims for flourishing depending on such practices of communication, the threat of conflict via dissent made politics also a threat to what self-sustaining models of the individual sought—namely, the individual’s own security and appetite. The consumer-individual increasingly prevailed, and as accountability pointed back to that individual, the decline of collective responsibility meant more direct normative models of morality and force of law supervened. In short, liberal political theory makes morality and law supervene over politics. This supervenience created an important split, the consequences of which are suffered into the present. The clear statement of this division was in the French eighteenthcentury French parliament, where Monarchists sat on the right and Republicans on the left. This right and left separation, although at first arbitrary, had psychoanalytical significance, since “right” also refers to being straight in a society where “left” suffered from much superstition. In French, the words were droit and gauche. Gauche had replaced the earlier senestre, which, as it sounds, was from the Latin sinister (literally, to the left). Droit has origins in the Latin directus (“straight”), which is the past participle of dirigere (“to set straight”). We see in this etymological exercise a portrait of two fundamentally different responses to crises. A crisis, after all, refers to a situation in which a decision must be made. Some people’s response is to attempt to set things straight. This presumes that which is not straight is a deviation from an initial straight or right position. The setting things straight therefore has an implicit “again” in it and thus a return. There is therefore an inherent conservative turn in the right, and that involves the associations of rightness such as law and order. The term droit, after all, also refers to legal rightness. The right, then, is about a form of rectitude of law and order embedded in an imagined right past. Although conservatives tend to seek order through returning to traditional values, another group—neoconservatives—demand more and thus become right of traditional conservatives (Kerwick 2016). Since order supervenes, this means threats to it—such as dissent, freedom, liberty—are subordinated. If radicalized, this means all oppositions, all difference, all dissent, all things rendered external threats, must be eliminated. The result is fascism. There is also an interpretation of keeping straight instead of resetting as straight. This model, which a theorist such as the famed Anglo-American philosopher John Rawls called “well-ordered,” is a core aspect of liberal thought. It is also simultaneously conservative in that to maintain straightness requires conserving or preserving it. Thus, the rightward turn of re-setting straight would be interpreted here as transforming what is already straight. The conflict, then, becomes one of how the moment of crisis is interpreted. This leaves the leftward turn. That one looks at liberalism and positions moving right of it as wrong interpretations of each of their moments. The past and the 253

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present, from this perspective, are both imperfect. In fact, there is no perfect moment but instead, those of perfecting or at least making moments better. This makes leftward thought future-oriented with the understanding of each future moment being different than the present. Where better, it is progressivism. Where that progressivism leads to an imagined perfection—a utopia—there is the return of a paradoxical conservatism, for what else is there to do with perfection than to maintain it? The leftward position also raises questions of liberty and freedom. This is because for change to be possible, there must be something that people could do that diverges from what people have done. This ability to bring in the new requires liberty and the possibility of freedom. It has liberty because it must unlock the grips of the past and the present. Where it remains negative in the sense of unlocking or perhaps destroying, its goal becomes an absence of constraints. Radicalised, this model of leftism promises anarchy. There isn’t enough space to go through the complicated varieties of anarchy averred over the past few hundred years. For now, the crucial consideration is that where anarchy emerges and each individual is not a god, the only recourse is for some kind of voluntary collective management of life resources. It is not long, however, before one realises that what is voluntary can be dissolved without compulsory—that is, nonvoluntary— maintenance. This is where conservatism and libertarianism meet, and where both could also meet fascism. After all, fascism is a voluntary association of fascists. This portrait requires, then, a leftward turn in which liberty alone is not the goal. It requires an understanding of freedom that is richer than an absence of constraints. Imagine the plight of prisoners. When released, they have liberty. When they escape, they also have liberty. Both, however, often seek the same thing: to go home. This “place” or set of relationships of belonging is where people could live and at times flourish. It requires the empowering of possibility. There are people who have traumatic associations with their place of belonging. One could say they belong in those places in the form of abuse and suffering. The response is that such places are perversions of home. They introduce the paradox of nonbelonging belonging or belonging by virtue of not belonging. The outcome of either is the same—some form of escape. They are thus not homes properly understood, except for the masochists who may need degradation as affirmation of the familiar. Rejecting that, the course of belonging through places of flourishing entail possibility, and this, then, leads to concepts such as growth and maturation. The latter is crucial here, since maturation involves understanding the false dilemma of dystopia versus utopia. Life is not a case of the depressing versus the ideal. It is also one of building what is reasonable in the face of its strengths and weaknesses. Seeing both facilitates a dialectical relationship to reality in which there are not always two competing universals of the positive and the negative but instead an interactive relationship of both. What, we should then ask, as we did with capitalism, would be the philosophical anthropology of that leftward turn? It would be no less than the ongoing realization of incomplete subjectivity, of taking responsibility for a future that is never foreclosed or overdetermined but instead must be built beyond one’s immediate reach. We come, then, to a fundamental distinction of right and left. The right, after all, decides within a temporal realm of immediate reach. This means for the right it all comes 254

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back to the proverbial me, which is why others are often jeopardized. A similar path emerges for the various sliding locations of liberal identification. The leftward turn is distinguished, as well, by an immediate and a far-reaching temporality. The immediate one tends to grasp for what “we”—understood as those in the here and now—can reach and thus eventually back to a “me.” That is why some forms of left could slide easily into the right. Another kind realizes that a far-reaching temporality offers a place into which one cannot enter, yet could only exist from the actions of immediate and succeeding generations. The relationship of subjects thus become between the known and the anonymous. In this second model is a clue to political responsibility and political action. After all, as it is always about us and they who are not us, the ramifications of such actions are responsibilities for those who are always eventually unknown. Without a forecasted outcome of who they are and what they would receive, action becomes an existential challenge. It requires commitment without knowledge of outcome. It is political action that is, in the language of Kierkegaard, a leap of faith. Such a leap, however, requires infinite resignation. This means no guarantee of anything on the other side to catch one. No epistemic or moral mediation. This is why Kierkegaard (1983) considered a teleological suspension of the ethical. It does not mean that ethical life disappears. It simply means it does not justify itself and that taking the leap requires taking full responsibility for that leap. This is an ancient insight. It is there in Judaism. It is also there in Hindu thought. It is there all across the world because human beings have always been haunted by a displeasing truth. We do not only face responsibility in the world but also our responsibility for that responsibility. When I argued for a teleological suspension of disciplinarity and the idols of our age, I meant also that initiating such a suspension is a form of leap in which there is responsibility, even at metalevels, for the justifications of justification. At political levels, this means there is no mediating force of promised political outcomes to grasp. It means the commitment itself is the responsibility through which responsibility for responsibility is made manifest. This is scary stuff. Some recoil from such a possibility and thus reject political responsibility and the political subject—we who are all politically responsible—for the immediate security of individual responsibility in the forms of legal and moral responsible ones (Jaspers 2000; Young 2004; Gordon 2022). The political is too open. They want the closed security of rule. This expectation of rule over the political is the proffered model of liberal, conservative, neoconservative, and fascist thought. Among liberals, the philosophical anthropology becomes a moral, and often moralised, one of moral individual subject. Neoliberalism, for example, strives for a combination of The Market and civil liberties focusing on individual moral subjects with individual rights. The conservative wants that subject to be constrained by tradition, the neoconservative by law, and the fascist demands no deviation from its total dictates. As the liberal subject is already shown to be an extension of Euromodern capitalism, we could imagine what follows. First, the idea of morality prevailing becomes the model of so-called normative political theory. This ultimately means eliminating the contingency of politics and, consequently, politics itself. Second, where politics is avowed but ultimately rejected, the 255

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task becomes its transformation under market constraints. This requires constructing a marketable political subject. Where that occurs, the most compatible kind is the moral one posing as political. Where to be political is to be moral, the logic of moral subjectivity emerges. Unfortunately, moral subjects often become moralistic through an expectation of moral purity. This offers notions of innocence, and the result is a world in which one could either be free of having done harm or be those who are harmed. The victimized subject as the moral subject follows, and appearance—at least in the avowed political realm—becomes premised on having been harmed. The logic here is legalistic in form, and in fact that is what emerges: Politics as a case of petitioned redress for harm. This destroys the political dimensions of political life, since, after all, the key subject of political life is the citizen, the agent of citizenship, the person whose appearance depends on actions on which the life of power depends. The citizen, qua citizen, need not be a victim. The citizen must foremost be capable. Thus the moralistic model is ultimately at war with citizenship and politics, but it is ironic here since it is offered as political in a world of the commodified politics. One’s political marketability becomes one’s victimization or harm. This is why, as we see in today’s postmodern reassertion of fascism, white hegemonic groups claim to be victims. It is why, in fact, there are so many victims or harmed subjects everywhere. It is not that there are not actually people who are harmed. It is that their harm is being weaponized at the expense of political life. It announces a claim on the basis of what one is (among the harmed) instead of what one can do (citizenship or political work). This development of the subordination of politics through the supervenience of moralistic subjectivity is an expression of political nihilism. It is symptomatic of presentday decadence.

Shifting the Geography of Reason, Shifting the Geography of Action A conclusion thus far in this analysis of decadence and its teleological suspension is that the degradation of political life holds within it forces of disempowerment. This means that although a triumphant moralism emerges—as we have seen historically with assertions of human rights as a feature of why liberal governing and economic models should be preserved—a reality is that there is a paradoxical undermining of democracy in the name of democracy. What, after all, is the point of an avowed moral democracy when it offers no power to the people? Of course much depends on what “people” means here, since moral subjects could also be people. What is significant is that political subjects as people is on the decline. How do we know? A significant sign of disempowerment is where agents then focus their agency. Where political life is healthy, their energy moves outward and interacts with the ever-widening reach of the social world and its communicability. Where political life is jeopardized, the movement is inward. Eventually, agency is a manifestation of the ability to act on the self, and where even that is jeopardized, it becomes the body devoid of selfhood. 256

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Thinking back to the 1960s into mid-1970s, the idea of a globally free and humane world was part of the Zeitgeist. Proponents of capitalism were not pleased. They knew such developments would require global democratic structures in which there would be nowhere for capital to turn for the extraction of profits from alienated labor. Large federal structures could ally with each other to form even larger ones through which ultimately there would be a mere agreement to create planetary political life. Everything from environment regulation to universal health care would be a possibility. Even in a globally mixed economy, the eventual task of keeping labor for the production of wealth would emerge, and that would mean the subordination of capital to the lives of people and other forms of life on the planet. The response was to hijack crucial concepts through which global democracy could be understood. One of those was the notion of the “global.” The success of the think tanks, corporate investments, and organised coups for this cause is evident in today’s equivocation of the word “global” with privatization. Accompanying this triumph is a host of hijacked concepts. The reader may notice my use of the word “Euromodern” throughout this piece. This is because the word “modern” has been co-opted to mean “European” or “Western,” when all the term once meant was “present.” To be present meant to be centrally linked to the time to come. Not to be so is to be past. Euromodern colonization and enslavement of much of the planet led to the presupposition of humanity’s future being a European or Western one, and thus the presumption was that the modern and European/Western were the same. Yet, before there was a geopolitical idea of Europe or Western, there were many countries in which their people understood themselves as belonging to the future. When other countries imposed upon them, the question of whether one would disappear or some mixed form would emerge arose. In the case of Indigenous peoples, where conquest is the model, the future is the settlers’. This renders Indigenous peoples of the past and pejorative notions of primitivism prevailed (Gordon 2011 and 2022.) Where the Indigenous peoples see invasion, however, the idea of continued struggle for the future transforms the present (Walsh 2018: 1532). There would then be no primitives but instead the question of which kind of future to live. This future may even transcend the Indigenous/settlers nonrelationship. It is a non-relationship because it is premised on reciprocal universals that do not meet; it is a Manicheanism of complete positivity and absolute negativity. Interaction explodes this binary and the question of relationships means no one’s remaining the same. The hijacking of the global led to left-wing allergy to the global and power. This is because the global becomes privatization and power becomes the coercive mechanisms of its implementation. The opposite becomes “local” and anti-power. This, however, is a mistake. This is because it closes off the imaginative possibility of a global public, with public institutions of global flourishing. It also reduces power to the right-wing model of coercion. As that model is the acquisition of power through the disempowering of others, one should ask what would eliminating disempowerment entail. What would that be other than empowering the once disempowered? This means imaginative and political work should be about extending the potential of flourishing forms of power. It is, in other words, a teleological suspension of power, where decadent power (coercive power) is transcended for the sake of open power (empowering freedom). 257

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This global reflection raises geopolitical dimensions of power, and since thought and deed must meet in such a quest, it raises the geography of reason. That reason, where subjugated for the purposes of coercive power, calls for transformation and the location of agents through which it could be manifested. It requires a move from selfcontained hording models to relational ones of building open relations. It demands shifting the geography of reason (Gordon 2011). Part of the arrogance of all empires is that they imagine they could open doors that lead one-way. The architects of the global advancement of privatized capital imagined using information technology such as the internet for unilateral flows of capital. Doors and keys are, however, technologies with possibilities beyond those initially posed. Combined with various pathways, they offer contexts through which imagination and deed could build a different and perhaps better kind of tomorrow. Unexpected paths could be many discoveries along the way. Taking hold of building alternative futures requires a commitment to having a future at all. Where the geography of reason means that only certain groups of people, in a specific geopolitical location called “the North,” have a future and reason, the structure of the relationship is reason’s supposedly coming “down” to the people of “the South.” The implications are many. For example, the presumption is that people from the North offer through reason the ideas—concepts, knowledge, theory—that make people of the South appear. Those from the South thus become passive recipients of such intellectual light. This, however, is a distortion of history and reality. It erases facts, and it cultivates dependency. It also leads, since the people of the North avowedly use reason to illuminate their experience, to the conclusion that Northern experience is more valuable than Southern ones. If the point is to bring reason to experience, then everyone must take responsibility for reason and the theory it creates. It is this taking responsibility for reason that leads to the shift. It is crucially done without permission of those who attempt to horde reason. But here is the additional shift. The horded reason is a distorted reason. It is a form of unreasonable reason that imagines itself complete and standing on its own. Those who challenge it do so from an understanding of reason as an ongoing relationship and commitment to certain kinds of practices that are thus, unlike this distorted reason, never “complete.” In such a challenge, even the future is open. They thus, in shifting the location/geography of reason, also shift reason itself from a closed to an open, relational commitment.

Concluding Remarks The implications of these shifts are many. They involve challenging even notions of “location.” There are, for instance, Southern elements in the geographical North—as we see in Eastern Europe and also the many migrant and refugee groups across the world— and there are Northern ones in the South, as we see with settlers in the South and the disasters and coups and anti-democracy directions of privatization elites co-opting countries such as Brazil and India. All of these are marked by historical inheritance from colonialism, enslavement, and racism. If we think about reason as an incomplete but 258

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ongoing commitment, we could see why shifting, instead of simply a shift, in the geography of reason is a contemporary task of social and historical transformation. This shifting is a living, ongoing commitment to building liveable worlds of living thought. Shifting the geography of reason also requires thinking anew and creatively how we understand concepts such as “right” and “left.” Recall there are left-wing positions that can slide into the right when we understand their goals. Conservatism, we have seen, is a turn toward a past, a cherry-picked past, of supposed security, law and order, perfection. This often requires eliminating sources of dissent such as difference, creativity, and freedom and, if pushed to its extreme, cultivating fascism. We should understand, however, that our world—that of the twenty-first century—is not like those of the past. Too many people respond to these crises through trying to figure out to which past century they belong—the twentieth, nineteenth, or eighteenth. Our world, however, is undergoing its own seismic shifts; with several billion people and technologies that traverse distances in a nanosecond, we live on a smaller planet. We are compressing reality and thus imploding life. Among the questions we face is the challenge of living on a planet incapable of sustaining the kind of life to which past ages have committed us—and those who wish to return by turning to the right are condemning us—to, as the East Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo put it, opening up our minds to our potential to address our challenges. The late political theorist Benjamin Barber (2017: 6) summarized the situation thus: “Nature doesn’t negotiate.” We must understand that the challenges we face today are human produced; they are manifestations of power by which human beings could affect life beyond ourselves. That means they require human action for their transformation, and the human world of produced power is, as we have seen, properly called politics. The right’s effort to eliminate political life imperils us all, but, as I have been arguing, we cannot address such a challenge through leaving the understanding of power, as has occurred with “global,” in their hands. They assert power as exclusively coercive. It would be a mistake for the rest of us to adopt such a view. Coercive power disempowers. To fight against disempowerment requires empowerment. Shifting the geography of reason requires understanding that power should not be reduced to a single element but instead should be explored to its creative potential. If we think of power as the ability to make things happen and securing access to the conditions of doing so, there is much proverbially to be done.

References Appiah, A. 2016 “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization”, The Guardian https://www. theguardian. com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisationappiah-reith-lecture?CMP=share_ btn_fb (accessed 9/11/2018). Barber, B. 2017 Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Global Warming. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gordon, L. 2006. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge. —— 2011 “Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World 1, no. 2: 96–104. —— 2022., Fear of Black Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 259

Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge Jaspers, K. 2000 The Question of German Guilt, trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Fordham University Press. Kerwick, J. 2016 Misguided Guardians: The Conservative Case against Neoconservatism. Las Vegas: Stairway Press. Kierkegaard, S. 1983 “Fear and Trembling” and “Repetition,” trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H Hong. Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press. —— 2010 The Present Age: The Death of Rebellion, trans. Alexander Dru, Harper Perennial, New York. Nietzsche, F. 1968 The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage. Walsh, C. 2018 “The Decolonial For: Resurgences, Shifts, and Movements”, in W. Mignolo and C. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Young, I. 2004 “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 4: 365–88.

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CHAPTER 23 LABOR, MIGRATION, AND RACE: TOWARD A SECULAR MODEL OF CITIZENSHIP

It has become a truism of recent thought that labor, migration, and race converge in the portrait of exploitation occasioned by modern capitalism. Often overlooked, however, are the theological underpinnings and their relation to the wider, global models of human organization and politics at hand. These foundations also offer a grammar of recurring themes by which, as Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, the path from the mythic to the scientific is a transformation more of name than form. We are left, then, with questions of the tenability of moving forward in an age that seems to be struggling with which past to force onto the present. The topic at hand points to a poetic theme from Audre Lorde, one that has achieved mythopoetic status—namely, her oft-cited maxim of the master’s tool not being able to tear down the master’s house. My co-editor Jane Anna Gordon and I received much rancor, for instance, from some critics for challenging this sacred tenet of black critical thought in our edited volume Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (2006). Our claim was straightforward: The master did not actually build his house, and the tools by which it was built were not exclusively his. Enslaved, dominated, oppressed, and subaltern peoples brought their intellectual resources and labor to the task of building the modern world, and any realistic effort to transcend the world of colonization and enslavement requires adjudicating this complicated, and often complicit, past and present. The point seemed obvious, but our critics responded in ways that struck us as, unfortunately, neurotic: They would rephrase our claim as somehow defending mastery and then offer as an alternative claim the very point we made—that among the tools used to build the status quo were resources from enslaved peoples. A difficult task, then, is the decolonizing one of conceptual transformation, where along with new concepts could also be new relationships by which to forge a different future and different forms of life. Such an effort requires some reexamination of the past. The approach by which I would like to consider these questions is that of Africana philosophy, with some considerations from ideas in political economy. Africana philosophy focuses, as I have argued in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), on problems of philosophical anthropology, freedom and liberation, and metacritical analyses of reason. These considerations emerged from the contradictions of the Euromodern world, where freedom is avowed in the midst of continuous constructions of more rigorous techniques of enslavement and dehumanization. They come to the fore in this area of philosophy because of what is historically posed by the African Diaspora as an enslaved and subsequently colonized population. They are also a consequence of the forms of rationalizations used to justify such modern developments, among which 261

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are anthropological notions with mythic and thus normative force albeit wrought by many contradictions in reality. Such misconceptions include the expectation of migration without transformation, of self-contained communities in motion, as if people are metaphysically complete substances, without change and effect. From such a perspective, human beings from different places can be in proximity without being in relation with each other. To maintain that view requires an extraordinary distortion of historical and social reality. A familiar theme of anthropological distortion is race. It is, however, one whose historical portrait is often governed by disciplinary decadence. Biologism, sociologism, psychologism, historicism, economicism, and a variety of other discipline-governed isms often offer portraits that situate race from the dawn of the species in one extreme to the nineteenth century and the emergence of the human sciences on the other. Yet the etymology of the term “race” tells a story that crosses all of these disciplinary perspectives in a way that confirms its anthropological character. The subject underneath race discourse is, after all, the human being, and since race is about the classification of human groups, it follows that its subject matter cannot be completely contained in disciplines designed to address only parts of human reality. Failure to understand this, as Du Bois (1898 and 1903) argued, leads, in effect, to attempting to squeeze the human being into a disciplinary shoe whose size is supposed to fit all. And what happens to those who do not fit into such a schema? They become, in a word, “problems.” A feature of problem people is that they become problems by virtue of failures of systemic assimilation. It is not that they necessarily resist systemic assimilation. It is that they face a circumstance of institutional bad faith, where the mechanisms of rejection in the social world, manifested or denied by those who affect and effect them, hide from themselves by placing “cause” onto supposedly problem people. Put differently, problem people are blamed for their condition through processes that include problematic explanations. These include ideological and hegemonic rationalizations, neurotic investments, and an array of self-deceiving devices. A key exemplar of these tendencies is the punitive dimensions of social practices and explanations that emerge when race is introduced. We are familiar today with what happens to social welfare programs in Europe and North America, for instance, when the populations benefiting from them include those of a dark hue. They are either eroded or eradicated, or if continued, beset with conditions that did not apply to the dominant populations (see Handler, 2004; Handler and Hasenfeld, 2007). The explanation of exploitation is an insufficient explanation of this tendency, however, since that factor would be sufficient grounds for not offering social welfare remedies to the preceding populations as well. To understand this dynamic, some explanation of race and its history is needed. Race has a history of a prototypical and then full-fledged form of thought or what Paul Taylor (2004) calls “self conscious race thinking.” The prototypical history refers to theories of human difference from ancient to the end of medieval times. The ancient versions, in Africa, Asia, and Europe were not explicitly race thinking because the concept was not yet developed, but familiar tropes of a centered group of human beings counting as truly human versus those who were evident in ancient writings. These accounts of 262

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human difference were premised upon teleological conceptions of nature, in which the centered group exemplified the direction or purpose of achieved humanness. Although there was variation in the models offered, the ancient Greeks generally thought in terms of a species-form of human achievement. For Plato, these concerns transcended the organic features of embodied human beings, but for Aristotle, the organic fusion of form and matter made concrete the manifestations of human potential in the centered group and a natural limitation on the outside groups, which included, as argued in his Politics, barbarians, women, and slaves (cf. Robinson, 2001). The emergence of Christendom transformed the centered group into one legitimated by a theological naturalism, which framed the outsiders at first as those who rejected Christianity. In the Iberian Peninsula, this framework took the form of raza, which referred to breeds of dogs and horses and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews. As Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews, represented a deviation from and rejection of Christian normativity. The defeat of the Moors in Iberia was followed by the Inquisition to assess the authenticity of the remaining populations of Moors and Jews who had converted to Christianity, a process which led to demands for demonstrations of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) best exemplified by individuals whose origins were supposedly purely Christian. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological center, these groups stood as a prototypical formulation of the anthropology that took a path through razza (Italian) to the modern term race. The initial period of the expansion of Christendom in the late fifteenth century led to Christian encounters with populations of people who were neither Moor nor Jew, although there were efforts to interpret them in such terms as Conquistadors had at first thought they were encountering strange mosques and synagogues (when the populations were presumed to have been lost Hebrew “tribes”) in the New World. The enslavement and near genocide of the Native populations of the Americas led to Bartolomé Las Casas’s efforts to save them through appeals to the Papal authority and his famous debate with Gines de Sepúlveda on the status and suitability of the Native populations for slavery. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a consequence of these conflicts. The emerging secular explanations that developed by the end of the sixteenth century were in no small terms a consequence of meeting people; animals; and fauna not accounted for in the Bible, in addition to the changing worldviews from the emerging new science inaugurated by the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Bacon, to name a few. This new science demanded explanations, as Ernst Cassirer observed in An Essay on Man (1962), without theological causality. The search for non-theological causation in the human organism became part of a nexus rooted in nature itself. Johann Blumenbach devoted his classification interests, for instance, to divisions within the human species, racial divisions, correlated with the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, as they tend to be known today, including the term Caucasians, which he coined, to refer to Europeans. In the nineteenth century, the explanation that eclipsed all discussions up to that point at least with regard to the understanding of the human being in nature and the development of human differences was Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. With regard to the human being and differences in the social world, the theoretical 263

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frameworks that set the stage for the eventual critique of Darwinian conceptions of race was the materialist sociology of Karl Marx, the historico-genealogical “positivist” anthropology of Anténor Firmin, the metacritical one of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the socialdiagnostic phenomenology that grew out of Husserl’s thought and critical work on the human sciences in the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon, as well as the structuralist and poststructuralist turns from Lévi-Strauss through to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, among others (see Carbonell 2009; Chandler, 2006; L. Gordon, 2008; Taylor, 2004). A crucial and missing backdrop of this portrait, however, is the story of imperialism or at least geopolitical relationships akin to imperial ones. (I say this because we simply presume that the Greco-Roman concept of empire applies to the expanded relations of geo-power orchestrated by the Chin state to create China or the Moguls in India or the Sultans in the Arabic world or the Aztec-controlled regions. Walter Mignolo [2008] has argued, e.g., that these are unique cultural political relations that may not be properly understood by the notion of “empire.”) That race is, however, a concept that emerged within the historical experience through which Europe emerged legitimately requires consideration of its imperial undercurrent. A crucial feature of empires is their structure of central consumption. Empires reach outward and create a flow of resources inward, to their center, where they are consumed. The technological resources of empires affect the reach and speed of consumption, and they also affect the labor required for their function. Empires, in other words, produce new relations as they engulf new terrains of people, and in doing this, something particularly unexpected happens. The hope of empires is to have a static center of agents who consume, but this expectation is reproduced as the empire reaches out and leads to a flow of people to the center for the sake of their own survival. Every empire, in other words, stimulates migration of peoples. In the past, this process of consumption and migration took millennia to exhaust themselves, then centuries, and now decades. We forget that the few hundred years of British imperial rule and not even a century of U.S. imperial hegemony are nothing compared to the times of Rome or Egypt, and, if we count the Chin (Qin) expansion into China as an empire, expanded by the Han and subsequent dynasties, that continues today as a global political force. Empires, in other words, are facing a compression of time. In addition to a compression of time, empires are also facing the same of space. This is because the geographical reach of empires is now global, and with nowhere else to go, the world shrinks (see Gordon and Gordon, 2009: chapter 5). One misconception of migration stimulated by empire is the notion that the imperial center remains the same while the periphery changes. The anxiously protected expectation of centered and national purity is compromised by the impossibility of maintained asymmetry between groups of peoples. It takes too much energy to keep people out while consuming what they have to offer, including the people themselves. The stories are familiar. Egypt conquering outward created the Afro-Asiatic world. Persia doing the same affected the Mediterranean Afro-Asiatic world and expanded it into the foundations of a Euro-Afro-Asiatic one. And Rome doing the same led to the fusion known today as Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity (cf. Cohen, 1999). The 264

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reassertion of the Afro-Asiatic world led to Islam, and the conflict that followed led to the formation of Western civilization, Europe, and the modern world. (We forget today that although we look to the Middle East for Islam, most Muslims are in Africa and southern Asia.) And as varieties of Christian capitalism were transformed into secular modernity, Hindu-affected capitalism and Buddhist-affected capitalisms are bursting from their cocoon as custodians of the damaged infrastructures of Western capitalist countries tremble and look to a future that for them is no less than the end of the world. An odd dimension of these recent developments of temporal and spatial compression is a silly conflict on which past forms of globalism into which to retreat. The neoconservative response, for instance, is to look to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inspiration from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke (Thompson and Brook 2010; Frank, 2008). The neoliberals expand matters to the nineteenth century, by integrating Locke with John Stuart Mill while triumphantly rejecting Marx as a nineteenth-century relic and failure (Harvey 2005). Twentieth-century globalism is hardly considered, however, since that age of revolution, marked by experiments with socialism and the Cold War, is now subject mostly to critique and metacritique. Put differently, it’s as if the twentieth century’s legacy is global chaos left for the twenty-first century to fix, or at least attempt to fix. The rub, however, is that such problems are global, but there is fear of taking on the task of articulating what a genuinely twenty-first century globalism should be. The fallacy, after all, is to presume that globalism must be either a fifteenth-through-nineteenth-century phenomenon. As the world becomes geopolitically smaller, especially as environmental crises now accompany economic ones, humanity clearly can no longer afford to turn its back on its global situation. Although the global situation of humankind is beset with many problems, among them is the continued model of a religious grammar of citizenship, brought from relegation, which shares etymological roots with religion, in the Roman and then Holy Roman worlds. The term “citizen” at first seems free of religious connotation, as it pertains to city dwelling, and with it only the correlative social relations whose legacy is what we know as politics. The polis was, after all, not only an ancient city but also a place in which relations of war were sublimated and transformed into discursive agonal practices. The price of physical conflict was too high in the enclosed polis, and thus discursive communication, speech, stimulated new relations from which glory, history, and other dimensions of what it means to live together emerged. The city became an imperial center, in a way, over national and state terrain, and it is no accident that the idea of a state without a capital city is unthinkable today (cf. Fanon, 1961; Mielants, 2008). In antiquity, however, especially in the Roman world, from which, as we have seen, the concept of religion emerged, the conditions of membership had a quasi-religious character with the criteria of birth or conversion. In Rome, in other words, one could become a Roman citizen, and other groups—for example, Judeans—adopted this model, especially of matrilineal criteria for born citizens and processes of oaths and rituals for conversion or “naturalization” (Cohen, 1999). It is ridiculous but treated as a matter without question that contemporary citizenship follows similar criteria in most modern and avowedly secular states. 265

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What, however, if we were to radicalize secularization of states and eradicate birthright and oaths and rituals for citizenship and instead focused on contribution (e.g., but not exclusively, taxation broadly understood as any demonstration of contribution) to the common good? Let us suppose the following global situation (since imaginative acts are also crucial dimensions of theoretical work), where there is a form of global federalism initiating interstate commerce across localities whose primary criteria for membership and participation are demonstrations of contribution to the various localities. Labor is one consideration. Wherever one works, one should have a voice in its governance. Labor could be broadly understood as the physical production of things, the creation of ideas and aesthetic expression, or the cultivation of subsequent generations of citizens. It could include the contribution of skills of social cohesion and negotiation. And crucially, its reach could be global in the classic federal sense of shared and distributed power the consequence of which are internal lines of demarcation instead of external ones (cf. Karmis and Norman, 2005). Without external borders, one could migrate to where one’s skills are needed, and by contributing those skills, earn membership for participation as a local citizen. For such a world to exist, a radical transformation of global relations would occur, through which the meaning of “migrant,” “emigrant,” and “immigrant” would be transformed in the set of relations that would make the weight of global exploitation void because of nowhere for that kind of capital, the one that requires vulnerable and hence cheaper labor as extolled by neoconservatism and neoliberalism, to go. The benefits of safety nets in localities on the basis of contributions could be justified from basic contractarian argument of localities owing those who have contributed to them (for debate, cf. Pateman and Mills, 2007). At the federal level, that would mean investment in a global infrastructure that would affect the flow of materials and labor in a way that matches the reality of a spatially and temporally compressed world. Although this is an imaginative act, we should bear in mind that humanity is already headed that way in the demands of labor itself. More people live in different places from where they work, and more people are part of a global flow of labor seeking work (see, e.g., Frase 2007; Coughlan 2006; Coombes, 1995). Unlike times where primarily vulnerable populations were compelled to migrate or at least work where they do not live, that necessity is increasing among the middle and upper strata of societies across the globe. The absurdity of erecting borders to keep people away from jobs that are not desirable for those in the center is a residue from a conception of nation and self that is, unfortunately, out of step with reality. What exactly would a contributions-based model of citizenship mean for humankind is, in the end, the welfare of humankind itself. The anxiety wrought by race, for instance, is often assuaged by an appeal to the human who lurks beneath. Yet the borders that keep the human being over “there” from coming over “here” depend upon submerging human presence in a way more conducive to the proliferation of races—as we see in heightened racism and radicalized inequalities in an age that valorizes cosmopolitanism—than raising the standards of human conviviality. Lost in such border policing, marked also by fetishized investments, is the understanding that although some of us succeed alone, global failure is no less than the end of us all. 266

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References Carbonell, Curtis D. 2009. “Spandrels and the Institution of Evolutionary Biology: Gould and the Third Culture,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 29 (Summer): 51–69. Cassirer, Ernst. 1962. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chandler, Nahum. 2006. “The Figure of W. E. B. Du Bois as a Problem for Thought.” In “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Question of Another World,” a Special Issue of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review, Nahum D. Chandler, guest editor, 6, no. 3 (Winter): 29–55. Cohen, Shaye J. D. 1999. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkley: University of California Press. Coombes, Mike. 1995. “The Impact of International Boundaries on Labour Market Area Definitions,” Area 27, no. 1: 46–52. Coughlan, Sean. 2006. “The New Commuter Belt,” BBC News (18 July): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/5187096.stm Du Bois, W.E.B. 1898. “The Study of Negro Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science XI (January 1898):1–23. Reprinted in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (March 2000): 13–27. ——. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. Fanon, Frantz. 1961. Les Damnés de la terre. Préface de Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: François Maspero éditeur S.A.R.L./Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Frank, Thomas. 2008. The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. New York: Metropolitan Books. Frase, Martha J. 2007. “International Commuters,” HR Magazine 52, no. 3 (March 9), available at the following URL: http://www.shrm.org/Publications/hrmagazine/EditorialContent/ Pages/0307agenda_global.aspx Gordon, Jane Anna and Lewis R. Gordon. 2006. Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. ——. 2009. Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. New York: Routledge. Gordon, Lewis R. 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press. Handler, Joel. 2004. Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe: The Paradox of Inclusion. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press. Handler, Joel F. and Yeheskel Hasenfeld. 2007. Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality. Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press. Harvey, David Harvey. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press. Karmis, Dimitrios and Wayne Norman (eds.). 2005. Theories of Federalism: A Reader. New York: Palgrave. Mayrhofer, Wolfang, Paul Sparrow, and Angelika Zimmermann. 2008. “Modern Forms of International Working.” In Michael Dickmann, Chris Brewster, and Paul Sparrow (eds.), International Human Resource Management: A European Perspective, Second Edition. London: Routledge. Mielants, Eric H. 2007. The Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West.” Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2008. “Afterword: What Does the Black Legend Have to Do with Race?” In Greer, Margaret R., Maureen Quilligan, and Walter D. Mignolo (eds.), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 312–324. Pateman, Carol and Charles Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Cambridge, UK : Polity Press. Robinson, Cedric. 2001. An Anthropology of Marxism. Aldershot, UK : Ashgate. Taylor, Paul. 2004. Race: A Philosophical Introduction. Cambridge, UK : Polity. 267

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CHAPTER 24 ARE REPARATIONS POSSIBLE? LESSONS TO THE UNITED STATES FROM SOUTH AFRICA A discussion between The Honorable Richard Goldstone, Dr. Lewis Gordon, Dr. Alecia Anderson (moderator)*

The Honorable Richard Goldstone is a former justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court. He was instrumental in several key decisions that worked to unravel South Africa’s system of apartheid. He worked closely with Nelson Mandela during the transition from apartheid and headed the Goldstone Commission, which was created to investigate ongoing police violence. Goldstone also served as the first Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, prosecuting numerous war crimes. Goldstone has received the International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association, the Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, and the MacArthur Award for International Justice. Dr. Lewis Gordon is Professor of Philosophy with affiliations in Jewish Studies, Caribbean and Latinx Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and Global Studies at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He has written extensively on race and racism, postcolonial phenomenology, the works of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and Black existentialism. Among his many notable accomplishments, Gordon founded the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies in Philadelphia, which provided reliable sources of information on African Diasporic Jewish and Hebrew populations and the Second Chance Program at Lehman High School in New York, which was designed for inschool truants. Gordon also holds Visiting Professor appointments at Toulouse University in France and Rhodes University in South Africa. Dr. Alecia Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and a member of the Executive committees of the Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The title of Anderson’s dissertation at North Carolina State University was “Political Stability: A Study of Trust and Legitimacy in South Africa.” Introduction On September 25, 2019, the Honorable Richard Goldstone joined Dr. Lewis Gordon for a conversation about reparations at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). The public discussion was offered as part of a series of events for Human Rights Week. It was co-sponsored by the Goldstein Community Chair for Human Rights, the Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, and the UNO Department of Black Studies. Goldstone and Gordon were brought to the University of Nebraska at Omaha by the Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights. 271

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Alecia Anderson (AA) Before beginning, I want to thank the Director of the Goldstein Center for Human Rights, Dr. Curtis Hutt, for bringing our panelists to the University of Nebraska at Omaha. All right, so everyone, welcome. We have some already prepared discussion questions to kind of facilitate the conversation. And then if we have time at the end, we’ll have a few minutes available for audience questions as well. All right, so to kick us off, first of all, thank you both for being here. But I thought, if we’re gonna talk about if reparations are possible, we should probably get on the same page about what reparations involve. So I’d like you both to start by describing your conceptualization of reparations. Who wants to go first? [A moment’s pause] Lewis Gordon (LG) Well, I guess that means me. Well first, shalom, as-salamu alaykum, halito, and, as I’m from Jamaica—how you keepin’? And I know there’re some of you a little farther back. So when I speak, I’ll stand up then I’ll sit down, okay? That way you in the back can see and hear me better. It would be wonderful if the audience gets some time, get time to speak, so I’m not going to speak very long. So the short of it is that there is a distinction between what you hear as reparations and, if you reflect upon it, what it means. Already your intuition tells you there’s in it the word “repair.” So it means you have to fix something that was broken or fix a wrong. Now, that becomes very complicated of course if you’re going to repair something. That means there was a point at which it was well functioning. And there are those who have argued—for instance, one of my colleagues in South Africa, Mogobe Ramosa, points out that many people forget that the context we’re talking about is harm done to human beings. That means we need to remember that it’s human beings who are degraded; their humanity is challenged. So, if we’re at all going to begin to talk about the question of reparations, we need to talk about re-humanization. To bring back the kind of dignity, freedom, and understanding that are involved in living a human life. Now there are unfortunately ways, as we know, in which words get twisted. We are here in the United States of America where people always talk about freedom while developing techniques to get rid of people’s freedoms. And in fact, the people who are most actively attacking freedom love to use the word “freedom.” What we’ll learn is that in the history of reparations the actual notion of reparations was twisted in such a way that it has helped mostly those who committed harm. But we’ll come to that since there’s more time to speak. And you could ask me to elaborate. Thank you. Richard Goldstone (RG) For me, certainly as a South African, reparations covers a fairly wide field. In particular, because of the experience we had with our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reparations covers acknowledging what happened to the victims. This is really the first call that victims have, is for public acknowledgement and recognition, which is important for the restoration of their dignity. South Africa came to the end of a sordid three and a half centuries of racial discrimination and oppression. Way back in 1973, the United Nations General Assembly passed a treaty that declared 272

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apartheid in South Africa to be a crime against humanity. And of course, it was. Millions and millions of our people, because of the color of their skin, were treated as third-rate citizens, not even second-rate citizens. They lived in penury, they were discriminated against, and many of them were murdered, and many of them were tortured. So there was a lot to be repaired when apartheid came to an end in 1994. The first democratic government in South Africa, the administration of President Nelson Mandela, was really faced with a choice of doing one of three things. The one was to allow for collective amnesia, forgetting about the past. The other extreme was prosecuting the apartheid leaders and especially those of the police and the army who were responsible for the most serious human rights violations. And, the third was really a compromise. That was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It held hearings over roughly a twoyear period in which the testimony of over 21,000 victims was submitted. Around the country, over 2,000 sittings of committees of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were held, and South Africans, white South Africans in particular, were forced, for many of them for the first time, to recognize, accept and acknowledge the crimes for which they bore moral responsibility. Because there were no South Africans who didn’t know what was going on. So they were all active, active bystanders at best, and at worst, implementers of the policy of apartheid. So reparations certainly covers that acknowledgement. It also includes financial reparations. There’s also the question of memorialization, including, for example, the change of street names or the removal of statues. There is a Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa that began at the University of Cape Town, where student activists insisted that the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, who was a colonial leader, a mining magnate, be removed from the campus. The university authorities were eventually left with little choice but to remove the statue. So reparations certainly, in my book, covers a whole gamut of finding appropriate means to make good to the victims for their suffering, and the suffering of their parents and grandparents. AA Okay, so I wanted to piggyback I think off of what Justice Goldstone just said here. And then just ask what are the strengths and weaknesses that you both see in the Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, and other historical contexts of reparations. What can the U.S. take from those examples historically? RG Well, first of all, one has to recognize the differences between the experience of South Africa and the United States. Every situation of mass victimization is different if not unique. The situation that we faced in South Africa is in some ways the converse of the situation faced in the United States. With the possible exception of Malaysia, South Africa is the only country, as far as I am aware, where the oppressed constituted the majority of the people. In other countries where there’s been racism and victimization, it’s been against a minority. In some ways it is easier for a previously victimized majority to recover than it is for a formerly victimized minority. We have a formerly oppressed majority that is now running the country. That’s a difference that has to be recognized. And to an extent it has to be grappled with. The second difference is that the first 273

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democratic South African parliament, and that was during the early administration of Nelson Mandela, decided that, in the investigation of past human rights violations, South Africa could not go back further than some 36 years. To go back further was just too complicated—memories fail and victims and witnesses have passed on. What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did was to look at serious human rights violations that were committed during the last three and a half decades of apartheid. It didn’t go back further. So it never went back to slavery, which was practiced in the Cape Colony, in particular after the Dutch arrived in the Cape in 1652. I recall that during the last apartheid government of President F. W. De Klerk, the prime minister of the Netherlands, Ruud Lubbers, made the first ever state visit by a Dutch leader to South Africa. It was in about February 1994. At the cocktail reception, which my wife and I attended in Cape Town, President De Klerk said to the Dutch prime minister, that in three months from then, we will come to an end in South Africa of some three and a half centuries of racial oppression. “Which of course, Mr. Prime Minister, began when the Dutch arrived in the Cape in 1652!” And the look of bemusement on the face of Prime Minister Lubbers was striking. So, these differences must be recognized and acknowledged. LG Well, this time I’ll also add buenos dias. The reason earlier when I stood I said “halito” is because it’s one of the indigenous languages [Choktaw] of this country, in which I know how to say hi or hello. That relates to this question in a rather profound way because some of these issues we talk about as if they’re fixed. But if we don’t deal with the conditions that produce these forms of oppression, they take additional forms. We know right now I think the important question that is raised is about the kind of collective responsibilities we have when they recur. I travel across this country all the time. It is profound, particularly in places of transportation, the [now] near absence of Latinx peoples. This is really crucial, because we’re living in a period right now in this country where there is the production of policies that will place this entire society on the levels of accountability where we—if justice is really done—will be dealing with a prosecutor such as our esteemed guest [turning to the Honorable Richard Goldstone]. Now I bring this up because, although there are differences [with past instances of crimes against humanity], there are actually many similarities here. The first one you should bear in mind, as we’re bringing up the South African example, is that the architects, the model the architects were using for the oppression that was unleashed there, was this country [the USA]. Okay? This was because they saw the eradication of the majority population, the indigenous peoples of this country, as an aspiration for that country. And it was not just here; there are other countries that adopted such policies. There are people who studied what Andrew Jackson was doing in this country in the nineteenth century. There are people who studied how racialization actually made certain things effective. And this is what makes the South African situation a rather interesting one. Not only South Africa—but also all over the African continent—because on the African continent there is the racial imposition that hides the indigenous dimension. In the United States right now, the racial part, which is predominantly looked at in terms of black Americans—and we’re now seeing it in terms of Latinx Americans—gives 274

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the sense that it is done to people from elsewhere. However, where do you go when you are racialized and you are Xhosa (that’s what we say in South Africa [referring to the clicking sound in the name])? Or you are Wolof in Senegal? You say, “Well, I’ve been racialized, I’ve been oppressed, but this is also my home.” You see? So those are some of the additional dynamics. But the complicated part that is also related to it—and I think this is some of what has been hinted at—is that part of the repair is to bring things out into the open. But there’s a tendency that makes this challenging when it comes to actual commitments to truth. Actual commitments to truth tend to come from those who are actually at the bottom of society. That is because they don’t have access to the mechanisms of power that could protect them. They have to rely more on truth. Forces at the top thus often need to rewrite history in order to make their daily lives morally palatable. Just to give you a sense—and again, I would like to hear from you all—but to give you a sense, just let me give you an allegory for this that is also a fact. Most historians who study enslavement, indigenous genocide, and colonialism, the versions they publish in their books are heavily sterilized and mediated because of two primary forces. The first one is professionalization. They won’t be taken seriously. Now when you read these things, they’re pretty bad. So, to know that what you’re receiving is the sterilized version, it should make you really take pause. The second one is more complicated. It’s not simply about nefarious forces that would like to have a misrepresentation of history. There is also, for the person who is studying it, the trauma of studying it. Because these historians— and people who are not historians who go through those archives—have to develop a day-to-day relationship as human beings with empathy steeped in levels of cruelty that would recoil anybody with any ethical sensibility. As a consequence, almost everybody who has studied those phenomena has had to go into therapy. Everyone. From Black historians [such as Sir Hilary Beckles] to Winthrop Jordan, a white historian. All of them had to do this. So part of the difficulty is that we are trying to address issues that are not simply difficult for the people on whom they were imposed. It is also difficult to try to accept the idea that you are linked to the people who committed those atrocities. It takes extraordinary courage to say this is humanity’s deeds; this is a responsibility that I as a human being have to take on as well. And so, the question of the success or the failure is connected to the fact that we have to take seriously that we’re dealing with human phenomena, okay? And that means that it’s going to have its imperfections. However, one of the things that’s very important for every act—that is, you try to make a better world— is that what maintains an unjust, cruel world is the belief that nobody will act. So as I see it, it may not be perfect, but the very act of demonstrating that people will do something sets the conditions for others to do more. And I’ll stop there. AA All right. So okay, I’ll keep going with that theme of, you know, responsibility, taking responsibility, and ask in the U.S. specifically, when it comes to reparations, who is responsible? So is it the responsibility of the government, corporations, is this an individual effort? So what are your thoughts on that? Whose responsibility is it for reparations? 275

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LG

Oh, you want me to go first?

RG

I think so.

LG Okay. You know, you asked the question that I’m actually writing on right now. I’m writing a book—I think you’ll love this title—it’s called “Fear of Black Consciousness.” It relates to South Africa in many ways. In South Africa, there’s a lot of fear of Black consciousness. There’s a certain point as I go through that reflection that I have to deal with this question. And here is the thing. Whenever people are doing things that are uncomfortable, there’s a very important fallacy to learn. Well, there are several fallacies. There is a red herring, where you bring up something that is irrelevant and get people off track. But there is also a fallacy called straw man. That fallacy is where you pick something so ridiculous and easy to knock down that it helps you avoid getting at the real question. And here is the thing that many people don’t realize. In the United States, there is a tendency—but not just here, it happens in the UK, it happens in South Africa, it happens all across the globe, in Canada, in Australia, for instance—to moralize the issue so much that we fail to understand that for anything to be done, we have to recognize the political dimensions of the issue. This is difficult, because when you say the word “responsibility,” people immediately think about moral responsibility. If we think about it, however, if we think about the histories of when actual reparations were conducted, the people who received reparations throughout history for the most part—it’s not exclusively this way, but for the most part, and I leave it open to how you define it, whether it’s in financial terms, structural terms, you know, terms governing policies, etc.—the people who have really received reparations, most have actually been the people from the dominating groups that oppress the other groups. You know that slave masters received reparations. They got compensated for [the loss of] their “property.” But no enslaved people got compensated for their labor or the theft of their embodied property. If you’re going to have that capital, that’s going to put you in a position actually to build certain structures. If you think about the question of wealth, for instance, in the world right now, it’s not that every individual white person is rich, but nobody can deny that there is structural white wealth. Early capitalists didn’t give a damn about individual white people, nor others black or brown. But at a certain point in history, in the history of this development of white wealth, things emerged such as today when you study “foreign relations,” you know what it used to be called? “Race relations.” That’s because there was a global, concerted effort to build a so-called Manifest Destiny. It was to create the idea, through legal and military means, of structural white wealth. And this involved many, many efforts that, when communities of color attempted access to them, were blocked. Many of you right now, when you think of public universities, you think about how much you’re going to pay for them. When they were all white, they were free. If people have access to free education, finishing their studies without debt, et cetera, they begin with structural wealth. But how did that happen? Who paid those white masters? Who paid for all those things? And the answer for that of course is the people. It’s going to be, you know; there were free blacks whose revenue, whose tax revenue, went to paying 276

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white slave masters. If you’re talking about everything that produced, whether it’s in South Africa or Australia—structural white wealth—it was excluding the indigenous and the black populations. So the straw man is to make it seem like you individually pay and others don’t. No. A political issue is a societal responsibility, regardless of whether you’re a citizen, a permanent resident, anybody within that jurisdiction in some way pays— whether it’s materially, socially, or in other forms—for instance, politically—for such debts. So it is this ultimately—even though we may couch it in terms of this racial issue of white and black: when things are political, the responsibility always takes the form of us. It means anybody, including—you all know this—if you’re a recent white immigrant to the U.S., you say, “Well, I didn’t do it. I didn’t enslave blacks. What did I do to deal with these things?” The simple response is: “You choose to live in this country, don’t you? If you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna take on these debts.” If you move to France, you know what you’re going to do? Take on its historical debts. If we globalize it, this is why we have at the level of the World Court a question of a crime against humanity, because if the impact is against humanity, it’s humanity that holds the global responsibility to take on that debt and respond to it. And so we have got to get rid of the straw man part, understand the political ramifications of these responsibilities, and use our creativity to work out the specifics. I’ll stop there. RG I think the politics is all important. And obviously, without the politics, these things don’t happen. And this was the dilemma too that faced Nelson Mandela. South Africa was on a certain road to a bloodbath in the 1980s. It was to the credit of our last apartheid leader, De Klerk, that he saw that the writing was on the wall. His father had been one of the architects of the apartheid system. Those leaders left it to the next generation to deal with the inevitable, looming existential problems. But De Klerk, to his credit, decided that the time had come to bring apartheid to an end. I remember watching the television news in February 1990, when De Klerk announced the end of apartheid. And announced that Nelson Mandela and his comrades were being freed from prison. Their freedom movements were being unbanned. It took the country by complete surprise. In fact, it was said, and I believe it, that some of the members of De Klerk’s cabinet were not aware until the day of the announcement that this was going to happen. And the politics was then interesting. De Klerk, I have no doubt, had intended that the transition from apartheid to democracy would take 15 years, maybe 20 years, there was no hurry. The longer the white minority could stay in government, the better for them. But Nelson Mandela, in particular, was too shrewd a leader to allow that to happen. And what De Klerk thought might take 15 or 20 years took four years. It took from 1990 to 1994 to end apartheid and to embark on a constitutional democracy in April of 1994. I had the privilege of spending many Sunday evenings chatting to Nelson Mandela. He was lonely and I was investigating violence during our transition and he used to invite me on a Sunday evening to come and spend a couple of hours with him, beginning with the eight o’clock TV news and then chatting about many topics. And I know from those personal discussions that he was initially torn about the Truth and Reconciliation 277

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Commission. It was politically inviting to take De Klerk by the hand and walk together into a golden sunrise of the post-apartheid system. But to do that he realized, would have been an amoral abdication of leadership. The victims of apartheid had to be recognized. Compromises were necessary. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also looked into violence committed against white people that accompanied the last years of apartheid. As I indicated earlier, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in fact a compromise between doing nothing and Nuremberg style prosecutions. There were very few prosecutions. What is interesting, and I think relevant, possibly for the United States, is that now 25 years after the end of apartheid, activists are now wanting the investigations into murder by police of deceased activists to be reopened. It’s interesting that this didn’t happen in 1994 when apartheid came to an end. It’s happening now, 25 years later. The lesson is that the longer you leave unrecognized and unacknowledged the indignities and the victimization of the past, the longer it’s going to take to come to grips with these problems. They have to be tackled sooner rather than later. And the later, the more difficult. As I said, in South Africa it was decided not to go back more than about 36 years, in looking at the victimization. What interests me, and I’d love to hear the reason for it, is why the question of reparations has become a new, live issue, or an enlivened issue in the United States. Certainly I’ve been visiting this country for the last 40 years, and I don’t believe there’s been a time when this issue has become more vocal in society. Why? Why has it taken all of these years? Why has it taken South Africa 25 years to come to grips with dishonest inquests that were held into the deaths of people who were tortured to death in a police station in the center of Johannesburg? What is it that causes this history to just keep boiling and suddenly percolate out of the top? How does one deal with that? And that’s the situation we still face in South Africa, where the sins of the past still haven’t been sufficiently addressed. The financial imbalances in our country are stark. I was at a conference last week on gender violence and gender discrimination. And I was shocked to find that 80% of the CEOs of South African companies are still white. And 3% are women. So we have imbalances that 25 years of post-apartheid government has not really ameliorated. AA Yes. We are, it’s coming up. Okay, so just want to go back quickly to the victims, there seems to be a theme here that we didn’t do right by the victims. So in the U.S., there’s at least been a criticism that we can’t do that because of lack of documentation. And I wonder what your comments would be in regard to Black Americans, Native Americans or other communities of color or disenfranchised people here in the U.S. historically when we think about documentation being the reason why we don’t do reparations. LG Well there are several things. The first one I have to say straight out is that we’re dealing with problems in a human world that requires human solutions and we’re intelligent enough to find ways to figure them out. It’s bad faith when people make those kinds of arguments. Connected to some of the remarks that we were just making, first, if you look at the history of the discussion of reparations, actually it recurs exactly in the 278

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same way as what is happening in South Africa. All you have to do is look back at Reconstruction. I wrote a piece when Trump was elected in which I pointed out its connection to Reconstruction because it’s dialectical. Every moment there is a movement forward, there are forces committed to pushing things backward. So, as you know, Reconstruction was an opportunity for the United States actually to be a country premised on freedom. And in fact, it is unbelievable to witness what those just freed, I mean legally freed enslaved people, were able to achieve within 10 years, okay? It’s extraordinary when one tries to imagine, even if you look at many indigenous communities willing to build on their horrible circumstances. Despite those achievements, they were massacred, ripped apart. I was just in Oklahoma City. We already know the history there. The folks keep rebuilding, but they were ripped apart and with governing resources helping the decimators of those movements. And as we know, that culminated in the structure of Jim Crow—legalized segregation in the United States, which was the model, because “apartheid” really is another way of saying “apartness,” “segregation.” And then when there were other moments of what we can call “progress” again—and among those were the New Deal and lots of other expectations. Eleanor Roosevelt, as many of you know, had a position about radicalized equality. She actually argued, for instance, for the integration of the American military and in addition to that there were efforts that brought many white students, many who were white activists, into the South and they began to realize that the blacks who were teaching them were actually far more qualified to be teaching in the dominant white universities from which they came and those white students were actually for the first time getting an education from those people who were supposedly from inferior colleges. That precipitated their involvement in the civil rights movement. The backlash to the civil rights movement was neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The latter was the Regan period. So we are living right now in the aftermath of what the Obama administration represented—although it was bound to neoliberalism—a form of moving forward. We’re seeing right now a kind of nostalgia for the period of turning back from Reconstruction. In South Africa, the United States also participated in trying to negotiate what postapartheid South Africa should look like. The investment there was to radicalize privatization. Now here’s the thing. White South Africans benefited from a social welfare state. You all have heard this, right? As there is an election coming up, all the critical talk about Bernie Sanders is followed by the claim that social welfare states don’t work. Every time I hear this, I crack up. I always say, “Actually there is irrefutable proof that social welfare states work.” Critics always ask me what it is, and I respond, “White wealth.” White wealth is created from social welfare mechanisms to make sure whites have superior subsistence to other groups. In fact, in China people watched this development and a lot of the people advising the transformation of China were actually Caribbean intellectuals who observed this, because at least in China the whole point for the Chinese people was not to say, “How do we in China create white wealth?” That’s an oxymoron. It was instead, “How do we try to get a billion people out of poverty?” That required a different mechanism. And so if we understand that, the problem was that black South 279

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Africans were told the vote alone would make their lives better. But the imperative was a structural system that was designed to make their lives worse. Realizing that, there’s a point when you say, “I’ve been hoodwinked!” And now that they won the vote, they’re thinking through reparations. Similarly, there were people who said, “You’ve got Obama as president!” People said, “Yes!” People said yes so much with such pride and joy that they showed up and stood in frigid weather for six hours—no, some cases it was ten hours!—just to see the impossible: a black American president. And then afterward, they looked around at the radicalization of inequalities that followed and said, “We were hoodwinked.” And so what reparations are about—and this is connected to the acknowledgement argument—is the acknowledgment that although there was a moral effort, there is a fact of radicalized inequalities that need to be addressed, you see? And so if we connect it in that way, if we’re going to address it, remember what I said before when I said “us.” If it’s about repair, we need to link it to the understanding of a societal repair. If we’re going to take seriously that radicalized inequalities are wrong, then it’s not simply enough to ask, “How do you write a paycheck to an individual?” That’s because, you see, the individuals, the peoples we’re talking about, are intimately linked to the very question of the structure of the society. And ultimately what their plight raises is the question we all have to ask, which is what kind of society we want to live in. You want to effect reparations, make the United States a better society. Okay, I’ll stop. RG Your remarks bring back to me one thought and that is people, all people, all of us, act in what we think is our self-interest. We often get ourselves into trouble because we acted in what we thought was in our self-interest. And good leaders set an agenda for interests that are really, in the interests of the citizens. In South Africa today, and since 1994, and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Lewis, from your travels in South Africa, it’s almost impossible to find any white South African who didn’t oppose apartheid. That is now their “new” self-interest. In the United States (and I plead guilty to generalizing), the overwhelming majority of white Americans do not acknowledge that the legacy of slavery and entrenched racial oppression remains relevant today. If asked whether any acknowledgment is required, they refer to the history books. “Its all there,” they say. In South Africa, I am beginning to hear well-meaning whites complain that affirmative action programs are no longer required 25 years after the end of apartheid. The Constitution calls for a color-blind community. But, how can the sins of racism be acknowledged and remedies introduced if color and gender are not taken into account. It is not racist to use the tools of discrimination to make good the sins of the past that were predicated on them. That is true both in the United States and South Africa. AA

And then everyone just kind of may come up. Say your name please.

Questioner 1 My name’s William. Earlier you said, “People are scared of black consciousness.” I was wondering what you meant by that? 280

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Questioner 2, Jakeem Fox My question was we talk a lot about reparations for black people specifically as if there aren’t other examples of reparations in America for other racial groups. I was wondering what you all thought about why black people specifically in America haven’t received reparations. Questioner 3, Terri Crawford This makes the request to go to the floor, to have a conversation about whether or not reparations are even possible. Not to establish how that happens or an amount, or any of that. Just gather the information to see whether or not there are some practical applications of reparations for black Americans. That has happened for at least three decades. I think the reason why it is now re-percolating is because of our current political atmosphere. It has to because we are having these open conversations, be good, bad, or ugly, about white supremacy and our ugly racial history in the United States. So I’d be interested in both of you talking about how that differs, as to how it happened with apartheid and why we can’t have that conversation about this being a crime against humanity and not just a crime against black people in the United States. It’s a crime against humanity and we should treat as such, and I think for those that feel as though my ancestors participated in that atrocity, I don’t want to take responsibility for that, but I think if we couch it in that humanity conversation, that it makes it more palatable for everyone. I don’t care about it being palatable; I just want to have the discussion. If that’s what it takes to bring everyone into the fold, then let’s do it. AA Thank you for all the questions. We are really running low on time, but I would like to give both our guests the opportunity to comment as much as they can on the questions that were asked. RG Well we could spend another hour, if we paid due regard to the wonderful questions and comments that have been made. Let me restrict myself to just a few as it is impossible to deal with the whole gamut of questions that were asked. One is that I don’t believe that you could have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the South African type situation, in 2019 or 2020. We were lucky that it was in 1995 and international criminal law was not as advanced as it is today. I doubt whether many countries would tolerate crimes against humanity being dealt with in 2019 by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There would be widespread demands for prosecutions—for full justice. People forget the opposition to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by South Africans from all sides. White South Africans did not wish to have the skeletons leave the cupboards and many black South Africans, the victims, wanted full justice. They did not accept that amnesties were justifiable or fair to the victims. Nelson Mandela waited for almost a year before introducing legislation to set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was worried that there could be an attempted coup instigated from the higher ranks of the army and police. For good reason, they feared the truth becoming public. Mandela waited until his own people were in charge of the army and police before introducing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission legislation. So it may not be the solution in a country like Syria or Yemen, where the most terrible human rights violations 281

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including genocide and crimes against humanity have been and are being committed as we talk today. I don’t believe that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would find favor with the international community and or the human rights community. Of course, apartheid did not remotely reach the level of genocide. There was no intention on the part of the apartheid leaders to wipe out the black majority in South Africa. That was not the agenda. They wanted to keep the majority oppressed and to enable white supremacy to continue for as long as possible. The other point I would make, and it’s again too often forgotten. And that is the important role that Americans played in helping bring apartheid to an end. Civil society in particular. I remember the visits during the last 10 years of apartheid, particularly from African American lawyers and judges who visited South Africa. Thelton Henderson, and Nate Jones, and Leon Higginbotham, who really made black lawyers in South Africa proud. They set an example of what black lawyers could do, and could achieve. In South Africa that sort of leadership needed to be demonstrated. So, South Africa certainly owes a great deal to the American civil rights movement in general and to some African American leaders in particular. I agree fully with the suggestion that in any society which experienced serious human rights violations there should be discussion of the affects of those violations and whether reparations of any kind are appropriate. LG There’s a long history of black or African American jurists, activists, and scholars who have articulated this as a human rights issue. You could go back to William Paterson, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B Du Bois, who had petitioned for the Unites States to be brought up on human rights violations before the UN, and a call of genocidal attacks against the indigenous peoples and the peoples of African descent. Malcolm X, many of you know, was very critical of the civil rights movement because he said it should be a human rights movement. And there are many examples of those, so yes. The first thing is that we are having the conversation. The thing is, you know a lot of folks like to say, “We oughta have a conversation,” and then they go like this [looking to the left and to the right; crowd laughs]. If you think there ought to be a conversation, then start the conversation. And that’s important. We here are part of the conversation. You see? And there are other places I’m sure. We’re not seeing it on all the big news stations and so forth, but hey, there’ve always been people who don’t have access to those. But they start somewhere. The second part which is a very crucial issue, which is the question you asked, is that if you look at the history of the people who actually received reparations—I mean outside of white supremacists and slave masters—if you’re thinking about, for instance, what happened to Japan or among Japanese Americans, if you are going to think specifically, for instance, what happened to Germans in terms of their response to what they did not only to Jews but also to the Roma and many other groups—you have to pay attention to certain important elements. And that is the people, the institutions that are to implement, to put into practice these situations never ever did so from a moral transformation of their heart. It has been because of a structural political situation in which it was in their interest to do so. So for instance, if you think of the standing of the United States after World War II—particularly with the rise of communist China and the 282

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Soviet Union—what the Pacific meant if the United States did not actually secure a certain relationship to Japan and a few other places. If you look at the German situation, the bottom line is they were vanquished! They had no option, okay? Those policies were imposed on them. But remember, the United States had a Marshall Plan in Europe because it was determined in the interest of the United States to do so to block the westward movement of the Soviet Union. So these are historical, very specific ways in which redress and reparations appear. The thing that I said earlier—let’s just pick one group, because there are other groups connected, but let’s just pick black Americans—is that so much of justice for black Americans is linked to the question of making America structurally a different kind of society, and there is not the kind of power base to make it in the interests of those who dominate American society to act to make things better. That doesn’t mean that the society cannot be transformed, but it means that what has to change is the relations of power, okay? Similarly, right now there are many immigrants, there are white immigrants all over the United States. But the face of immigration is Latinx peoples. Latinx peoples who are also citizens of this country and are linked to these issues in ways that it require rethinking them. But we have a short time, there’s more there to say, but that’s a short version. In terms of Black consciousness, let’s face it: there are two things to consider. The first thing is: Black consciousness is a form of potentiated double consciousness. That’s a fancy way of saying it reveals the dirty laundry of the society. Not many people like to see their drawers shown—you know, to see their fecal stains right out there to the public. So that’s the first part. The second part, though, is connected to what I just said in my second comment. The second question, because it’s not just about blacks needing the concept of the truth, it’s also about understanding the truth as linked to political reality. It’s where Black consciousness is a political consciousness. There’s fear of it because you cannot have a political consciousness without power. Now think about it. Folks love in this country to hear black people be moralistic. They love hearing about the reverend, the so forth, the individualized declaration, “Oh, if we could just be individually better human beings!” But the moment you put the word “black” with the word “power”—oh, man! There’s fear. There’s a crisis because with power you can actually do something. This is because power—you know a lot of people think of power negatively in this country, but they don’t understand that all the word “power” means is the ability to make things happen, and that means that if you think about what oppression, discrimination, what those things are, they are forms of dis-empowerment. You see what I’m saying? So when we talk about reparations, we are not simply talking about the question of a kind of balance sheet. We’re talking, when we talk about re-humanization, we’re talking about re-empowerment of people. So they’re able actually to make a difference in their lives. Even in the way we are talking right now—why it was important to hear you all speak— is because in a way if we’re structurally to just be here and talk at you, that would be the contradiction of our thesis. Do you see what I’m saying? When you said [referring to an audience member who introduced himself earlier], “You’re just a guy.” You’re not “just a guy”! None of you in here are just a woman; you’re not just whatever these identities are. We were asked to be here because we respect what you are as a human being. And that 283

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meant you were to get up. That’s an act of power, an ability. Walk up here. That’s another ability. You are able to speak. That’s an ability. And there was a time even in this state where you would not have even been able to be in this room. That is what this about, and it’s all connected. This discussion is only part of a much larger issue about the project of what we have when we talk about unity and freedom.

Notes * Kendall Panas, Schwalb Center staff associate, wrote the panel discussion transcript.

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CHAPTER 25 HISTORIES OF VIOLENCE: THINKING ART IN A DECOLONIAL WAY

This is the 29th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is with Lewis R. Gordon, who is professor of Philosophy with affiliation in Jewish Studies, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and International Studies at UCONN-Storrs. His many publications include What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (2015) and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). Brad Evans You have described art as being “the expression of human beings creating belonging in a world that really didn’t have to have us.” This understanding of art, which stands in marked contrast to art as the production of commodity fetishization, has a profound bearing on its relevance to the human condition, especially its violence. Given the definition you offer, what do you understand to be the relationship between art and violence? Lewis R. Gordon I reject the model of art as the production of commodity fetishization. It is not that art can never be commodified or made into a fetish. My objection is that the story of art is only presented to us under specific social conditions. Euromodern society and its celebration of capital are only parts of the human story. It is decadent to reduce art to a single element of what we sometimes do with it—namely, art for consumption. Such an account of art is also a form of European arrogance wherein nothing exists except through actions of Europeans or whites. Ancient humanity decorated, found ways to season their food, made music, and dance. Some did so ritualistically; others did so for instrumental reasons long lost to the rest of us; and others did so simply for enjoyment, fun, or pleasure. Europe certainly didn’t invent the idea of a “good life.” Yet the underlying question is: Why do so at all? Even if we enjoy doing something, we do sometimes have to be coaxed into that activity. I regard our species, and perhaps some of our related but now extinct cousins, as endowed with an extraordinary sense of awareness and critical possibilities that haunt each moment of lived investments. The fact that we puzzle over what preceded us and what will succeed us brings forth the existential conundrum of what we bring to reality as necessary despite our existence being contingent. For some, that occasions fear and trembling. For others, wonder. And, yes, there are those who are too busy to care. Yet even the last find pause for moments amid the ebb and flow of life in the range of aesthetic experience we have with objects and performances we call “art.” Art brings value to our existence in a world through the radicality of our non-necessity. In other words, because we are irrelevant to reality, it 285

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means our value, through art, must be on our terms. Art enables us to live despite the reality and infinite possibilities of the absurd—including the absurd notion that our existence is necessary. The relationship between art and violence, as I see it, is one of value, valuing, and being valued. The core idea is that violence properly exists where there is an attributable value, which is being both accepted and denied in the violating action. Accidentally walking into a wall hurts. Someone pushing you into a wall is violence. The latter offers two forms of suffering whereas the former has only one. The two are pain and degradation. To be value, realizing oneself as a source of value, and experience being valued offer dignity. Violence rips that dignity away. Where it emerges from sources not linked into the human world of communicated and communicable value, there is accident. Though it may be contingent that violence happens to us, it is never accidental. Where there is violence, there is, then, responsibility. Art, among other features of human life, is a key value into the radicality of values in which we are offered a refuge from the desolate. That, however, makes us vulnerable to the experience of being thrown back into the cold, uncaring void. There is thus an empowering element in art that paradoxically connects also to the violent significance of disempowerment. All violence includes the disempowering of another. In terms of your critical understanding, rather than focusing on the colonial practices of art you have attended to the way’s colonialism is brought to art as an invasive force. In this regard, might we see art as being, by definition, something that is necessarily anti-colonial and indeed revealing of something pre-/post-colonial in the temporality of its demands and claims upon the liberation of non-Eurocentric ways of living? Yes. My argument is one that precisely links art to freedom. It is, however, not freedom in and of itself. It is always reaching beyond itself as a testament to our condition. This is why excellent art speaks across generations. It is only partially in its time. Bad art, however, suffers from a form of implosivity. This, by the way, is also how I define oppression. Or to put it another way, the subjugation of a life is a subjugation of its arts of expression. Human life thrives when it reaches beyond itself. Oppression pushes us back into ourselves to the point of being trapped in our bodies and eventually mental illness. What is madness but losing our mind? I also describe this phenomenon as epistemic closure. It means no longer having to learn; knowing little is to know all. This mentality could be brought to art. It collapses art or artistic practices into forms of closed idols. This is what colonialism, racism, and all forms of oppression do. That is why they are saturated with violence. Yet there is a paradox. Colonialism and other forms of oppression are, after all, human practices through which human institutions of violence are constructed and maintained. What this means is that they could never be complete. They are attempts, as idols and expressions of idolatry, to close human reality through reducing it to one of its elements. In the case of racism, that means the narcissism, as we have seen over the past few hundred years, of white supremacy. The obvious limitations of all such efforts are that even those 286

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who built them eventually find them unlivable and seek alternatives even from those they supposedly “conquered.” Colonized people fight, and part of their resistance is in their effort to reclaim their value, often through producing art that transcends the idols imposed on them. Colonial art eventually suffers the fate of all those who imagine they are the end of art, history, and thought. They become boring, unimaginative, irrelevant. The history of colonizers who seek creativity through fusion or creolization with the aesthetic life of those they dominate is well known. It is also a misunderstood history. Many today call it “appropriation.” I reject that characterization since it fails to address what it means to participate in the beautiful, enjoyable, and profound. The better concepts to use are “historical erasure,” “historical misrepresentation,” or, getting to the point, “historical theft.” I use “historical” in each because the issue is not whether some or perhaps many whites, for instance, participate in the aesthetic forms of nonwhites. It is that those whites have exploited the history and capitalized on those forms through commodification, historical misrepresentation, and practices of disenfranchisement. It is the addition of racism to the presentation of the art in which such forms are treated only as art when whites perform them. The liberation of non-Eurocentric forms of art, then, is the liberation of art. I see the liberation of art as linked to freedom since that would also require the freedom of nonEuropean peoples. The Native American philosopher V. F. Cordova argues this point beautifully in her aphorism: “The value of survival is being able to recognize yourself after you’ve managed to survive.” Beyond surviving colonial invasion, colonized people raise, through art, an important question to humankind, as their art is compelled to address the violence unleashed on us all from such an onslaught: Given what has been done, what have we become? What, in remembering, might we offer as testaments of belonging? “Belonging” is, after all, an unusual word. It in effect means to keep being. That requires having a place in the realm of the possible. What does that demand other than freedom? The influence of Frantz Fanon over your work still remains powerful and instructive. When reading Fanon, I am often taken by his poetic language and how his critique invokes a truly radical imagination. We could, for example, take a whole number of passages from Black Skins, White Masks or The Wretched of the Earth and read them as poems in their own terms. What is it about Fanon, which still captures your imagination (thinking with and beyond Fanon), especially in terms of his poetic and aesthetic qualities? Fanon was not disciplinarily decadent. He loved freedom and understood that to squeeze the human condition into a single narrative, shoes, or box would be to make us into problems. It would be a form of violence. He understood that this was not an issue of changing players. It was—and continues to be—about changing the game. Doing so means more than what the game is but also how the game is played. Fanon was critical of depersonalization, dissociation, disconnection, and the varieties of ways human beings are pummelled out of relations with reality—which includes each other—into the isolation and madness of self-contained selves. Such a model is best 287

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suited for gods, not people. Human beings require creativity, which in turn requires possibility and freedom. He thus saw colonialism and oppression also at methodological levels. This is why he was able to see and articulate truth beyond the confines of ordinary philosophical and scientific prose. Such ways of offering truth hide their own aesthetic character through supposed claims of non-subjectivity. In fact, the subjective versus objective divide is loaded with fallacies since neither could make sense without the other. Fanon’s poetic talents are evident throughout. Beyond his well-known books published before his death, there are many essays, editorials, poems, and even academic journal articles with poetic resonance. Fanon understood that profundity should not be a liability but instead an exemplification of communicability. So, too, should humor not be a liability. Readers are often shocked at how funny he is. Fanon, the revolutionary forensic and clinical psychiatrist was not only a man of action but one who found time to cook, dance, and read novels, plays, and poetry. In the spirit of Fanon, I take some of these issues further and offer ideas through musical composition and performance, and I also argue that there are truths available through aesthetic forms and that theory by itself is insufficient for a healthy relationship with reality. We also need meaning. A problem with much of what is proffered as professional scientific and academic writing, for instance, is that they are attempts to demythologize reality to the point of offering meaningless theory. I explore considerations such as truth in fiction, rhythmic meaning, and more. I thus take seriously the meaning significance of myth and narrative and their importance for communication and also critical sensibility. In other words, the world of thinking suffers where its model is disconnection instead of connectivity. It would in effect be the performative contradiction of incommunicability as our highest aspiration. What then does the thinking of art in a decolonial way look like at the level of everyday aesthetic practice? And which contemporary artists in particular stand out for you in this regard as pushing against the boundaries of the colonial imagination? We should bear in mind that decolonization is always a transitional act or moment. It is the transformation of the given with an expectation of an openness of what will come. This is a paradox because where it fetishizes itself it would be a form of epistemic closure. It would in effect have to produce colonial relations in order to keep decolonial practices going. So, I only see decolonial questions as critical moments in certain forms of art but not necessarily the foci on which art must be based. My argument about art is that it must not be one thing but instead a meeting or convergence of many elements through which we live our relationships with reality. Art is, in other words, about freedom and belonging without dissociation from the challenges of life in the face of the lifeless. Given my position, I explore a broad range of what we call “art” over the course of human existence. I try to converse with our ancestors who managed to offer us intelligibility of affect and truth from antiquity to the present. This ranges from the visual to the auditory to the gastronomic—in short, the full range of what is properly called 288

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aesthesis, which refers to affecting all the senses. I do not elide aesthetics because of my position on the dimensions and possibilities of meaning afforded in the practice of art among other kinds of creative activity. So, with such a lofty goal, and given my position on relationality and the freedom dimensions of art, I must first stress that I seek such experiences from the radically local and independent to the global. As this is a limited forum, I will not belabor our discussion with the long list of works I love but will instead simply focus on some living practitioners from music and visual art. I immediately think of the following artists in the world of music: Michael Abels (United States), Joan Baez (United States), José Adelino Barceló de Carvalho (better known as Bonga from Angola), Peter Gabriel (United Kingdom), Abdullah Ibrahim (South Africa), Linton Kwesi Johnson (United Kingdom and Jamaica), Joni Mitchell (Canada), Meshell Ndegeocello (United States), Youssou N’Dour (Senegal), Sinéad O’Connor (Ireland), Burning Spear (a.k.a. Winston Rodney, Jamaica), Boubacar Traoré (better known as Kar Kar from Mali), Jagjit Singh (India), Tracy Chapman (United States). I see these artists as inheritors of, if by “contemporary” you also mean the past 50 years, the African Americans John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sam Cooke, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Abbey Lincoln/Aminata Moseka, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Prince, Max Roach, Horace Silver, Nina Simone, and Billy Strayhorn, the Puerto Rican Willie Colón, the Canadian Leonard Cohen, the Nigerian Fela Kuti, and the Jamaican groups the Wailers, the Abyssinians, and Steel Pulse. Those artists were revolutionary. Each of them took the world of the rejected and transcended genre and expected practices to offer portraits of freedom, despair, love, and sorrow. The list among those who have become ancestors is, of course, not exhaustive, and if I were to list the past 200 years, which includes artists I listen to from many other countries, the reader may stop reading. As should be evident, I do not hold the popularity of some artists against them. You no doubt also notice there are some “white” artists on this non-exhaustive list. There have always been white artists who challenge not only the colonization of art but also the same for humankind. Those I have listed regard their commitment to freedom in their art also as forms of resistance against colonization and other forms of decolonization. I often quip that I am the guy who likes the “B” side of albums. It lost resonance in the age of CDs and now MP3s and streaming. By the “B” side, I mean that most of what I listen to are “indie” or independently produced music and most of my viewing is of independent cinema. There are, however, “hits” that make my list. Filmmakers—that is, director-writers (again, among the living)—include Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Marlon Riggs, Lina Wertmüller, Euzhan Palcy, Julie Dash, Rajkumar Hirani, Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Boots Riley. There are, of course, artists whose works connect us to themes of freedom and belonging despite forces of crushing nihilism without offering the theme of decolonization. Those artists are many, and failure at least to engage what they offer would collapse my analysis into an example of aesthetic and epistemic closure. Many of them get the proverbial “it” of our existence, whether through the sorrowful wails of 289

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the Spanish indie group Barbott or the majestic virtuosity of Erykah Badu (listen to her live recordings) or the South African jazz guitarist Vuma Levin, the dynamic couple of US-American jazz saxophonist Ben Barson and opera, jazz, and US-Mexican flamenco vocalist and cellist Gizelxanath Soprano, and the Japanese jazz pianist Hiromi. I also look forward to mixed media by visual artists such as the African American Paula Wilson in Carrizozo, New Mexico, and the Salvadoran Karina Alma (formerly Oliva Alvarado) in Los Angeles, California. Additionally, there are theater projects such as Rites & Reason in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) National Arts Festival in which themes of our conversation abound. I should stress that Levin’s, Barson’s, Gizelxanath Soprano’s, and Alma’s work also address decolonial themes. My list of novelists, poets, playwrights, choreographers, architects, and innovative chefs would also make this discussion go too far afield. And, of course, there are the many unnamed artists who make us pause as they busk in the streets across the globe. They remind us that we emerged out of a nowhere that we made into somewhere through producing what eventually was a work of the anonymous to everyone who is paradoxically valued despite our all sharing the eventual fate of anonymity at the moment of our witnesses’ final breath. Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base covering 143 countries.

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CHAPTER 26 BLACK ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY: GORDON AND DA SILVA ON BRAZIL AND AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY

This interview previously appeared in a special issue of EntreLetras Journal. I offer its reprint here in light of the [2018] elections in Brazil, which were marked by the far-right taking control of the Federal Government. Among those to be placed in power is Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez as the Minister of Education. According to Mauricio Savarese of AP News: “Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has appointed an ultraconservative philosopher to serve as education minister, apparently in a bow to his evangelical Christian backers.” Rodríguez, who is from Colombia, arrived in Brazil in 1973 with a scholarship from the Organization of American States (OAS). He became a Brazilian citizen in 1997. He achieved his doctorate from the Gama Filho University with a dissertation entitled: “The Political Philosophy of Positivist Inspiration in Brazil” and is a specialist in LusoBrazilian thought. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the anti-left Raymond Aron Center for Policy Research Center in Paris, France. Professor Emeritus at the ECEME (Brazil’s Army Command College) in Rio de Janeiro, Rodríguez is critical of what he classifies as “Marxist indoctrination” and “genderbiased teaching.” He therefore supports Bolsonaro’s plans to ban the study of Marxism and gender in the Brazilian education system. In his announcement of Rodríguez, Bolsonaro said that the he meets the “principals” and “values” of the bench formed by federal evangelical deputies. The representatives of philosophy in many countries are already quite conservative, though such exemplars often refer to themselves as “liberal.” The emergence of those farther to the right of an already professionally conservative academic discipline raises the possibility of its increasing decay. There are philosophers who have fought for an understanding of philosophy and its relevance beyond hegemonic and imperial models. Since Lewis Gordon is among those, it is my hope that those paying attention to developments in Brazil will make use of the arguments he makes for the importance of the study of decolonization, gender, race, and global freedom, in addition to the natural sciences, arts, and humanities. Indeed, for Gordon, education is properly a humanistic practice. Gordon achieved his formal education in a period of the United States’ history in which there was an effort to build more egalitarian education. Those policies have been under constant attack as U.S. education policy turned more to the right. The resulting declines in the United States are indications of what such inegalitarian policies offer Brazil. Gordon is also an example of the kinds of people the impending policies are designed to bar from the educational system—dark peoples who are committed to 291

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building ideas for transforming the lives of those whom Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist, described as the damned of the earth. Rosemere Ferreira Da Silva: Dr. Lewis Ricardo Gordon, would you discuss some aspects of your biography: where you were born, why you are in the United States, where you studied, where you currently work, and what kind of work you do? Lewis R. Gordon I was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962. My mother left my stepfather in the late 1960s. My two maternal brothers and I followed from 1971 onward. We lived in the South Bronx in New York City, where we moved around quite a bit and ended up in the Northeast Bronx, where my mother lived till her death. I loved music and the sciences as a child, though I had a penchant for all things wondrous. I particularly loved archaeology, astronomy, and music. I went to Evander Childs High School without plans of going to college. I played jazz and blues professionally since my adolescent years. My then girlfriend was interested in becoming a school teacher. Her efforts and encouragement led us both to Lehman College of the City University of New York. I gave it a go to spend more time with her. Not sure where it would lead, I took courses I loved and in some semesters registered for as many as eight classes. One of my philosophy professors, Bernard Baumrin, recommended me for a special program called the Lehman Scholars Program. I wasn’t initially interested, but one day I bumped into a pre-med friend who was interviewing for the program. When the professor opened his office door, I heard Charlie Parker’s Bird at the Roost (1948) playing on a vinyl record. When I named the recording, the professor—a skinny, thoughtful White Jewish man in light beige pants, a white shirt with black tie, and a dark blue jacket—was curious. He asked me to wait. After meeting with my friend, the professor asked me to come in, and he and I ended up speaking for a few hours. I decided to apply to his program. His name was Gary Schwartz. He was a professor of classics and Director of the Lehman Scholars Program. That was in the fall of 1982. We’ve been close friends—in truth, family—ever since. I ended up studying classical literature with him, philosophy, and political science with others, though I hadn’t thought about a major. The joy of learning was enough for me. Taking so many classes meant I was eligible to complete my degree two years later. I decided to declare majors where I had the majority of my credits and ended up writing three honors theses and graduated, because of my courses in the sciences and language requirements, as a member of the academic honors societies Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha. I subsequently played music and did substitute teaching in New York City, which required taking graduate courses in education and securing a masters degree. I took advantage of whatever free courses I could secure, which included nine credits in economics at the New York Federal Reserve through the City University of New York’s graduate education program at Queen’s College. During those years I had founded The Second Chance Program at Lehman High School. It was a program designed for in-school truants. I was informed that the students were so difficult that if even ten percent of them completed high school the program would be a success. Our rate was eighty-five percent. My observation that respecting people’s humanity makes them grow, while failing to do so 292

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makes them wither, led to intense philosophical reflection on human potential. I loved writing throughout my childhood and that continued during and after college. I thus decided that since I needed to pursue more intense discussion on the human being’s relationship to reality, as well as questions of human potential, I should pursue a PhD. Given my way of thinking, which brought the arts and sciences together, my friends and former professors recommended Yale. I applied. I was offered admission. I accepted, and the rest was history. I had the good fortune to complete my degree with Maurice Natanson as my advisor and Jonathan Smith and M. Sean Copeland on my committee. Natanson was a student of the great philosopher, sociologist, and jurist Alfred Schütz. Smith was a giant in American philosophy and Hegel Studies. He worked with people such as Bertrand Russell, Ernest Nagel, and Hans-Gorg Gadamer. Copeland was one of the theologians and philosophers who formed Womanist theology, and she was a scholar of Black Liberation theology, existentialism, and political theology. Her mentors included Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman and James Cone. I spent three and a half years at Yale, achieving my doctorate with distinction in the spring of 1993. My dissertation was entitled “Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism: A Study in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.” Talk a little about your relationship with philosophy. Did you choose philosophy or has philosophy chosen you? Who are your main references in this field of knowledge? The two aren’t mutually exclusive. When we find what we should be doing, we retrospectively realize we’ve been doing it all along. My first experience with philosophy, I realized many years later, was when I was a child of about five years of age. I remember lying down on the grass at night in a soccer field in Kingston, Jamaica. That was the mid1960s. There were fewer lights even in Jamaica’s biggest city back then. That meant the sky was majestic. So many stars. I’ve never forgotten that. It was my first experience of genuine wonder. I began to notice so many things around me. It led to my curiosity about life, nature, and reality. I continuously inquired into more. I was curious about everything— the soil and the life teaming within it; the sky and what was out there beyond the stars; the paradox of sensed invisibility; and so on. Philosophy made sense to me because it demanded asking more. So, although I was already on such a path, the journey was highly existential and phenomenological. I was choosing that which had already been chosen, I later realized. A strange responsibility was there in each effort to think further. Ironically, this radicality of thought also means I am not a philosophy nationalist. As you already know, I take the position that philosophy only lives when we are willing to go beyond it. You are a specialist in the thinking of Frantz Fanon. How can Fanonian thinking be important for Brazil as a reference in intellectual work and research? Fanon’s thought is manifold. He rejected the ontologizing or cordoning off of human reality. We’re endangered, he argued, when we forget that human institutions are created by human beings. When we forget that, we treat our institutions as unchangeable even though their maintenance depends on us. 293

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Fanon also argued that it is important to become what he called “actional.” That means being agents of history. People become agents of history when they understand they are not gods and that no time in the past was perfect. That means that history is a constant struggle of trying to make things better while many attempt to reach a point of closure. Many people attempt to say, “History ends here.” Yet “here” always entails a “there.” Fanon called for moving on. Fanonian thinking is important for Brazil because it is important for everyone. Humanity is not in a state of perfection; there is much work for us to do while realizing that although we can never be “perfect,” we can become better or at least try. Fanon also addressed clear concerns of Afro- or Afri-modernity. Colonialism, enslavement, and racism obscured history through claiming that black people are only effects of white people’s actions. I call this “black melancholia.” It is where black people see ourselves as indigenous to Euromodernity and not belonging to it. We are homeless in a world to which we are temporally indigenous. Fanon, and others such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Almílcar Cabral, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X), and Ella Baker took the position that black people should build a world to which we belong on our own terms. They in effect argued for the transformation of black people into Black people. The first are effects; the second are agents of history. I think Black Brazilians and Indigenous Brazilians could learn much from this. Fanon also argued that people must cultivate skill sets that are organic to the struggles they face. That means every generation has its mission. Brazilians of today must think through what their obligations are to Brazilians of tomorrow. In that stands their historic mission. Brazilian Paulo Freire is among the many intellectuals that you reference in your work. How does Freire’s thinking fit into your intellectual production? I see Freire as phenomenological with an attunement to maturity. His critical pedagogy was inspirational when I worked as a high school teacher in New York City. I was inspired by his ideas—in addition to those on education offered by Antonio Gramsci, John Dewey, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Y. Davis. I used to teach a course called “Radical Theories of Education,” in which we studied their thought. A lot of Freire’s ideas were already there in what could be called the Black Radical Tradition. His theory of conscientização is similar to Kwame Nkrumah’s theory of Consciencism and Gramsci’s on critical consciousness. He also shares Fanon’s view that such a consciousness entails a maturation process in which one’s relationship to reality is demystified. What I like about Freire’s thought is that it is attuned to reality. It also informs my understanding of research and scholarship. For me, an expert is ultimately an advanced student. She or he is someone who fell in love with learning and never stopped doing so. This understanding of what we do as continued, committed learning makes all intellectual work educational when done well. I should add, however, that “educational” for me isn’t exclusively pragmatic. It involves the multifaceted dimensions of our relationship with reality. This includes, as well, our 294

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ability to appreciate reality’s beauty and understand its ugliness; it involves joy and sorrow; the known and the mysterious. Much has been discussed and proposed about the “new functions” of the intellectual in the Human Sciences. In your opinion, what is the contemporary challenge of the intellectual? I don’t think there is one challenge. There are many. These challenges include the following issues: the danger of market colonization, not only of knowledge but also of politics; the ongoing struggle against seductive forms of stupidity; the fetishization of ignorance; the pathological fear of reality and truth; the insipid and growing domination of the view that nothing new can be thought; and, in short, nihilism. I have discussed various dimensions of these in my writings. To do so here would take up the rest of the interview. Here are some summaries: capitalism requires nothing out of its reach. Thus, intellectuals become subordinated to capitalism by struggling to make themselves “marketable.” One way these days is to increase their marketability through claims of being “political.” This is in effect the market colonization of politics and is an explanation of why many so-called political intellectuals offer no organic solutions, but instead sometimes only present textual links to problems of political reality. They embody the contradiction, offering their political identities as marketable, to the extent to which they do not make that identity compromise their marketability. Anti-intellectualism is one of the seductive forms of stupidity. There is no shortage of intellectuals who claim to be anti-intellectual. It’s one of the doorways to fascism; fascists valorize their stupidity as a kind of mass consciousness. The fear of reality and truth already permeates many societies with subjective language, as though all issues come down to subjectivity versus objectivity. Reality doesn’t care whether we are subjective or objective, and in truth such arguments are dead ends: there is no subjectivity without objectivity and vice versa. Sadly, the descent has worsened. Too many people don’t think anymore; they “feel.” The growing, ultimately narcissistic rage against novelty of thought is linked to the demise of Eurocentrism. The presumption is that when Europeans or whites run out of ideas it must be because developing new ideas is no longer possible. That’s another version of Europe and whites as the end of history. Well, the rest of us cannot afford that. We’ve got to move on and think creatively. All this is nihilistic. It makes intellectual life meaningless. It also achieves its misguided ends by demanding proof of novelty before ideas have been thought. This is a fallacy. We never have advanced knowledge of what we can do. Much of life, of the thinking it entails, involves imagining and doing what wasn’t done before. The challenge, then, is to rally the existential paradox of commitment without guarantees. Although Brazil has advanced in its discussion about racism, it is widely perceived that racism continues to operate in the oppression of black people. Can you, from your studies, systematize a way out of the case of Brazilian racism? 295

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Racism is a political phenomenon. It therefore requires political solutions. The best way to get out of racism is through committed action from those who are its adversaries. Those actions involve building institutions in which human beings could live in nonracist social relations. This requires a different understanding of what human beings are and can be. If we treat ourselves as permanent or unchangeable, then we would just have racists in different social environments. If we understand ourselves as those relationships, then creating different social relationships and institutions entails the birth of different kinds of human beings and the social worlds in which they live. In Brazil, there is still the mistaken belief that the black individual who socially ascends does not face any more racial problems. To what extent can the imbrications between race and class be clarified in order to avoid the fallacy that the black individual who rises is an exception? This question relates to the previous one. If racism is a political phenomenon, it is also a social one. Race never exists in a vacuum. It is a function of many converging forces. A race by itself is an abstraction. So is a class. A gender. A sexual orientation, and more. Those are all abstractions. Living human beings are convergences of these relationships. Thus, different elements manifest themselves in different ways as they are connected to other social situations. The old model of treating a human being as a thing imagines one could pick a black woman, for example, and place her in a place that was historically designed to exclude her and the problem is then fixed. What such proponents don’t get is that if the system was designed to exclude her, it could only let her in as an affirmation of her exclusion. Put differently, she would only be there as an “exception,” which in effect would make her function as the maintenance of that system. She would then simply be a white man who only looks like a black woman. Now if we understand her as a set of relationships, the whole scenario changes. For her to enter means the array of baggage connected to her must also enter. They include the history of racism, sexism, classism, etc. Since those are incompatible with maintaining the system designed for their exclusion, it means new relationships must follow. It means a different kind of system, one not premised on exclusions, must emerge. That, however, requires also changing those people whom the exclusions—based on race, class, or sex— were designed to benefit. Black feminist thinkers in the United States have initiated specific discussions about the intersections among race, class, gender and sexuality. Taking into consideration your academic experience in other countries, how do you see the global importance of the work developed by black feminist intellectuals? Black feminism is, in my view, a misnomer in some contexts and accurate in others. Where it means an imitation or mimicry of white feminism, it’s a misnomer. Where it means the world of dignity and freedom for which Black women have struggled regardless of the terms to which they are referred, it is accurate.

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One of the things about Black feminism in the United States is that its history is often misrepresented. Black feminist activism began in every moment of defiance that Black women—enslaved and otherwise—were engaged in from the moment they landed in the Americas (Abya Yala). That history is there in the revolts they led, the enslaved people they guided to territories in which slavery was illegal, and in their speeches and writings. Sojourner Truth, Lucy Parsons, and Anna Julia Cooper are great examples from the nineteenth century. Cooper lived well into the twentieth. And there are many others. Today much discussion of Black feminism is dominated by its academic exemplars. Kimberlé Crenchaw’s work on intersectionality has gained world prominence, though the insights go back not only to ideas from Anna Julia Cooper to Angela Y. Davis, but also to writings of Black men such as Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through to Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara. It’s fashionable to construct discussions of Black men as antipathetic to Black feminist thought, but that is not historically correct. Yes, there were and continue to be Black male sexists, but the fact of the matter is that the history of Black female leadership not only in the Americas, but also in continental Africa is such that very different paradigms of Black women and men on such issues need to be admitted and addressed. Some theorists, such as Keisha Lindsay, Nkiru Nzegwu, Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, Lyn Ossome, and Hanétha Vété-Congolo, have raised these concerns. I discuss some of the global impact of the intellectual work offered by Black feminist philosophers in my book An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, but beyond intellectual history is also the reality of the multiple forms of work Black feminists do. They include not only the world of pedagogy and scholarship—of which you, for instance, are a part— but also other facets of social life. I am thinking of women such as Amanda Alexander, who founded the Detroit Justice Center, and Alicia Garza, who co-founded many organizations, including Black Lives Matter. There is the work of community builders, political workers, farmers (of which women are the highest number in Africa, for instance), physical and spiritual healers, mothers, and also, more controversially, sex workers. The last are part of the world of shadow economies whose political significance, especially with regard to rethinking agency in service economies, calls for reflections. In short, too many think of feminist work—and indeed much committed work—too narrowly. Rethinking what that involves could lead to better understandings of what constitutes contribution and who contributes. In your book An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (2008), you argue for the importance of understanding Africana Philosophy as a modern philosophy. What relationships can be established between Africana Philosophy and other disciplines such as History, Literature, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, etc.? I argue that Africana philosophy, which is another way of saying African diasporic philosophy, is modern because the idea of the African diaspora emerged through Arab

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enslavement and then the European efforts across the Atlantic and Indian oceans. I interrogate the concept of “modern” in my recent writings, where I point out that its content involves mechanisms of power through which people “belong” to the future. This means that modern peoples have emerged throughout history. What has been different since 1492 is the emergence of Euromodernity. This one differs from others in that its model of belonging was racialized. Race and racism constitute its philosophical anthropology. There was and continues to be, however, resistance. Those involving the cultivation of belonging to the future outside the framework of Euromodern mimicry are building their own modernities. This includes Afro- or Afri-modernity. It is one of the bases for the transition from black to Black. The relationships between Africana philosophy and other disciplines are manifold. I argue that Africana philosophy raises at least three challenging questions: (1) What does it mean to be human? (2) What are freedom and liberation? And (3), What must be done to address the crises of reason raised by the emergence of racist rationality? Reformulated, the third comes down to the question of whether justification is any longer justifiable. I call this “the metacritique of reason.” The first addresses racism directly. The second addresses colonialism and enslavement, among other forms of institutional oppression. The third, however, addresses disciplines as well. If any discipline is presumed legitimate without interrogation, it can collapse into a colonial epistemological force. There is, therefore, a form of humility in Africana philosophy. It must communicate with other sciences instead of imposing itself upon them or absorbing them into itself as their legitimate overlord. The metacritique of reason is, then, a form of teleological suspension of disciplinarity. This is a formulation I posed in my book Disciplinary Decadence (2006). It involves examining the danger of forgetting that human beings create disciplines, which are developed to address specific problems inherent to our relationships to reality. Since only a god could create a discipline that encompasses everything, there is a fundamental incompleteness at the heart of every human disciplinary practice. This means a discipline must be willing to go beyond itself for the sake of communicating with others in efforts to cultivate relationships with reality. In philosophy, I call this a teleological suspension of philosophy. It means being willing to go beyond philosophy for the sake of reality. Every discipline, then, is a practice of continued learning along with other disciplines. Failure to understand this leads also to what I call methodological fetishism. This is where the method is also treated as created by a god. It leads to the naive conclusion that one need simply apply the method as thought, or one shoe that fits all. The implications of this critique are many. A crucial one is that the various constellations of disciplines at our disposal may only tap into a small fragment—a tiny point—of disclosing our relationships to reality. Your next book will be about social justice. At this ruthless political moment that reflects the demise of democracies, especially in South America, how can human existence, freedom of thought, and social justice be apprehended from the perspective of existentialist philosophy? 298

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Actually my next three books are on Black consciousness, on Global Existentialism, and a collection of essays on Africana existential philosophy. After those, I plan to write a book on the study of Jews of color and then a book on concepts of justice indigenous to our epoch. I will argue that social justice approaches are insufficient to address problems of the colonization of normative life. I outline that argument in my chapter, “When Justice Is Not Enough,” which was recently published in the book I co-edited with Fernanda Bragato entitled, Geopolitics and Decolonization (2017). Different academic and non-academic communities all over the world have used your theoretical work to develop research on the specificities of your thinking. This special issue of EntreLetras is about the global significance of your intellectual production. It is the first time in Brazil that such a journal has been exclusively devoted to your work. What kind of message would you like to leave for young Brazilian researchers? Think about the aforementioned challenges to intellectual life. An addition is the form of decadence that attempts to lock people of the Global South in the realm of experience with thought left in the hands of dominating, Eurocentric forces of the North. That would make experience dark and thinking white. That would be a form of epistemic dependency. It is a form of epistemological colonialism. The struggle for dignity, freedom, and liberation involves also taking responsibility for how we think and bring meaning to thought and systems of knowledge. This makes intellectual work crucial. It’s one of the reasons there are market efforts to colonize it. Brazilian researchers should, like all committed and excellent intellectuals, open the door of thought through which life flourishes. Think about what needs to be thought. This requires the courage to face knowledge, life, and the welfare of us all with the commitment to face truths that few can bear. Start from the premise of valuing what is not often valued: each other. We have inherited a world that formulates value as something offered from those who degrade, dominate, and oppress us. If we accept that, then we would fail to see the value offered from each other. And if we stop there, we would fail to see the value of being valued by each other. This purposefully awkward formulation is raised to highlight a central point. Looking into the past, too many of us seek sources of value from kings, queens, generals, and capitalists. It is revolutionary, however, to value the love offered down the ages from the colonized, the enslaved, the once invisibilized. Those are the people whose courage and commitment were the conditions enabling us to fight different kinds of struggles today. We should do the same for our descendants. We don’t serve the interests of our ancestors or progeny by extinguishing the flame that inspired our love of learning. We must admit we don’t know where that road will lead and, instead, ask about journeys worth making. Not because of what we will gain but what, in the practice of so doing, exemplifies the best of what we are. Ultimately, we may learn and appreciate who we are as well. 299

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Dr. Rosemere Ferreira da Silva is Titular Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia or UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. Her research focuses on Afro-Brazilian Literature. She is currently writing a book about black intellectuals. Dr. Da Silva is a Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs and part of the editorial team of Black Issues in Philosophy.

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CHAPTER 27 DOUGLA : INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN DALITNESS AND AFROBLACKNESS Interviewed by Sayan Dey and Rozena Maart

Sayan and Rozena Let us start with a basic question. When and how you were identified as Dougla for the first time and what impact the identity had on you? Lewis The term is used mostly in Trinidad and Guyana. I never heard it used in Jamaica. To be mixed in Jamaica wasn’t, in my recollection, treated as an abomination. I learned later, through stories from my elders, about how things were up until the 1960s. The colonial years were full of prohibitions, especially against mixture, although, given the obvious presence of mixed peoples (of all sorts, from “race” to religions to ethnicities), those injunctions were clearly not honored. In my childhood, everyone was simply Jamaican—from darkskin to light. This doesn’t mean there weren’t forms of discrimination, as evidenced by the existence of a variety of pejorative terms. The obvious one, with reference to brown through dark East Indians, was “coolie,” even though the term originally pertained to Chinese and East Indians. As my Chinese and East Indian ancestry were from poor—indeed, enslaved—laborers, that made me technically “coolie” on both sides. What makes things difficult is that “black” and “Jamaican” pertained to people who were also morphologically brown and appeared East Indian. This applied even to those who were very light, even though they were not, in my recollection, called “coolies.” In my case, my maternal grandmother was also descended from Tamils from Puducherry, India. Her paternal great-grandmother was an enslaved Tamil girl on a plantation owned by the Norton family from Scotland. Asians on my paternal side came from Guangdong, China. My encounter with the word “Dougla” came about in the 1990s from my learning about the situation of Afro-Indian peoples in Trinidad. Sayan and Rozena It is known to us that the term Dougla is derogatorily used to denote the interracial communities that emerged in the Caribbean from the Indian and African indentured laborers. The term has a derogatory usage within India as well where individuals who indulge in intercaste relationships are dehumanized, demonized and rejected as Dougla. These problematic attitudes show how transculturality and inbetweenesses of identities are always subjected to ridicule. But your works on Black existentialism, Africana philosophy, decoloniality, critical race studies, gender, sexuality and various others have widely acknowledged the necessity of the embracing and practicing inbetweeness and inconclusivity as ways of knowledge production. Is this acknowledgment a way of celebrating your Dougla identity? 301

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Lewis Not at first. My ideas on relationality are connected to acknowledging our humanity. It is attuned to reality and what is right. It is also connected to my critique of notions of bad faith, of which a form is an appeal to purity imposed upon human life. To be truly “pure” is to be cleansed of all external connections. Even the notion of “pure” consciousness makes no sense. It would lack intentionality and even the emergence of thought. I should add that there are forms of inbetweeness that are exemplars of bad faith, since I argue that the human world includes “both-and” realities. Autobiographically, it has always struck me as weird that anyone would consider me ontologically incompatible with my parents and other relatives—especially my grandmothers—because of my black racial designation. I could “see” them in me and me in them, in addition to their individuality. I am, however, from so many despised peoples that love has always been the best option. I am Black (of Ethiopian and Liberian ancestry), Jewish (Mizrahi and Sephardi), Palestinian (with Egyptian and Syrian relatives), Tamil, Chinese (not always revered in the Caribbean context), Irish, and Scottish. In short, typically Caribbean. There are people who would try to quantify these into parts, but, as you know, I argue that people can be 100 percent more than one identity (hence the earlier “both-and” point). We could call this creolization, in which all are at work in something new amidst the old. I learned in my childhood to respect and embrace the elements of my communities that are underappreciated. Thus, for me there was no incompatibility between my blackness and my other identities. Before I was aware of being Dougla I learned about Varn·a and its pernicious effects of Varn·as through which there were the production of, through problematic policies of “integration,” the excluded, those who don’t “fit”—namely, the Dalits. From an ethical perspective, one fights injustice through identification with the excluded. Given the Dravidian dimension of Tamil history, and the connection I have to that history through colonialism and enslavement, through which so many of my ancestors who were at the bottom and those who were higher up challenged those hierarchies, I do see much to celebrate in being Dougla, even with its being used as a pejorative term by historical oppressors. I should add that my former student Stephon Alexander, a renowned physicist from Trinidad, and I love to address each other as Douglas. We regard our achievements as shared among so many people who oppressive forces wished did not exist. We are inspired by other Douglas, of whom, in my writings, Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James loom large. Sayan and Rozena Now let us come to more specific reflections on Dalitness and Afro-blackness as a part of your Dougla identity. Historically the Dalit community in India has widely been influenced by the Afro-black movements across the world, especially in the United States of America. As an individual, you also identify yourself closely with both the Dalit and the Afro-black communities across the globe. How your identities of both Dalitness and Afro-blackness get reflected in your works? Lewis Those identities are reflected in every one of my books. I had a wonderful conversation about this with Stan Grant of ABC Radio, Australia, this past spring on his program The Ethics and Religion Report. He observed that I have an inclusive view of 302

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blackness. In my first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), my use of “black” was not exclusively African American. I referred to—and cited—indigenous peoples of Australia, peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, and, yes, India. Much of this was inspired by my father and uncles’ history of involvement in Black liberation struggles, my mother’s in workers’ struggles, and my subsequent involvement in the South African antiapartheid struggle in the early 1980s through to my involvement in varieties of global efforts since the 1990s. In my published writings, this commitment continued through to my discussions of V. T. Rajshekar’s work in Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). As well, I distinguish white supremacy from antiblack racism in my work. One could eliminate white supremacy and still have antiblack racism, as we see in how that configures in many countries whose majority populations are not white and whose national identification isn’t white. Blackness as what is to shun—to render untouchable—is a familiar trope that makes a failure to address shared dynamics with Dalit struggles a grave mistake in the struggle against antiblack racism and related forms of dehumanization. Beyond my work, this history is a feature of the thought of many historic Black liberationists. Think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s correspondence with B.R. Ambedkar, through to Fanon’s and James’s writings, and even Martin Luther King, Jr.’s. And, as attested to in so many writings by Dalits, Malcolm X/ El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s critique of civil rights as, though necessary, insufficient for peoples suffering from dehumanization works well with Rajshekar’s discussion of Brahmanic weaponizing of integration and assimilation against Dalits. Sayan and Rozena Along with your arguments on the celebration of Dougla identities and philosophies so far, what we can also figure out is the necessity of building a planetary archive of Dougla literature. According to you what are some of the possible ways through which archives on Dougla Literature can be developed across the globe? Lewis This begins with acknowledging the existence and value of Dougla-designated peoples. The realities of the Caribbean and Southwest Asia are such that Douglas are often known exclusively through our other mixtures. More people know me as Black and Jewish and even Chinese than as Tamil and Dougla—except, of course, the colleagues with whom I collaborate in India through the Forum on Contemporary Theory. I’m sure that some readers are surprised to learn from this interview that Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James are Douglas. To this we can add, as well, you, Rozena, although the operative term for you in South Africa is “Coloured” because of your mixture also with Afrikaners and Xhosas. Aside from literary figures, there are artists and politicians, perhaps the most famous of whom is United States Vice President Kamala Harris, who, like me, is AfroTamil. Since the identity is premised primarily on Afro-East Indian mixture, this means wherever there are African and African Studies, there should also be a Dougla component because of the mixtures occasioned and identities formed by Euromodern empires. I do think some nuance could come to this, however, since even to say “Indian” is misleading, given the history of the British Empire’s role of cramming so many people from the Indus-Valley under a single designation. As there are many African-descended mixtures 303

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that could be with many Southwest-Asian descended mixtures, Dougla studies could no doubt offer a rich portrait of how different kinds of human beings come into being and the possibilities of more to come. I could see, as well, a whole area of Dougla queer studies, since “Dougla” is already a designation that challenges the idea of staying in an imposed place. And, of course, there is so much to unpack from the doubled blackness of Afro-Dalits.

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CHAPTER 28 FREEDOM, OPPRESSION, AND BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN GET OUT

Having recently viewed Jordan Peele’s award-winning Get Out (2017), political theorist Derefe Kimarley Chevannes was prompted to discuss the film with philosopher Lewis Gordon, whose writings include discussions of race in horror films and literature. Derefe Kimarley Chevannes: Lewis, it’s a pleasure to have this discussion with you. As I begin, I want to first consider the title of the film, Get Out. A seemingly trivial affair at first glance but perhaps not. This title is not merely a recommendation; it’s a command. What are the benefits of such a title? Or, better yet, why “Get Out” and not, say, “The Sunken Place”—referring, of course, to the imprisoning of Black consciousness? This allows me to consider the question: To what extent can Blacks permanently “Get Out” of white brutalization? And, lastly, does “Get Out” suggest that black escape, or more charitably, black freedom, is entirely reliant on black action absent white accountability? Lewis Gordon: You’re asking a lot, Derefe. First, it’s a delight to discuss this film with you. It’s such a philosophically and politically rich film that I could write an entire essay on any single scene. To your question, however, much is already there in the opening credits and the end. You should check out Michael Abels’s amazing score. It’s actually scarier than the movie, though it’s there throughout. Without the visuals, without what is seen, it is so haunting as one simply listens. And listening is much of what the film is about, despite what is seen. Notice the moving images of pine and brush as though on the run as Abels’s haunting song “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga” (2017) is the initial leitmotif. The title is in Kiswahili. It means, “Listen to your Ancestors.” And that’s the point. The ancestors suffered. Heed their warning. They eventually whisper, “run!” Yes, get out. Much is already stated in the fact that Chris, the protagonist, is a photographer. He works with his eyes, but his vulnerability is in what he fails to hear, which is in effect to listen. The theme of listening is crucial here. As anyone who has seen the film knows, part of what he had to learn was also what not to hear, to close his ears from what obscures his focus, which in effect is his ability to listen. “The sunken place,” into which he is thrown and immobilized, is the stratification of trauma. He associates it with his mother’s death from a car accident, of which he was first reminded when the female deer was hit by his girlfriend Rose Armitage’s car en route to her parents’ home. At their house, which is obviously “the Big House” of slave narratives, he finds his counterpart in the buck on the mantle. The buck, of course, refers to the old term for enslaved black males, and we 305

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already know the villains of the film are on the hunt for bucks, though, as we also see in the character Georgina/Grandma, there is the occasional doe. The voices of the film are the ancestors, which is why “Get Out” is the appropriate title. And we should bear in mind those are Andre’s words when he is momentarily released from the grip of white consciousness through the flash of light from the smart phone. Ancestors come before us. They offer knowledge. They offer history. The choice of Kiswahili as their voice is to point to Africa, though Kiswahili is a creolized language of the East African Kingozi with Arabic and Persian elements. That there was an Arab and Persian trade in the enslavement of Africans brings to the fore the African American story of creolization from enslavement. Yet the basilect, the often-suppressed African voice, speaks. That voice, in a way, gets out. With regard to your other question, I think the charitable part would be the escape. Freedom is a perpetual, not completed, journey. The question of “permanently getting out” offers paradox. Do you mean get out “as black” or get out of the ensnarement of a world dependent on a particular construction of blackness? The first would require a different kind of black than those premised on white agency and black passivity. That black, however, would be something radically different and possibly unrecognizable to anyone locked in the currency of blackness as a negative term. That would be a redemptive historical development, no? I’m not sure what you mean by “absent white accountability,” since, as a political matter, no one is left without accountability when it comes to racism. But if you mean without dependency on whites, the truth of the matter is that white dependency is something cultivated by whites. If black people depended on whites, we would have been wiped out a long time ago. Any theoretician of dialectics, from Hegel to Marx to He-Yin Zhen to Sartre to Fanon, would reveal the obvious. The dependency is the other way around. My next question alludes to Fanonian discourse. The antagonist, Missy Armitage, the mother of the white girlfriend uses a form of hypnosis to entrap her black victims and sends them into what’s famously known as the “Sunken Place.” As the audience knows well, once there, such a place seems inescapable—though, there are moments of momentary relief. But it seems to be exactly that, “moments of escape” and not necessarily freedom proper. I wonder, then, about Fanon’s discussion of the zone of nonbeing. What parallels, if any, are there between the Sunken Place and Fanon’s zone of nonbeing? Or perhaps, more controversially, have Black conservatives (or the Black bourgeoisie) fallen into the Sunken Place? Missy Armitage, Rose’s mother, imposes hypnosis. The “sunken place” is a great metaphor of the experience of oppression. It’s what Michael Tillotson, in his book Invisible Jim Crow (2011), calls making us “resistant to resistance.” Where one is resistant to resistance, one is not what Frantz Fanon calls “actional.” It means one no longer affects the world. What one “does” is turned inward. Inward directed, one’s energy is at first on one’s body but then sinks into oneself. In my writings on oppression, I call this “implosion.” Eventually one disappears from the world in a continued suffering as an imprisoned observer on reality. 306

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The zone of nonbeing requires unpacking. It is at first simply not being. To be is to be there or, basically, somewhere. Not being entails, then, being nowhere. We should bear in mind, however, that existence is not identical with being. To exist, after all, is to stand out. It is thus the human condition. Much of what has become known as “western culture” is premised on the notion of being. To be, however, suppresses existence. There are times we just want to be. But we eventually realize that’s not living. To live, we must move beyond being. Where being becomes the standard, however, actually living becomes enmeshed in an elusive goal. Thus, there is the experience of constantly being measured by not only what one is not but also what one could never be. What is tricky here, however, is the direction in which one is not being. Where outward, it is actional and existence. Pushed inward, it is immobilization, being sunken, locked in a form of stasis. So, paradoxically, the zone of nonbeing is the experience of the transition from human being into thingness. As a thing, one is an instrument. One is reduced to a consciousness that can only look but not act. It is what existentialists call being-in-itself. With regard to black conservatives and the black bourgeoisie, the first thing to remember is that they are not identical. Conservatism is a response to crisis in which one turns to the past not as a source from which to learn but a place to which to return. That is why “tradition” is always a feature of conservatism. The problem with conservatism is always about which past it is to which one wishes to return. Many black conservatives don’t see a past beyond the one constructed by white conservatism. White conservatism has an imagined past of perfect white rule. One of the reasons conservatives turn to the past is because they see it as a world of order and security. Thus, implicit in perfect white rule is the notion of a world of order and security only achievable with whites ruling. The path for black conservatives who subscribe to that is clearly, then, the sunken place. Another formulation of that place is political nihilism. Other kinds of people who identify as black conservatives are not interested in a world of white rule. They are interested in capital accumulation of wealth. For them, capitalism is the end of history. Their conservatism is premised on what they could individually acquire since the logic of capitalism is one in which inequalities are radicalized. For them, the world comes down to haves and have-nots. Though they retreat to themselves, they are not “sunken” since they are actional. They’re just not invested in others. Their goal is getting and having. There is debate over whether there is properly a black bourgeoisie. Some, such as E. Franklin Frazier and Frantz Fanon, have argued there is in effect a black “lumpen” bourgeoisie. This is because most black wealth isn’t linked to material capital. White capital has materially affected the lives of white people. We see today that Chinese capital does the same. There are individually rich black people with their capital having more of a symbolic effect on black people than a material transformation of the conditions under which black people live. That needn’t be a permanent condition. It is, however, a real one. There is, as well, the African American expression “bougie,” which refers to pretending to be of a higher class than what one is. It generally pertains to what in class analysis would be petit bourgeois. The problem in black communities is that there are people with working-class incomes pretending to be even that. They end up enmeshed in the web of 307

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debt to appear as what they are not. This phenomenon goes beyond African America, as it is now an issue across the African continent, the Caribbean, and pretty much the entire African diaspora. The sunken place there, then, would be an economic one. There are other forms of black conservatism such as those in churches, mosques, and synagogues. An unfortunate feature of much contemporary discourse on conservatism, liberalism, leftism, and notions of the right is that they lack nuance. An excellent recent analysis of this issue is an article by Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of AfroPessimism (2.0)?” (2018). Thomas shows how a form of conservatism rests beneath certain kinds of avowed leftism. These analyses ultimately depend on the important question of what Antonio Gramsci would call an organic relationship to a set of interests. A black bourgeoisie linked to the status quo is conservative. Those invested in the transformation of a people are otherwise. Friedrich Engels, we should remember, was a factory owner. There are black publishers such as Haki R. Madhubuti, co-founder of Third World Press, the largest independentowned black press in the United States, Kassahun Checole, founder of Africa World Press and Red Sea Press, and Firoze Manji, founder of Daraja Press. These are viable economic enterprises organically linked to black communities. I could offer a long list from people in the tech to the food industries. Those people are formally members of the bourgeoisie but it’s not clear to me that, given their commitments, they identify as such and they are certainly not conservative. One thing is certain. People who reject notions of a perfect past face the recourse of building a better future. As I watched the movie, there’s a scene that stood out as peculiar and interesting at the very least. It is where Rod, the close and wise friend of the protagonist, Chris, who, after suggesting some form of foul play by the white family, visits the cops and tells them the crimes he believes transpired. Their instinctive, if not “reasonable,” response is literally to laugh in his face! All these cops, two males, and one female lead detective, laugh at the hilarity of the position of white occupation of black bodies. Is this a nuanced critique of black disbelief in the face of white colonization? Or, is this only a critique of law enforcement and its trivialization of black brutalization in white generic spaces? I recall their laughter was specifically at his talking about sexual slavery of black men. The disbelief there is manifold. From the police point of view, if one desires black men, money would be a good lure, no? What is important in the scene is that it is a conversation among people of color. There are many layers to that scene. Rod is, after all, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer. There is also condescension, since the police are also in effect saying, “Leave this to the professionals.” And the professional assessment is that his story is ridiculous. There is, however, an allegory here. After all, black people are constantly presented as ridiculous. Expressions such as “feeling of discrimination” and “perceived racism” undermine the validity of fact through subjectivizing them. How is racial discrimination a “feeling” when there is so much data and history out there? How is it so when antiblack policies are enacted with public avowal of their targets? 308

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We should remember, however, that Rod is a TSA agent. His job is to monitor migration. He is a mythic character, a gatekeeper. He manages transgressions, pathways. Rod is in effect doing his job when he attempts to rescue blacks from whites illegally migrating into their bodies. Why “illegal”? Clearly being kidnapped and having a piece or pieces of another person’s brain placed into one’s own is illegal. What is “invisible” to the law is the movement of one consciousness into another’s in the movement of those portions of the brain. This leads us into issues of philosophy of mind, but at this point I’m getting off track from your main point, which is political. Here is something to consider. There are two endings of Get Out. There is the official released cut. Rod shows up and drives Chris away from the carnage. Let me say something about names here. “Rod,” as in a lightening rod, is a conduit. As I’ve already mentioned, he negotiates passages. When he shows up and drives Chris away, he is similar to mythic guides such as Aker in ancient Kmt/Egypt or Virgil, who guides Dante’s protagonist in The Inferno out of the depths of hell at dawn into life’s possibilities. “Chris” means “messiah,” which in turn means to be “anointed.” Messiah is also savior. Who does Chris save? In the original ending, it’s the police who show up. The scene shifts to black. Then the closing scene is Rod visiting Chris in prison. Rod offers to use his detective skills to exonerate Chris, but Chris discourages him. He simply says, “Rod. I’m good. I stopped them. I stopped them.” As he walks away, accompanied by a white guard down a white hall, “Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga” returns as white bars slide shut behind him. In the released version, Chris saves himself and indirectly those to come. Perhaps he has also saved those whose parasites no longer have a hypnotist to help them suppress their host. In the original, now alternative, ending his words, “I stopped them,” makes Chris a messiah. It also makes Rod someone who knows the truth but is no longer a guide. In one version he is Akar or Virgil. In the alternative ending, however, as knowing the truth and seeking order, balance, and justice, Rod is the African Kmt/Egyptian godess MAat. Chris’s words, “I’m good,” signify his having accomplished what he was supposed to do. This is another feature of myth. The one who gets others out doesn’t himself get out. Think of the biblical story of Moshe or Moses. Such heroes don’t enter the Promised Land. Lastly, Get Out focuses our attention on the capture of black bodies for white predatory ends. Chris, the main character, asks, “Why black people?” and the response given by one white predator is: “black is in fashion!” This black-is-fashionable viewpoint is hardly new. It reminds me of the white fetishization of the African woman, Sarah Baartman, known by Europeans as “Hottentot Venus,” whose big butt entranced the white imagination. Like Chris, and other black victims in the film, black bodies are fetishized, either for their big eyes, big lips, big ass or dare I say, big penis. My question is this: Have we confused the “Black is Beautiful” emancipatory motif with this rank sexualization of black peoples? And, has white liberalism fallen into the trap of this confusion? 309

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I’m not a fan of the formulation “the white imagination.” Neither “the black imagination.” Those are abstractions that elide the varieties of ways people are and how they think. I think you are specifically referring to whites who exoticize black people. Exoticism is as old as exploitation. The focus on body parts to which you refer is a key feature of fetishism. For some of the best discussions of fetishism today, I recommend consulting Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard’s The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de rosses and the Afterlives of an Idea (2017). I think a more insightful element of the film is that many public claims of hating how black people look and smell may be for show. If freed from the pressures of a society premised on antiblack hatred, what would white people—and also many black, brown, red, and yellow people—“see” when they actually look at black people. They may see the beauty of many black people. They could see our positive qualities. They may also admit what Jean-Paul Rocchi calls in his book Desiring Modes of Being Black (2018): many black people, like variations of all other peoples, are beautiful. This is also an issue explored by Paul Taylor in his discussion of what he calls “somatic aesthetics” in his book Black Is Beautiful (2016). I don’t say all black people because that would be exoticism. Finding every member of a group beautiful would be downright weird. It would manifest a failure to see each individual in her, his, or their specificity. That is a feature of racial exoticism, which is a form of racism. We’ve arrived at a thesis I’m exploring in my book Fear of a Black Consciousness. There is much talk about hatred of “black bodies.” It’s as though black people no longer exist. We should bear in mind, however, that one could desire black bodies but hate black people. In the film, the thought of a white consciousness in a black body turned on, to the point of near salivation, the Coagula cult. Those antagonists are the white and East Asian people kidnapping black people and marketing the process of coagulation or seizing black bodies with white and, as we see, East Asian consciousness. The status of East Asian requires analysis here, since it may be that at least the East Asian and whites in the film regard their consciousnesses as the same—a form of Eurasian consciousness. The political reality of China and Japan is that those countries reveal no interest in being linked to the global south. Theirs may very well be a new kind of white supremacy in the making, if not already made. It is, after all, very good to be white in East Asia. (See, e.g., César Ross’s “The Role of Africa in the Foreign Policy of China,” in Geopolitics and Decolonization, 2018.) Returning to the point about desire, we should consider this: What if the fear isn’t of black bodies but instead of black consciousness? This brings us back to your question about black conservatives. There are some, after all, who can move through the white world so long as they offer themselves as black bodies with white consciousnesses. They even become “desirable.” This question raises a host of other considerations. Given there being fear of black consciousness, would it be so in a white body? The problem with black consciousness in a white society is that it is fundamentally political. Since politics makes no sense without power, fear of black power is what 310

Freedom, Oppression, and Black Consciousness in Get Out

impedes many people’s willingness to look at the humanity black people embody. My colleague Noël Cazenave addresses this fear of black political advancement in his book Killing African Americans (2018). It’s clear Get Out raises as many questions as it addresses. I’m delighted that Jordan Peele received the well-deserved Oscar and many other accolades for his screenplay. His directing is also spectacular. I could write an entire essay on the opening credits of the film alone. Many others have devoted much attention to every detail of the film. That it is worthy of such attention is a testament to its philosophical value and also its clearly earned place, at its release, as a classic.

Note on the Interviewer Dr. Derefe Chevannes is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. He specializes in political theory and is also trained in the field of public law. His research focuses, broadly, on Africana political theory, with an emphasis on Black liberatory politics. His research project lies at the intersection of Africana Studies, Deaf Studies, and Caribbean Studies. His publications offer a renewed conception of political speech by theorizing how the communicative practices of Black and Deaf subjects contribute to an enriched understanding of the relationships of speech, subjectivity, and liberation for the study of politics.

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Books in Print 1 Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, by Humanities International Press, 1995. (Went through 5 printings in 1995.) Acquired by Amherst, NY: Humanity/Prometheus Books, 1999. Humanities Classics imprint of Rowman & Littlefield International Publishers edition 2023. 2 Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995. 2nd edition, with commentary by Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Paget Henry, Nigel Gibson, Greg Graham, Julia Suàrez-Krabbe, Catherine Walsh, and Michael Monahan, Routledge, 2023. 3 Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited with an introduction and translations by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White, and a foreword by Leonard Harris and Carolyn Johnson, and an afterword by Joy Ann James. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. 4 Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, edited with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon. New York: Routledge, 1997. 5 Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age, with a foreword by Renée T. White. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. 6 Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. 7 A Companion to African-American Studies, edited with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006. 8 Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon. New York: Routledge, 2006. 9 Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. New York: Routledge, 2006. 10 An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Revised and expanded 2nd Edition forthcoming in 2022. 11 with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age. New York: Routledge, 2009. 12 with Walter Mignolo, Alejandro de Oto, and Sylvia Wynter, La teoría política en la encrucijada descolonial. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Del Signo ediciones, 2009. 13 What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Portrait of His Life and Thought, with a foreword by Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun and an Afterword by Drucilla Cornell. Series: Images of Justice: Transformative Ideals of Justice in Ethical and Political Thought, edited by Drucilla Cornell, Roger Berkowitz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015; London: Hurst Publishers, 2015; Johannesburg, SA: Wits University Press, 2015. Swedish translation, Vad Fanon Sa. Stockholm: TankeKraft förlag, 2016; Portuguese translation, São Leopoldo, Brazil: Unisinos Publishers, forthcoming. 14 Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader, edited with an introduction by Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R. Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. 15 La sud prin nord-vest: Reflecţii existenţiale afrodiasporice, trans. Ovidiu Tichindeleanu. Cluj, Romania: IDEA Design & Print, 2016. (Title in English: “South by Northwest: Africana Existential Reflections”) Part of the series Colecţia Pluritopic.

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Selected Bibliography 16 Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South, edited with an introduction by Fernanda Frizzo Bragato and Lewis R. Gordon. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. 17 Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. New York: Routledge, 2021. 18 Fear of Black Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (hardcover print and e-book) and as a Macmillan Audiobook (read by Landon Woodson and Lewis R. Gordon); London: Penguin Books, 2022. German translation: Angst vor Schwarzem Bewusstsein, trans. Anna Jäger and Dominique Haensell. Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 2022; Portuguese translation in Portugal, Medo da Consciência Negra. Lisbon: Penguin-Portugal, 2022; U.S. paperback, NY: Picador, 2023.

Articles in Academic Journals: 1 “Antirace Rhetoric and Other Dimensions of Antiblackness in the Present Age.” Social Text, no. 42 (1995): 40–45. 2 “‘Critical’ Mixed-Race Theory?” Social Identities 1, no. 2 (1995): 381–395. 3 “Ethics in the Midst of Violence?: A Commentary on Linda Bell’s Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence,” Sartre Studies International 1, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 133–50. 4 “A Note on a Hundred Years.” Political Affairs 75, no. 2 (February 1996): 36–37. 5 “Black Skins Masked: Finding Fanon in Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: ‘Back Skin, White Masks,’” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (1996): 148–162. 6 “Mixed-Race Identity in Light of White Normativity and Shadows of Blackness,” Sophia: A Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 2 (1996–1997): 125–142. 7 “African Philosophy’s Search for Identity: Existential Considerations of a Recent Effort,” The CLR James Journal 5, no. 1 (1997): 98–117. 8 “Cynthia Willett’s Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities,” Continental Philosophy Review (formerly Man and World) 31 (1998): 107–116. 9 “The Problem of Autobiography in Theoretical Engagements with Black Intellectual Production,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, no. 4 (September 1998): 47–64. 10 “Contracting White Normativity: A Discussion of Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, no. 4 (September 1998): 166–174. 11 “African-American Philosophy: Philosophy, Politics, and Pedagogy,” Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society (1998): 39–46. 12 “Pan-Africanism and African-American Liberation in a Postmodern World: Two Recent Works in African-American Religious Thought,” Journal of Religious Ethics 27, no. 2 (1999): 333–360. 13 “Wilson Harris: The New Age in a Mythic Past,” The CLR. James Journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 1999/2000): 135–141. 14 “Du Bois’s Humanistic Philosophy of Human Sciences,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 265–280. 15 “On the Borders of Anonymity and Superfluous Invisibility,” Cultural Dynamics 12, no. 3 (2000): 275–283. 16 “Africana Thought and African Diasporic Studies,” The Black Scholar 30, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2000): 25–30. 17 “Remembering Frantz Fanon, a Great Revolutionary,” Political Affairs 18, no. 5 (May 2002): 22–25. 18 “Making Science Reasonable: Peter Caws on Science Both Human and ‘Natural,’” Janus Head: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 14–38. 19 “A Questioning Body of Laughter and Tears: Reading Black Skin, White Masks through the Cat and Mouse of Reason and a Misguided Theodicy,” Parallax 8, no. 2 (2002): 10–29.

314

Selected Bibliography 20 “Irreplaceability: An Existential Phenomenological Reflection,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 38 no. 2 (Spring 2003): 190–202. 21 “The Human Condition in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence: Thoughts on Knowing and Learning,” Philosophical Studies in Education 34 (2003): 105–123. 22 “Some Thoughts on Philosophy and Scripture in an Age of Secularism,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1, no. 1 (2003): 17–25. 23 “Fanon and Development: A Philosophical Look,” Africa Development/ Development Afrique XXIX, no. 1 (2004): 65–88. 24 “Philosophical Anthropology, Race, and the Political Economy of Disenfranchisement,” The Columbia Human Rights Law Review 36, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 145–172. 25 “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday,” The CLR James Journal 11, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 1–43. 26 «Sartre et l’existentialisme Noir», Cités—Philosophie, Politique, Histoire (2005): 87–95. 27 “The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27, no. 4 (October–December 2005): 367–389. 28 “From the President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association,” The Journal of Caribbean Studies 33, no. 2 (July–December 2005): xv–xxii. 29 “Theorising Race and Racism in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,” Shibboleths: Journal of Comparative Theory—‫שבולת‬1, no. 1 (September 2006): 20–36. 30 “Fanon and Philosophy of Liberation,” Edición en CD-ROM de las Memorias del XIII Congreso de Filosofía (2006). 31 “Sartre on Racism: An Essay in Celebration of the 100th Year of His Birth,” Edición en CDROM de las Memorias del XIII Congreso de Filosofía (2006). 32 “Iris Marion Young on Political Responsibility: A Reading through Jaspers and Fanon,” Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy 3, no. 1 (January 2007). 33 “Through the Hellish Zone of Nonbeing: Thinking through Fanon, Disaster, and the Damned of the Earth,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge V, nos. 3 & 4 (Summer 2007): 5–12 34 “When I Was There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night,” Performance Research 2, no. 3 (September 2007): 8–15. 35 “Elias K. Bongmba’s Dialectics of Social Transformation in Africa,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 3 (2007): 1–8. 36 “Must Revolutionaries Sing the Blues?: Thinking through Fanon and the Leitmotif of the Black Arts Movement,” Africana Studies: A Review of Social Science Research 2 (2008): 87–103. This issue also appears as an anthology: Law, Culture, & Africana Studies, edited by James L. Conyers, Jr. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008. 37 “Walking with Dussel: A Teleological Suspension of Ethics, History, and Philosophy,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 43, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 5–13. Also available here. 38 “Fanon dans la pensée politique africaine récente,” Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon Éditions en ligne, CSPRP—Université Paris 7 (Février 2008). 39 “Some Pitfalls of Contemporary Caribbean Consciousness: Thinking through the Americas Today,” Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura: International Journal of Humanistic Studies and Literature 9 (2008): 81–89. 40 “Not Always Enslaved, Yet Not Quite Free: Philosophical Challenges from the Underside of the New World,” Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel 36, no. 2 (2008): 151–166. 41 “Reply to My Critics,” for special symposium, “Teleological Suspensions in Africana Philosophy: Critical Essays on the Work of Lewis R. Gordon,” The CLR James Journal 14, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 304–320. 42 “Unmasking the Engineering of Pathology as a Prerequisite to Political Reinvention in Africa: Frantz Fanon in Perspective,” African Perspective/ Prospective Africaine 2 (2008): 3–13. 315

Selected Bibliography 43 “Décoloniser le savoir à la suite de Frantz Fanon,” traduit par Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Tumultes, numéro 31 (2008): 103–123. 44 “On Pateman and Mills’s Contract and Domination,” The CLR James Journal 15, no.1 (Spring 2009): 235–247. 45 “Africana Insight,” the philosophers’ magazine, issue 47, 4th quarter (2009): 47–51. 46 “Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 193–214. 47 “Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Africana Reason Part 1” / ФИЛОСОФИЯ, НАУКА И ГЕОГРАФИЯ АФРИКАНСКОГО РАЗУМА (Часть 1), with annotations and commentary by Madina Tlostanova, ЛИЧНОСТЬ. КУЛЬТУРА. ОБЩЕСТВО (Personality. Culture. Society) Том XII. Вып. 2 [№№ 55–56] (2010): 41–55. [This journal is published by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Science]. 48 “Theory and Methodology: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Africana Reason Part 2” / “Вопросы теории и методологии: ФИЛОСОФИЯ, НАУКА, И ГЕОГРАФИЯ, АФРИКАНСКОГО РАЗУМА Часть 2,” trans. and commentary by Madina Tlostanova, ЛИЧНОСТЬ. КУЛЬТУРА. ОБЩЕСТВО. Том XII. Вып. 3 [№№ 57–58] (2010): 1–11. 49 “Labor, Migration, and Race: Toward a Secular Model of Citizenship,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 32 (Winter 2010): 157–165. 50 “A Pedagogical Imperative of Pedagogical Imperatives,” Thresholds in Education XXXVI, nos. 1 & 2 (2010): 27–35. 51 “Falguni A. Sheth: Toward a Political Philosophy of Race,” Continental Philosophy Review 44, no. 1 (2011): 119–130. 52 « Quand je suis là, elle n’y est pas»: sobre el razonamiento en negro y la inquietud el colapso en la filosofía y las ciencias humanas” / “« Quand je suis là, elle n’y est pas»: “On Reasoning in Black and the Anxiety of Collapse in Philosophy and the Human Sciences” / “« Quand je suis là, elle n’y est pas»: Sobre o razoamento em negro e a inquietação accerca do colapso na filosofia e nas ciências humanas,” CS: dinàmicas regionales y sociales n. 7 (Junio 2011): 353–376. 53 “Response to Contributors,” Special issue: Beyond Disciplinary Decadence: Communicology in the Thought of Lewis Gordon, edited by Michael Paradiso-Michau, Atlantic Journal of Communication 19, no. 1 (2011): 54–63. 54 “Réflexions sur la question afro-juive,” Plurielles: Revue culturelle et politique pour un judaïsme Humaniste et Laïque No 16 (2011): 75–82. 55 “Afterword: Living Fanon,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy / Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française XIX, no. 1 (2011): 83–89. 56 “Manifiesto de transdisciplinariedad: Para no volvernos esclavos del conocimiento de otros,” trans. José Miguel Terán David Ricardo Luna, Ricardo Adolfo Coutin, Vladimir Rouvinski y Rafael Silva Vega, miembros del Comité Editorial de esta publicación, traspasando fronteras no. 1 (2011): 13–17. 57 “Charles Wm. Ephraim’s Pathology of Eurocentrism,” Antigua-Barbuda Review of Books 4, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 4–11. 58 “L’existence noire dans la philosophie de la culture,” trans. Christine Klein-Lataud, Diogène n° 235–236 (juillet 2011): 133–147. 59 “Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison postcoloniale,” trans. Sonya DayanHerzbrun, Tumultes, numéro 37 (October 2011): 165–183. 60 “Dernière année d’une vie bien vécue: Requiem pour Frantz Fanon,” trans. Sonya DayanHerzbrun, Tumultes, numéro 37 (October 2011): 211–233. 61 “Shifting the Geography of Reason in an Age of Disciplinary Decadence,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011): 96–104. 62 “Below Even the Other: Colonialism’s Violent Legacy and Challenge, with Respects to Fanon,” TransEuropeennes: International Journal of Critical Thought (3 September 2012). 316

Selected Bibliography 63 “Essentialist Anti-Essentialism, with Considerations from Other Sides of Modernity,” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal, n°1 (2012). 64 “Reasoning in Black: Africana Philosophy Under the Weight of Misguided Reason,” The Savannah Review 1, no. 1 (November 2012): 76–90. 65 “On Michael Monahan’s The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity,” The CLR James Journal 18, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 212–216. 66 with George Ciccariello-Maher, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Frantz Fanon, Fifty Years On: A Memorial Roundtable,” Radical Philosophy Review 16 number 1 (2013): 307–324. 67 “La philosophie a-t-elle le blues?” trans. Émilie Notéris et Seloua Luste Boulbina, Rue Descartes, n° 78 (2013): 48–56. 68 “Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 725–736. 69 “Thoughts on Dussel’s ‘Anti-Cartesian Meditations,’” Human Architecture XI, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 25–29. 70 “Africana Philosophy and Philosophy in Black,” The Black Scholar 43, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 46–51. 71 “One Black Philosopher in the White Academy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 9, no. 7 (2013): 723–730. 72 “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development XXXIX, no. 1 (2014): 81–92. 73 “V.Y. Mudimbe as Philosopher,” Savannah Review 5 (May 2015): 115–122. 74 “Africana Philosophy from Haiti: Firmin’s Ironic Critique of Transcendental Idealism in Philosophy of Race and Culture,” African Philosophical Inquiry 5 (2015): 57–65. 75 “Rarely Kosher: Studying Jews of Color in North America,” American Jewish History 100, no. 1 (2016): 105–116. 76 “Disciplining as a Human Science,” Quaderna: A Multilingual and Transdisciplinary Journal, n° 3 (2016). 77 “A Short Reflection on the Evidentiality of #Evidence,” Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World (November 11, 2016). 78 “Thoughts on Two Recent Decades of Studying Race and Racism,” Social Identities 24, no. 1 (2017): 29–38. 79 “Rockin’ It in Blue: A Black Existential Essay on Jimi Hendrix,” Discourse 39, no. 2 (Spring, 2017): 216–229. 80 “Thoughts on Afropessimism,” Contemporary Political Theory 17, no. 1 (2017): 105–112. 81 “Cities and Citizenship,” The Kettering Review 34, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 36–43. 82 “Black Aesthetics, Black Value,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (2018): 19–34. 83 “Thinking through Some Themes of Race and More,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 2 (2018): 331–345. 84 “Thinking through Rejections and Defenses of Transracialism,” Philosophy Today 62, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 3–11. 85 “Pourquoi les juifs ne doivent pas redouter la libération,” Tumultes numéro 50 (2018): 97–108. 86 “Decolonizing Frankenstein,” The Common Reader: A Journal of the Essay, no. 10 (Fall, 2018): 37–47 87 “Re-Imagining Liberations,” International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies 1, no. 1 (June 2018): 11–29. 88 “Teleological Suspensions for the Sake of Political Life,” Social Alternatives 37, no. 4 (2018): 12–17. 89 “French- and Francophone-Influenced Africana and Black Existentialism,” Yale Journal of French Studies 135/136 (2019): 119–133. 90 “Decolonizing Philosophy,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 57, Spindel Supplement (2019): 16–36. 317

Selected Bibliography 91 “Shifting the Geography of Reason in Black and Africana Studies,” The Black Scholar 50, no. 3 (2020): 42–47. 92 “Some Thoughts on Decolonization, Decoloniality, Racism, and Challenges of Citizenship in Communities of Learning,” Alternation 33 (2020): 56–82. 93 “Racialization and Human Reality,” The Philosopher 109, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 15–24. 94 “A Forum on Creolizing Political Theory,” Philosophy and Global Affairs 1, no. 2 (2021): 267–75. 95 “Fanon on Cadavers, Madness, and the Damned,” The European Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 4: 1577–1582. Brazilian Portuguese translation, by Rosemere Ferreira da Silva, “Fanon sobre cadáveres, loucura e os condenados,” EntreLetras 13, no. 2 (2022). Also reprinted at CES. 96 “What Does It Mean to Colonise and Decolonise Philosophy?” Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Suplements (2023). 97 “‘Not Bad for a N—, no?’” The A-Line Journal (2023). Brazilian Portuguese translation, by Bianka Adamatti, in EntreLetras (2023).

Edited Journals and Journal Symposia 1 “Race and Racism in the Last Quarter of ’95: The OJ and Post–OJ Trial and the Million Man March,” The Black Scholar 25, no. 4 (1995): 51–73. 2 Executive Editor of Radical Philosophy Review, volumes 1–5 (1998–2002). 3 “Africana Religion and Culture: Perspectives on the Call,” Listening: A Journal of Religion and Culture 36, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 3–67. 4 “Historicizing Anti-Semitism,” with Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants, Journal of Human Architecture VII, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 1–178. 5 “Degrees of Statelessness,” with Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants, Journal of Contemporary Thought 32 (Winter 2010): 1–180. 6 “Reflections on Paget Henry at 70,” with Jane Anna Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts, The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books 10, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 14–81. 7 “Forum on Creolizing Theory,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy XXV, no. 2 (2017): 1–66. 8 “Special Issue: The Creolization of Education, Pedagogy, and Political Theory” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 1–68. 9 “Critical Exchange: Creolizing Political Theory in Conversation,” Contemporary Political Theory (2018): 1–30. 10 Rosemere Ferreira Da Silva and Lewis R. Gordon, EDIÇÃO ESPECIAL: A PRODUÇÃO INTELECTUAL DE LEWIS RICARDO GORDON, A Revista EntreLetras 11, no. 2 (2020): 1–171. 11 “Creolizing Social and Political Theory,” Philosophy and Global Affairs 1, no. 2 (2021): 267–385.

Edited Encyclopedia Section: 1 “Philosophy of Existence,” ed. with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon. Section 2 of The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, Simon Glendenning, general editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 101–181.

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Selected Bibliography

Encyclopedia Articles 1 “Philosophy of Existence.” In The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Pp. 103–114. 2 “Philosophy of Existence, Religion, and Theology: Faith and Existence,” The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy. Pp. 141–151. 3 “Cornel West,” African American National Biography, ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Higginbotham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 4 “Black Existentialism.” In The Encyclopedia of Black Studies. New York: Sage Publications, 2005. Pp. 123–126. 5 “The Black Intellectual Tradition,” The Encyclopedia of American Studies Online. 6 “Jean-Paul Sartre.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition, Vol. 7, edited by William A. Darity, Jr. Detroit: Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 327–328. 7 “Black Existentialism.” In The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia, edited by Julius F. Thompson, James L. Conyers, Jr., and Nancy J. Davison. Santa Barbara, CA: The Greenwood Press, 2010. Pp. 20–24. 8 “Race.” Encyclopedia of Political Theory, Vol. 3, edited by Mark Bevir and Naomi Choi. Sage Publishers, 2010. Pp. 1133–1141. 9 “Race.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, November 2012.. 10 “Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80).” In The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Oxford: WileyBlackwell Publishers, 2014. Pp. 3335–3346. 11 “Frantz Fanon.” In The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2015.

Book Chapters: 1 “Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism.” In The Prism of the Self: Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, ed. by Steven Crowell. Series: Studies in Phenomenology. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Pp. 107–129. 2 “Can Men Worship?: Reflections on Male Bodies in Bad Faith and a Theology of Authenticity.” In Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods: Male Identities in a (Post-) Christian Culture, ed. by Björn Krondorfer. New York and London: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. 235–250. 3 “Ruminations on Violence and Anonymity in Our Anti-Black World.” In Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, ed. by Daniel Wideman and Rohan Preston. New York: Penguin, 1996. Pp. 277–287. 4 “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean SharpleyWhiting, and Renée T. White. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Pp. 74–84. 5 “Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader. Pp. 297–308. 6 “Existential Dynamics of Theorizing Black Invisibility.” In Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. 69–79. 7 “A Tragic Dimension of Our Neocolonial ‘Postcolonial’ World.” In Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. by Emmanuel Chuckudi Eze. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Pp. 241–51. 8 “Sex, Race, and Matrices of Desire in an Antiblack World: An Essay in Phenomenology and Social Role.” In Race and Sex: Their Sameness and Differences, ed. by Naomi Zack. New York: Routledge, 1997. Pp. 117–132. 319

Selected Bibliography 9 “Struggling Along the Race-Gender Academic Divide.” In Spoils of War: Women, Culture, and Revolution, ed. by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renée T. White. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Pp. 19–24. 10 “Meta-ethical and Liberatory Dimensions of Tragedy: A Schutzean Portrait.” In Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature”: Construction and Complementary Essays, ed. by Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. Pp. 169–80. 11 “Three Perspectives on Gays in African American Ecclesiology and Religious Thought.” In Sexual Orientation and Religion, ed. by Martha Nussbaum and Saul Olyan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. 171–177. 12 “Douglass as an Existentialist.” In Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, ed. by Bill Lawson and Frank Kirkland. Oxford: Blackwell Publisher, 1999. Pp. 207–225. 13 “Identity and Liberation: An Existential Phenomenological Approach.” In Phenomenology of the Political, ed. by Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. Pp. 189–205. 14 “A Phenomenology of Visible Invisibility: Racial Portraits of Anonymity,” Confluences: Phenomenology and Postmodernity, Environment, Race, Gender, ed. by Daniel J. Martino. Pittsburgh: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 2000. Pp. 39–52. 15 “The Unacknowledged Fourth Tradition: An Essay on Nihilism, Decadence, and the Black Intellectual Tradition in the Existential Pragmatic Thought of Cornel West.” In Cornel West: A Critical Reader, ed. by George Yancy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Pp. 38–58. 16 “Sociality and Community in Black: A Phenomenological Essay.” In Of the Quest for Community and Identity: An Africana Philosophical Anthology, ed. by Robert Birt. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Pp.105–123. 17 “African-American Existential Philosophy,” in The Blackwell Companion to African American Philosophy, ed. by Tommy Lott and John Pittman. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. 33–47. 18 “Moral Obligations Across Generations: A Consideration in the Understanding of Community Formation,” in Understanding Communities, ed. by Phillip Alperson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Pp. 116–127. 19 “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness.” In What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. by George Yancy. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 173–193. 20 “Black Latin@s and Blacks in Latin America: Some Philosophical Considerations.” In Latin@s in the World-System: Towards the Decolonization of the US Empire in the 21st Century, ed. by Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado Torres, and José David Saldívar. New York: Routledge. 21 “Grown Folks Business: The Problem of Maturity in Hip Hop.” In Hip Hop and Philosophy, ed. by Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005. Pp. 105–116. 22 “African-American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography of Reason.” In Not Only the Master’s Tools” African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon. New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 3–50. 23 “Is the Human a Teleological Suspension of Man?: A Phenomenological Exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian and Biodicean Reflections.” In After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on the Thought of Sylvia Wynter, ed. by Anthony Bogues. Kingston, JA: Ian Randle, 2006. Pp. 237–257. 24 “Of Tragedy and the Blues in an Age of Decadence: Thoughts on Nietzsche and African America.” In Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and the African American Experience, ed. by Jacqueline Renee Scott and Todd Franklin, with a foreword by Robert Gooding-Williams. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Pp. 75–97. 25 “Cultural Studies and Invention in Recent African Philosophy,” The Study of Africa: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2006. Pp. 418–443. 320

Selected Bibliography 26 “Problematic People and Epistemic Decolonization: Toward the Postcolonial in Africana Political Thought.” In Posctolonialism and Political Theory, edited by Nalini Persram. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. 121–141. 28 “What Is Afro-Caribbean Philosophy?” In Philosophy in Multiple Voice, edited by George Yancy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Pp. 145–174. 29 “Thinking Through Identities: Black Peoples, Race Labels, and Ethnic Consciousness.” In The Other African Americans: Contemporary African and Caribbean Families in the United States, edited by Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven A. Tuch. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2007. Pp. 69–92. 30 “Phenomenology of Biko’s Black Consciousness.” In Biko Lives!: Contestations and Conversations, edited by Amanda Alexander, Nigel Gibson, and Andile Mngxitama. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Pp. 83–93. 31 “Racism and Decadence in the Geography of Reason.” In Textual Dissensions and Political Dissidence: Dissent in Racial, Sexual, Gender-related and National Identity Formations, edited by Jean-Paul Rocchi. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2008. Pp. 27–45. 32 “Through the Twilight Zone of Nonbeing: Two Exemplars of Race in Serling’s Classic Series.” In Philosophy in “The Twilight Zone,” ed. by Noël Carroll and Lester Hunt. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. 111–122. 33 “Sartre and Fanon on Embodied Bad Faith,” Sartre on the Body, edited by Kathryn Morris. Philosophy in Depth Series. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Pp. 183–199. 34 “Black Existentialism.” In A History of Continental Philosophy, Vol. 5, Politics and the Human Sciences (1940–1968), edited by David Ingram. London: Acumen, 2010; 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, 2014. Pp. 199–219. 35 “Fanon on Decolonizing Knowledge.” In Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy, edited by Elizabeth A. Hope and Tracey Nicholls, with a foreword by Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010. Pp. 3–18. 36 “Thinking through the Americas Today: A Philosophical Perspective,” Prólogo: Roberto Carlos Vidal López; Foreword: Roberto Carlos Vidal López; Presentación general y Overview: Carlos Ignacio Jaramillo J., section editors, Óscar Guardiola-Rivera and Ricardo Sanín Restrepo, Realidades y tendencias del derecho en el siglo xxi. Filosofía e historia del derecho. Tomo VII. Bogotá, Colombia: Editorial Temis y Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2010. Pp. 51–171. 37 “Race in the Dialectics of Culture.” In Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class and Caste, edited by Abdul JanMohamed. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011. Pp. 55–79. 38 “Bridging Gaps in the Geography of Reason: A Philosophical Journey.” In Re-framing the Practice of Philosophy: Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge, edited by George Yancy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012. Pp. 271–291. 39 “Bigger–Cross Damon: Wright’s Existential Challenge.” In Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright, edited by James B. Haile, III. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp. 3–22. 40 “What the Right Learned from Charles Houston that the Left Did Not.” In Charles H. Houston: An Interdisciplinary Study of Civil Rights Leadership, edited by James Conyers, Jr. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp. 119–139. 41 “The Irreplaceability of Continued Struggle,” Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, edited by George Yancy and Janine Jones. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. Pp. 95–100. 42 “On the Market Colonization of the Virtual Public Sphere,” in The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere: Knowledge, Politics, Identity, edited by Guarav Desai. New Delhi, India: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 57–70. 43 “A Philosopher’s Journey: Philosophical Reflections for and on Uncle Bill,” in Revolutionary Hope: Essays in Honor of William L. McBride, edited by N.J. Jun and S.A. Wahl. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Pp. 71–80. 44 “On the Temporality of Indigenous Identity,” in The Politics of Identity: Emerging Indigeneity, 321

Selected Bibliography

45

46 47

48

49 50

51

52

53

54 55 56 57

58

59 60

61

62

edited by Michelle Harris, Martin Nakata, and Bronwyn Carlson. Sydney, Australia: UTSePress, 2013. Pp. 60–78. “To Want and to Live: Thoughts for Today Inspired by Amílcar Cabral,” in Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral, edited by Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA/Daraja Press, 2013. Pp. 183–188. “Fanon’s Decolonial Aesthetic,” in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, edited by Nikolas Kompridis. NY: Bloomsbury, 2014. Pp. 91–112. “The Problem of History in African American Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, edited by Anthony B. Pinn and Katie G. Cannon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 363–376. “Justice Otherwise: Thoughts on Ubuntu.” In Ubuntu: Curating the Archive, edited by Leonhard Praeg. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2014. Pp. 10–26. “Der Realität zuliebe: teleologische Suspensionen disziplinärer Dekadenz,” in Der Neue Realismus, edited by Markus Gabriel. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Pp. 244–267. “White Privilege and the Problem with Affirmative Action.” In “I Don’t See Color”: Personal and Critical Perspectives on White Privilege, edited by Bettina Bergo and Tracey Nicholls. State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015. Pp. 25–38. “Race and Justice in Higher Education: Some Global Challenges, with Attention to the South African Context.” In Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions, edited by Pedro Tabensky and Sally Matthews. Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015. Pp. 157–183. “Disaster, Ruin, and Permanent Catastrophe.” In The Time of Catastrophe: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Age of Catastrophe, edited by Christopher Dole, Robert Hayashi, Andrew Poe, Austin Sarat, and Boris Wolfson. London, UK: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 125–142. with Jane Anna Gordon, “When Monsters No Longer Speak.” In Political Phenomenology: Essays in Memory of Petee Jung, edited by Hwa Yol Jung and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. Pp. 331–352. “Phenomenology and Race.” In The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy and Race, edited by Naomi Zack. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 294–303. “Fanon on Violence.” In Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thought, edited by Brad Evans and Terrell Carver. London: Zed Books, 2017. Pp. 48–69. “Africana Thought,” in The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Alcoff and Edith Gnanadass. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 140–151. “When Justice Is Not Enough: Toward the Decolonization of Normative Life.” In Geopolitics and Decolonization, edited by Fernanda Bragato and Lewis R. Gordon. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018, pp. 31–49. “An Africana Philosophical Reading of Du Bois’s Political Thought,” in A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, edited by Nick Bromell and Alexander Livingston. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2018, pp. 57–81. “Afro-Jewish Ethics?” in Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics, edited by Curtis Hutt, Berel Dov Lerner, and Julia Schwartzmann. London: Routledge, 2018, 213–227. “Franz Boas in Africana Philosophy.” In Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, edited by Isaiah Lorado Wilner and Ned Blackhawk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, pp. 42–60. “Wright’s Afromodern Search for Political Freedom,” in The Politics of Richard Wright: Perspectives on Resistance, edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming, 2018, pp. 26–44. with LaRose Parris, “Black Consciousness: The Psychology of Frantz Fanon,” in Global Psychologies: Mental Health and the Global South, edited by Suman Fernando and Roy Moodley. London: Palgrave, 2018, pp. 215–228.

322

Selected Bibliography 63 “Philosophy,” in Keywords for African American Studies, edited by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson. NY: NYU Press, 2018, pp. 142–146. 64 “Frantz Fanon,” The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, Andrea Raballo, Matthew Broome, Anthony Vincent Fernandez, Paolo Fusar-Poli, and René Rosfort. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019. 65 “Bad Faith,” 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Ann Murphy, and Gayle Salamon. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019, pp. 17–23. 66 “Postmodern Fascism and Other Facets of Contemporary Quests for Stability,” in Xenophobia, Identity and new Forms of Nationalism, edited by Natalija Mićunović and Vladimir Milisavljević. Belgrade, Serbia: Institute of Social Science, 2019, pp. 43–61. 67 “Race in Film,” in The Palgrave Handbook on Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Nöel Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa-Knoop, Shawn Loht. New York: Palgrave, 2019, pp. 677–698. 68 “Race Consciousness, Phenomenologically Understood,” Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race, edited by Emily Lee. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019, pp. 135–142. 69 “Sartre’s Influence in Black Existentialism,” The Sartrean Mind, edited by Matthew Eshleman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 501–514. 70 “Existentialism and Human Nature,” Inquiry into Philosophical and Religious Issues: A Practical Resource for Students and Teachers. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. 2019, pp. 341–343. 71 with Takiyah Harper-Shipman, “Race and Ethics in International Relations,” in The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations, edited by Birgit Schippers. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 69–79. 72 “Letter to a Colleague on struggling with COVID-19,” in Falsework, SmallTalk, curated by Hic Rosa Collective and edited by Asma Abbas and Collin Eubank. Richmond, MA: Some Beloved, Inc., and Lahore, Pakistan: Folio Books, 2021, pp. 160–168. 73 “Jewish Diversity,” in Religion: Bloomsbury Religion in North America (BRINA), edited by Gary Porton. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. 74 “Lebendige Phänomenologie als dekoloniale Praxis,” in Phänomenologie und Kritische Theorie, edited by Jochen Dreher. Berlin: SuhrkampVerlag, 2023. 75 “Some Reflections from Africana Philosophy on African Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges, edited by Abraham Olivier et al. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2023. 76 ““A Black Existential Reflection on Hope,” in edited by Nancy Snow for Oxford University Press, 2023. 77 “Decolonizing Structural Justice and Political Responsibility: An Essay in Memory of Iris Marion Young,” in What Is Structural Justice, edited by Maeve McKeown and Jude Browne for Oxford University Press, 2023. 78 “Fanon: i cadaveri, la follia e i dannati,” in Violenza e Intimità Nell’Epoca Neoliberale. Etnophsichiatria Come Riparazione Della Storia, a cura di R. Beneduce, G. Bibeau, S. Taliani. Naples: TAMU edizioni, 2023.

Scholarly Dictionary Entries 1 “Black Consciousness.” Norton Dictionary of Modern Thought, ed. by Lord Bullock. London: W.W. Norton Publishers, 1999, p. 84. 2 “New Humanism.” Ibid, p. 583. 3 “Revolutionary Violence.” Ibid, p. 756. 4 “African Humanism.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. New York: Scribner and Sons, 2005. 323

Selected Bibliography

Select Articles and Essays in News, Newsletters, Magazines, Blogs, and Other Forums: 1 “Racism as a Form of Bad Faith.” The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 92, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 6–8. 2 “Overcoming the ‘Hurdles’ of Graduate School.” Nomo (Fall 1993): 3–4. 3 “Joint-Appointments from an African American Faculty Member’s Perspective.” The American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 93, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 20–21. 4 “Reflections on the 40th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.” Political Affairs 73, no. 11 (November 1994): 7–10, 15 5 “A Short History of the ‘Critical’ in Critical Race Theory,” The APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 98, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 23–26. 6 “‘Let the Blues Be Your Guide’: Thoughts on Keith Glover, Keb Mo’, and Anderson Edwards’s Thunder Knocking on the Door: A Bluesical Tale of Rhythm and Blues.” Playbill. Providence: Trinity Repertory Theater, February 2002. Pp. 37, 39. 7 “The Market Colonization of Intellectuals,” truthout (Tuesday, 6 April 2010). 8 “The Problem with Affirmative Action,” truthout (Tuesday, 16 August 2011). 9 “Remembering Fanon: Setting Afoot a New Humanity,” Pambazuka News (2011-12-05), no. 561. 10 “Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come,” truthout (Saturday, May 12, 2012). 11 “Letter to a Reporter,” truthout, (January 15, 2013). 12 “Christopher Dorner and the LAPD: America’s Native Sons,” truthout (February 26, 2013) 5 “A Thought for Women’s History Month: Anna Julia Cooper,” truthout (March 12, 2013). 6 “On Black Women Domestic Workers,” Speakout (March 21, 2013). 7 “A Letter to the Editor,” Temple Faculty Herald 43, no. 2 (April 2013). 8 “Temple’s Story: What White Faculty Could Learn from Black Faculty,” Speakout (April 30, 2013). 9 “Remembering William R. Jones (1933–2012): Philosopher and Freedom Fighter,” APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 12, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 12–13. 10 “Unjust Justice,” histories of violence.com (July 2013): http://historiesofviolence.com/ reflections/lewis-gordon-unjust-justice/ (site no longer accessible) 19 “Farewell Madiba,” truthout / Speakout (10 December 2013). 20 “On the Movie ‘Divergent’: Virtue Facing Dystopia,” truthout (7 April 2014). Artistic Plate commentary: “The World Stage: Israel.” In Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, edited by Eugenie Tsai. New York: Brooklyn Museum / DelMonico Books 2015. Pp. 117–118. In conjunction with Exhibition on the Work of Kehinde Wiley, The Brooklyn Museum. 21 Liner notes: “On The Spectacle of An-Other,” for the Vuma Levin Quintet’s CD: The Spectacle of An-Other (2015). 22 “Lewis R. Gordon on Frantz Fanon and the Art of Embodying Blackness,” Mail & Guardian (30 August 2015). 23 “Льюис Гордон. Типы ученых, гуманитариев и высшей интеллигенции,” trans. Maria Kaplun (“Types of Academics and Other Kinds of Intellectuals” ) ∑: Syg ma (04 февраля 2016). 24 “On Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Daddy Issues Continued but. . . .” Daily Nous (21 December 2015). 25 Featured reflecting on contemplation and Fanon today in the audio installation of Myron Beasley’s “Introduction: The Pink Tube & the Incorrigible Disturber of the Peace,” Liminalities 12, no. 2 (2016): http://liminalities.net/12-2/intro.html

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Selected Bibliography 26 “Continues to Rise: Muhammad Ali (1942–2016), Viewpoint Magazine (June 7, 2016): https:// viewpointmag.com/2016/06/07/continues-to-rise-muhammad-ali-1942-2016/ 28 “Perilous Times,” The Con (20 January 2017). 29 “Opinion: Philosophers on Trump,” The Philosophers’ Magazine, no. 76 (2017). 30 “How Did We Get Here? Reflections on the Transition of Power from Obama to Trump,” Truthout (11 February 2017). 31 “Decolonization Matters,” Rowman & Littlefield International’s Blog (4 November 2017). 32 “Introducing Black Issues in Philosophy,” The APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (7 October 2017). 34 “The African Decolonial Thought of Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí,” The APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (23 March 2018). 35 “How Should We Remember 1968?” One Question Forum: State of Nature (23 May 2018). 36 “Samir Amin: Shifting the Geography of Reason,” New Frame (17 August 2018). 37 “Thinking Logics of New Left and Right of ’68,” Thread (December 2018):. 38 “Nkiru Nzegwu: Philosopher, Artist, Art Historian, and Trail Blazer,” Black Issues in Philosophy (March 5, 2019). 39 “Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog,” Black Issues in Philosophy (1 October 2019). 40 “Rob Redding’s Why Black Lives Matter: Borigination Explains How to Get Police and Whites to Treat Blacks Like People,” Black Issues in Philosophy (10 December 2019). 41 “A Reflection on Loss,” Black Issues in Philosophy (6 October 2020). 42 “Trump Loyalists Want to Uphold a Long American Tradition: White License,” truthout (10 January 2021). 43 “Storming the Capitol Building Is Not a Privilege,” Black Issues in Philosophy (12 January 2021). 44 “Long Read | The joy of Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’,” The New Frame (31 January 2021). 45 “White Supremacists Among Us—Discomfiting but True,” Contending Modernities (2 February 2021). 46 “An Afro-Jewish Critique of Jews Against Liberation,” Contending Modernities (26 March 2021). 47 “Derek Chauvin Trial: 3 Questions American Needs to Ask About Seeking Racial Justice in a Court of Law,” The Conversation (12 April 2021). 48 “The Colonization of Philosophy,” Philosophy Forum, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences (10 May 2021). 49 “A Reflection on Juneteenth,” Black Issues in Philosophy (22 June 2021). 50 “On Antique Spoons: Chapters on Love, Loss and the Politics of Memory,” Black Issues in Philosophy (3 August 2021). 51 “Decolonising Freedom: Towards the Decolonisation of Normative Life,” The New Frame (23 August 2021). 52 “Remembering Yvonne Patricia Solomon, 1943–2004,” in From generation to generation: King’s legacy endures in families’ movement stories, in The Forward (16 January 2022). 53 “An Elegy for Bat-Ami Bar On,” APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (15 March 2022). 54 “A Reflection on Eva Kittay on Human Dignity,” APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (16 August 2022). 55 “Revealing Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” review of Margaret A. Burnham’s By Hands Now Known,” The APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (25 October 2022). 56 “Phenomenological Communicologist Jacqueline Martinez, Vice President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association,” APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (6 December 2022). 57 “Drucilla Cornell, in Memoriam,” APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (17 January 2023). 53 Translated into Portuguese by Maria Walkíria Cabral for Filosofias do tempo do agora (14 February 2023).

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INDEX

Abbas, Asma, 333 n.73 Abi Dhabi, x Abrahams, Israel, 186 n.21 Abya Yala, 218, 297 Abyssinians (reggae group), 289 aesthetics, 17, 127, 131, 213, 221–22, 271, 289, 310 affirmative action, 280 affliction, 123, 198, 219, 240 Africa, ix–xi, 4–11, 17–18, 20, 25, 31, 40, 42, 66–9, 77, 79, 82, 115, 125, 158, 165–7, 180–81, 183, 188, 196–8, 200, 212, 214, 216, 218, 240, 246, 262–5, 297, 303, 306 antiquity, 126, 140 Africa World Press and Red Sea Press, 308 African Methodist Church, 167 Africana people/African diaspora, 5, 7, 17, 20, 27, 29, 171, 173 n.12, 215–16, 244, 261, 297, 308 Africana Studies, 2, 33, 290, 311 Africans, 4, 25, 41, 65, 128, 140, 165–7, 169, 181, 190, 200, 210, 211, 213–14, 306 Afro-Asiatic World, 264–5 Afromodernity and Afrimodernity, 216, 294, 298 Ahmed, Sara, 88, 97 n.12 Alcibiades, 212 Alexander, Amanda, 297 Alexander, Stephon, 302 Algeria, 6, 9, 23 Al-Kindī, Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsh.āq as.-S.abbāh., 221–2 allegory, 115, 151, 275, 308 Alpha thalassemia, 72 n.21 Americas, 7, 25, 31, 54, 73 n.30, 76, 82, 167, 171, 180–81, 183, 186–7, 196, 238, 263, 297 analytical philosophy, 31, 212, 214, 217, 220, 231 anarchists, 234 anarchy, 234, 254 Andalusia, 24, 41, 77, 165, 188–9 Anderson, Alecia, 271–83 animals, 25, 41, 45, 67, 77–8, 85–7, 263 anonymity, 61, 106, 121, 224, 290 Antarctica, ix, 130, 183 Antef, 211–12, 215, 222, 224 n.2 antiblack world, 53, 55 n.5, 96, 101–10, 111 n.11, 112 n.12–14, 319 n.8 anxiety, 43, 85,87, 95, 107, 115, 140, 145, 178, 200, 205, 229, 266 apartheid, 5, 19, 48 n.9, 75, 79–81, 144, 155, 271, 273–4, 277–2, 303 American, 75

anti-, ix, 4 post-, 81, 246 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 111 n.6, 224 n.4, 252, 269 appropriation, 126–7, 287 Arabic, 41, 66 Afro-, 77, 239, 306 world, 264 Arabs, x, 41, 165, 179, 190, 198 Arendt, Hannah, 61, 71 n.8, 172 n.1, 174 Argentina, xi, 7, 182 Arona, Michael, John Beverly, and José Oviedo, 225 art, 2, 96, 125–9, 132, 285–90 Asante, Molefi Kete, 174 n.24, 224 n.2 Asia, ix, 3, 6, 8, 25, 40–42, 68–9, 73 n.30, 130, 140, 145, 165–6, 180, 183, 188, 196–7, 200, 204, 213–13, 218, 262–5, 303, 310 Asian and Asian American Studies, 271, 285 philosophies, 214 sun worshippers, 70 Asians, 75–6, 120, 140, 200, 210–11, 301 Afro-, 190 anti-, 190 music of, 128 Northeast, 72 n.21, 126, 310 West, 188, 210, 239 Southwest, 304 assimilation, 54, 188, 238, 262, 303 Assyrians, 179 Athens ancient, 210, 239 contemporary, 6 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 163, 221, 247 n.6 Aurobindo, Sri, 116, 127, 134 n.2, 158, 218, 221, 259 Australia, 6, 8, 11, 57, 67, 73 n.30, 126, 128, 130, 141, 187, 197–8, 218 Australian Indigenous peoples, 25, 73 n.28, 141, 201, 216, 276–7, 302–3 authenticity, 18, 24, 40, 126–7, 183, 190, 263, 319 n.2 cultural, 241 Jewish, 185 n.15 authority, 3, 65, 159 Papal, 25, 41, 263 axiology, 213 Aztec regions, 214, 264 Baartman, Sarah (“Hottentot Venus”), 309 Babylonians, 179

327

Index bad faith, 8, 18, 36, 38, 51–4, 70–71 n.6, 102, 104, 107, 110, 126, 151, 188, 190, 222, 228–34, 243, 278, 302 institutional, 230, 262 Badu, Erykah, 290 Baez, Joan, 289 Bahamas, the, 25, 166 Bales, Kevin, 62, 71 n.13 Baltazar, Eulalio, 173 n.15 barbarians, 40, 263 Barber, Benjamin, 259 Barbott, 290 Barceló de Carvalho, José Adelino (Bonga from Angola), 289 Barnett, Michael, 174 n.28 Barson, Ben, 290 Baumrin, Bernard, 292 Beauvoir, Simone de, 48, 51, 78, 110, 115 Be’chol Lashon, 186, 195 Bernier, François, 25, 40 Biko, Steve Bantu, x, 14 n.6, 4, 5, 7, 9, 75–82, 221 Bio-sociology, 43 Black consciousness, xi, 4, 8–9, 75–82, 215, 276, 283, 299, 305 existentialism, passim, but see especially: 125, 271, 301 feminism, 296–197 Black Graduate Network (Yale University, New Haven), ix Black Lives Matter, 297 Black Radical Tradition, 294 Black Studies, 157, 271 blues, xiii, 2, 9, 125, 128–33, 227, 292 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 25, 42, 263 Blumenberg, Hans, 164, 168, 172 n.5, 174, 240, 248 Blyden, Edward, 169, 173 n.17 Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1 body, the, and embodiment, 39, 48 n.16, 49 n.17, 67, 107, 159, 256 Boggs, James, 219, 224 Bongmba, Elias, 82 Bourdieu, Pierre, 39, 45–6, 49 n.20, 264 Boxill, Bernard, 37–8, 44–5, 48 n.9–10 Bragato, Fernanda Frizzo, 299 Brahmins, 303 Brazil, 7, 258, 291, 293–6, 299 Bahia, 7 Brodkin, Karen, 184 n.4, 185 n.11 Brown, Norman, 88, 97 n.13 Brown University, 96, 195, 290 Bruten, Edith, 32 n.7 Buck-Morrs, Susan, 48 n.15, 247 n.8, 248 bucks, 305–306 Buddhism, 214

328

Burnett, Charles, 289 Burning Spear (Winston Rodney), 289 Cabral, Amílcar Lopes da Costa, 221, 294 Campbell, Robert, 169, 173 n.17 Canada, 7, 59, 157, 276, 289 capitalism, 18, 191, 218–19, 224 n.6, 251–7, 261, 265, 295, 307 Buddhist- and Hindu-affected, 265 Carbonell, Curtis D., 264, 267 Caribbean, the, ix–x, 5–7, 177–8, 181, 240, 301–3, 308 Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA), ix, xiii, 1, 123, 145 Caribbean Studies, 311 Cartesianism, 31, 52 Cassirer, Ernst, 25, 32 n.8, 41, 45, 47, 49 n.27, 50 n.36, 85–6, 97 n.3–4, 127,134 n.2, 158, 172 n.2, 261, 263, 267 caste, 3, 8–9, 12, 77, 301 Varn·a, 302 Caws, Peter, 91, 97 n.4, 98 n.23, 161 n.15 Cazenave, Noël, 311 Central America, ix, 11, 214 Centre for Diversity Studies, x Césaire, Aimé, 4, 95, 99 n.35, 197 Chandigarh (in Punjab, India), x Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 131, 264, 267 Chandramohan S., x Chapman, Tracy, 289 Charmé, Stuart Z., 186 n.24 Checole, Kassahun, 308 Cheikh Anta Diop University, 6 Chevannes, Derefe Kimarley, 305–311 Chicago, 4 China, 6, 157, 180, 185, 264, 279, 282, 301, 310 Chinese (languages—concepts, terms), 216 Chinese (people), x, 1, 279, 301–3, 307 Christendom, 40–41, 76–7, 87, 139, 165–6, 177, 179–81, 189, 199, 239–41, 263 “Reconquest” of, 25, 41, 76–7, 165–6, 239 Christianity, 40, 165–8, 187, 189–91, 239, 246, 247 n.5, 263–4 Christians, 40–43, 140, 165–8, 181–2, 187, 191, 192, 200, 233, 240, 241 Christology, 169 cities, 7–9, 78 citizenship, 79–80, 119, 121, 180, 182, 227, 239, 256, 265–6 City University of New York (CUNY), 292 class, 3, 9, 43, 58, 81, 118, 121–2, 296, 307 stratification, 171 Cleage, Jr., Albert, 170, 171 n.21 coercion, xi, 159, 231, 257 Cohen, G.E., 248 n.15 Cohen, Leonard, 289

Index Cohen, Shaye J.D., 173 n.6, 174, 175, 247 n.4, 258, 264–5, 267 Colombia, 6–7, 291 Colón, Willie, 289 colonialism, 2, 10–11, 17–19, 28–9, 79, 94–5, 115, 129, 189–90, 196, 214–15, 238, 258, 275, 286, 288, 294, 298–99, 302 epistemic, 17, 214 Euromodern, 209, 213 neo-, 10–11, 146, 245 post-, 10–11 coloniality, 4–5, 11, 128, 144, 204, 209, 214 colonization, 2, 4, 8, 40, 66, 93–6, 128, 171–2, 179, 192, 197, 200–205, 209, 232, 242, 257, 261, 289, 295, 299, 308 Euromodern, 257 market, 218–19, 295 neo-, 205 of reason, 89–90 Roman, 183 Coltrane, Alice, 289 Coltrane, John, 131–2, 289 Columbus, Christopher, 10, 25, 3 n.7, 166 Comaroff, Jean and John, ix, 82, 248 n.123 commitment, 86, 113, 116, 121, 152, 156, 164, 211, 251, 258 existential, 109, 295, 255 to building public institutions, x, 259 to Dalit struggles, x, 303 to the Damned of the Earth, xi, 303 to freedom, 289 to liberation, 146, 205 methodological, 153 to reality, 36, 86, 118, 299 to truth, 275 commodification, 219, 287 completeness, 88, 90–91, 130, 150, 152–3, 156, 212, 216, 220 disciplinary, 143, 156, 203 consciousness, 19–21, 66–7, 75–82, 86, 90, 93, 127, 142, 145, 150–58, 191, 204, 229, 294, 302, 307, 309 disembodied, 49 n.17 double-, 26–7, 46–7, 133, 156–7, 215, 241, 246, 283 embodied, 67 exilic, 30 mass, 295 misanthropic, 53 petit-bourgeois, 57 potentiated double -, 21, 27, 47, 50 n.41, 133, 156–7, 172, 241, 246 self-, 1 un-, 191 see also Black consciousness and White consciousness

Cone, James, 170, 174 n.22, 221, 293 Confucianism, 213 Constantine (Emperor), 184, 188, 239 Coogler, Ryan, 289 Cooke, Sam, 289 Coombes, 266, 267 Cooper, Anna Julia, 20, 115, 169, 173 n.16, 221, 297 conservatism, 217, 255, 265–6, 279, 308 neo-, 125, 191, 247, 251, 265 conservatives, 191, 265, 291, 306 black, 306–8, 310 neo-, 253, 255 consistency, 19, 88–9, 94, 98 n.14, 116, 141, 201 maximum, 88–9, 116, 142, 201–2 contingency, 21, 51, 102, 104, 150, 156, 171–2, 255 Conyers, Jr., James, 248, 315 n.36, 319 n.7, 321 n.40 Copeland, M. Sean, 293 Cornell, Drucilla, 97 n.4, 146 n.2, 242–3, 245–6, 247 n.9, 248, 250, 313 n.13 Corsica, 6 Covarrubias Orozsco, Sebastian de, 31 n.6, 49 n.23, 77, 82 n.1, 184 n.1 COVID-19, 124 Coughlan, Sean, 266, 267s Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 297 creolization, ii, 96, 128, 134 n.3, 167, 182, 223, 287, 302, 306 crime, 271, 273–4, 277, 281–2, 308 crises, 17, 115, 154, 218–19, 229, 238, 240, 242, 253, 259, 265, 283, 307 of legitimation, 129 of reason, 215, 298 critical race studies, 12, 301 race theory, 64 theory, 218 critique(s), 17–19, 29, 53, 126, 154, 229, 246, 265 anti-colonial, 141, 201 decolonial, xi ideological, 171 internal, 18 meta-, 17, 19, 88–9, 93, 144, 203, 218, 242, 246, 265, 298 phenomenological, 91, 110 self-, 86–7, 246 Crummell, Alexander, 31, 36, 48, 169, 173 n.17, 174 n.19 Crusoe, Robinson and Friday, 245 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah, 18, 116–117, 168–9, 173 n.16 Cullen, Countee, 170, 174 n.20 culture, 30, 36–8, 42, 44–7, 67–9, 86, 90, 92–3, 95–6, 114, 126–7, 158–9, 213 as a prosthetic god, 159 “western,” 307 Czech Republic, 6

329

Index Dalits, x, xv n.27, 8, 11–12, 120, 188, 301, 302–4 Daedalus, 95 Daniels, N., 248 n.16 Daoism, 214 Daraja Press, 308 Dash, Julie, 289 Davis, Angela Y., 294, 297 Davis, Miles, 289 Dayan-Herzbrun, Sonia, x, 161 n.16, 162, 313 n.13 Deaf Studies, 311 Death-bound subjectivity, 94 decolonial theorists, 209, 245 decoloniality, 11, 223, 301 decolonization, 11, 21, 94, 115, 139, 141, 145–6, 199, 205, 216, 223, 245–6, 248 n.21, 288–9, 291 epistemic, 245, 246 deconstruction, 54, 75, 212 democracy/democracies, ix, 81–2, 121, 128, 244, 256–8, 277, 298 Denmark, 6 dependency, 3, 17, 76, 90, 143, 171, 213, 215, 258, 299, 306 Derrida, Jacques, 87, 97 n.11, 154, 161 n.8 Desai, Ashwin, 80, 82 Desai, S. and V. Kulkarni, 12 desire(s), 51, 53–4, 101–3, 104, 106–10, 159, 310 Dey, Sayan, xi, xiv, 1–2, 301–3 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, ix dialectics, 46, 77–8, 82, 116, 144, 192, 306 dignity, xii, 59, 121, 133, 242, 272, 286, 296, 299, 325 dikaiosúnē, 213, 243 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 20, 116, 211, 224, 294 disaster, 96, 258 disciplinary decadence, 3, 9–11, 65, 72 n.22, 90–92, 117, 139, 142–3, 153–60, 178, 199, 202, 205, 209, 216–18, 222, 232–4, 251–2, 262 Disraeli, Benjamin, 62 Dougla, 301–4 Douglass, Frederick, 79, 170, 297 Du Bois, W.E.B., 28–9, 31 n.2, 32 n.18, 33 n.24, 46, 48 nn.7 and 9, 50 n.30, 57, 70 n.1, 96, 97 n.5, 99 nn.30 and 37, 115, 135 n.12, 170, 172, 174 nn.20 and 26, 180, 184 n.5, 214–15, 221, 241, 246, 271, 303 on being a “problem,” 20, 23, 28, 43–44, 93–4, 117, 133, 141, 178, 201, 214, 262 on black petit-bourgeois consciousness, 57 on cultural “genius,” 36 on living by a false standard, 93–4 on the question of history, 29 on race, 36–7, 43, 46 on social theory, 44–6, 86, 180, 264 see also double consciousness Durkheim, Emile, 43

330

Dussel, Enrique, 29, 33 n.25, 82, 85, 97 n.1, 139, 146 n.2, 199, 205 n.1, 206, 214, 238, 241, 248, 249 Dworkin, Ronald, 248 n.15 Eastern Europe, 75, 181, 258 economics, 292 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 290 education, 2–3, 58–9, 71 n.1, 157, 219, 227–31, 234, 276, 279, 291–4 Egypt (Arab Republic of), 6 enslavement/slavery, 2–5, 7, 11, 17–18, 25–29, 40–42, 78, 121, 129, 134, 145–6, 166–72, 183, 190–92, 197, 200, 215, 257–61, 263, 274–82, 294, 297–9, 301–8 ancient, 187–8, 205 contemporary, 3, 189 epistemic colonialism, 17, 214 closure, 107, 117, 156, 223, 286, 288–9 decolonization, 143, 203, 246, 248 dependency, 3, 17, 299 epistemological compartmentalism, 4 solipsism, 3 epistemology, 17, 54, 139, 144, 151, 199, 209, 214, 217–18, 221, 251 essence, 102, 110, 196 essentialism, 91, 113, 158, 160 n.6 ethics, 9–11, 17, 30, 53, 79, 94–5, 34 n.34, 144, 146, 155, 204, 213–14, 221, 229, 243 deontological, 2 Jewish, 191–2 maternal, 9 of the self, 81 virtue, 58 Etoke, Nathalie, 147 n.16 Euclidean geometry, 212 Eurocentrism, 3, 9–11, 217–20, 286–7, 295, 299 Euromodern and Euromodernity, 7, 11, 17–19, 117, 139, 144, 151, 188–190, 191, 209, 210, 213–16, 252–7, 261, 285, 294, 298, 303 Europe, 4, 6, 8, 12, 25–7, 31, 40, 42, 68–9, 76, 125, 130, 140, 145, 165–6, 181, 189, 197, 200, 209–12, 237, 239, 241, 258, 262, 263, 264–5, 285, 295 geopolitical idea of, 257 Marshall Plan in, 283 northern, 180 southern, 180–81, 239 European philosophy, 5, 160 n.1 Europeans, 24–5, 31 n.5, 41–2, 77, 140, 157, 197, 200, 210–11, 241, 263, 285, 295, 309 black, 38 evidence and evidentiality, 19, 152, 170, 216, 230, 251

Index evil, 40, 62, 117, 159, 164, 168, 184, 218, 240, 252 existence, 9, 18, 55 n.2, 103, 128, 133, 237–8, 247 n.1 everyday mode of, 61, 63, 88 ghostlike, in blue, 129, 131 human, 29, 86, 94, 109, 118, 121–2, 127–8, 286–9, 298 not identical with being, 307 subhuman, 75 weight of, 109 existentialism, 293 see also Black existentialism, existentialists, existential paradox, existential phenomenology existentialists, 51, 129, 152, 157, 190, 243, 307 existential paradox, 129, 295 phenomenology, 10, 31 experience, 2, 17, 28, 238, 299, 307 aesthetic, 285 Black existential, 4 collective, 11–12 gendered, 5 intersubjective, 286 framework of, 230 lived, 6–7, 109 of reality, 118 of oppression, 306 suffering, 60–61 of value, 132 failure, 46, 121, 155 faith, 114–15, 163 people of, 191 Fanon, Frantz, x, xiii, 4, 5, 9, 19, 20, 23, 26, 28, 31 n.3, 50 n.41, 63, 71 n.1874, 75, 77–79, 82–3, 92–5, 97 n.8, 98 n.20, 102, 105–9, 116–17, 129, 134 n.7, 145–6, 147 n.9, 10, 13, 17, 156161 n.10, 162, 221, 224, 234, 245, 264, 261, 267, 271, 285, 287, 292, 293, 303 on actionality, 20–21, 23, 293–4, 302, 306–7 on colonization of method, 89, 141–4, 201–2, 205–6, 215 on failure, 46 on lumpen bourgeoisie, 307 on phobogenesis, 101, 112 nn.13 and 18 poetic talents of, 288 on psychoanalysis, 94–5, 112 n.12 on sociogenesis, 133 on unreasonable reason, 30, 33 n.28, 87, 90–91, 220 on the zone of nonbeing, 26, 78, 94, 241, 306–7 fascism, xi, 198, 251, 253–7, 295 Fiji, 6 Finch, III, Charles, 31 n.5, 49 n.25, 72 n.21, 73 n.33, 211, 224

Firmin, Anténor, 20, 26, 30, 32 n.17, 116–17, 214, 221, 264 flourishing, 219, 253–4, 257, 299 Foucault, Michel, 26, 33 n.26, 62, 71 n.12, 110 n.1, 158, 161 n.14, 162, 214, 264 France, 6, 9, 31, 187, 195, 239, 271, 277, 291 Frankfurt School, 191, 218 Frase, Martha, 266, 267 freedom, xi–xiii, 1, 19, 29–31, 42, 51, 76–82, 88, 92–6, 117–18, 121, 125, 129, 131, 144, 157, 164, 168–71, 172, 189–90, 205, 209, 213, 215, 242, 246, 253–9, 261, 279, 284, 286–9, 291, 296–9, 305–6 dialectics of, 78 movements, 277 living practice of, 146, 205 philosophy of, 17, 29 Freeman, S., 249 Frege, Gottlob, 89, 221 French (language—concepts and terms), 60, 77, 195, 197, 210, 238, 243 French Parliament, 253 Freud, Sigmund, 87–90, 94–5, 97 n.10, 99 n.34, 101–102, 104, 158–9, 161 n.17, 162, 185 n.9, 191, 231–2, 234 on the riddle of femininity, 110 n.2 Friedman, Michael Jay, 248 n.20, 249 G-d, 18, 53, 87, 155, 164, 192, 200, 205, 206 n.6, 232, 238, 240, 242 Gabriel, Markus, 160 n.6, 172 n.4 Gabriel, Peter, 289 Gadamer, Hans-Gorg, 293 Garvey, Marcus, 2, 170, 174 n.20 Gasset, José Ortega Y., 59, 70 n.5 Gastrow, Claudia, ix Gastrow-Ouma, Nava, x Gaye, Marvin, 289 Gәˁәz, 116 Geist, 102, 140, 200 gender and gendering, 3, 5, 9, 12, 52, 101–10, 113–22, 190, 230, 239 psychoanalytical interpretations of, 110 n.2, 111 n.12 in relation to race, 55 n.5, 104–10, 280, 291, 296, 301 social construction of, 9, 103–110 violence, 278 genocide, 18, 25, 41, 166, 189, 195–7, 238, 268, 275, 282 Gerima, Haile, 289 Germany, 6, 26, 179, 196–8 Gibson, Nigel, 80, 83 Gilroy, Paul, 32 n.14, 49 n.21, 50 n.35, 147 n.16 Ginsberg, South Africa, x globalism, 69, 265–x

331

Index globalization, ix, 224 n.6 Global South, ix, 144, 185 n.15, 221, 299, 310 Global Southern thought, 18 theorists, 129 Glustrom, S., 249 god(s), 18, 21, 39, 52–3, 61–2, 77, 87, 89, 93, 109, 121, 149, 150, 152–9, 164, 218, 233, 239, 252, 254, 288, 294, 298 false, 133, 169, 191, 222 MAat, 409 prosthetic, 110 Ra, 41 godlike, xi, 3, 153–4, 217, 222, 251 Goldberg, David Theo, 38, 47 n.4 Goldstein, Eric, 184 n.4, 185 n.11 Gordon, Flash, 131 Gordon, Jane Anna, xiii–xiv, 5, 26, 32, 33 n.22, 48 n.11, 96 n.26, 99 n.36, 134 n.3, 135 n.13, 146 n.1, 156–7,161 n.11, 162, 167, 173 n.11, 184 n.5, 185 n.14, 186 n.21, 216, 223, 230, 235, 238, 247 n.8 on creolization, 134 n.3 potentiated double consciousness, 20, 47, 50 n.41, 133, 241 Gordon, Lewis R., v, xiii–xiv, xvi, 1–26, 12, 32 nn.11, 15, 16 and 18, 33 nn.22 and 28, 47 n.2, 48 nn.6,11, 12 and 14, 49 n.17, 55 nn.1 and 5, 71 nn.6, 8 and 9, 72 nn.18 and 22, 82, 83, 97 nn.2 and 8, 98 nn.20, 21 and 26, 99 nn.29 and 36, 111 n.6, 112 n.16, 134 nn.4 and 5, 135 n.13, 146 n.2, 147 nn.8, 9, 12 and 16, 160 nn.3, 5 and 6, 161 nn.7, 11 and 16, 173 nn.17 and 18, 184 nn.2, 5, 6 and 7, 185 n.12, 186 n.22, 198, 206 nn.7, 8 and 11, 219, 220, 224, 225, 235, 237, 238, 241, 247 nn.1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10 and 12, 248 nn.13 and 14, 251, 252, 255, 257, 258, 259, 264, 267, 271–303, 285, 292, 313 nn.7, 8 and 14 government(s), 57, 159–60, 233, 275, 277 executives, 62 guilt, 57, 60–61, 94 Grant, Stan, 302 Greek (language, concepts, and terms), 30, 41, 60, 62, 76, 101, 114, 211, 101, 140, 149–51, 157, 163, 172 n.1, 195, 197, 200, 210–11, 213, 229, 243, 248 n.16 Greek-speaking peoples (ancient), 25, 30, 40–41, 60, 62, 69, 78, 151, 179, 198, 210, 220, 231, 238 –40, 263 so-called “miracle,” 220, 224 n.1 see also Hellens Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quiligan, 32 n.10, 49 n.23, 82 n.1, 83, 97 n.9, 147 n.5, 173 n.8, 184 nn.1 and 5, 267

332

Grenada (Spain), 24, 165, 239 Guhman, Sukhdeep, x Gyekye, Kwame, 82, 83 Haiti, 20, 214 Haitian Revolution, 171 Hanke, Lewis, 49 n.26, 173 n.9 Harris, US Vice-President Kamala, 303 Harris, Leonard, 111 n.8 Harris, Michelle, Martin Nakata, and Bronwyn Carlson, 32 n.10, 249 Haynes, Lemuel, 168, 170 health, x, 50, 63, 71, 94, 50 n.35, 63, 94–5, 130, 132–3, 233, 256, 288 care, 257 Hebrew (language, terms, concepts), 41, 77, 120, 140, 192, 195–197, 200, 205, 216 see also Judaism Hebrews (ancient people), 186 n.20, 188, 263, 271 see also Israelites, Judaism Hegel, G.W.F., 27, 30, 42, 48 n.15, 53, 75, 83, 86, 140, 147 n.6, 174 n.27, 191, 200, 206 n.4, 207, 220–21, 248 Hegelianism, 53, 76–8 studies, 293, 306 hegemony, 70, 144, 160, 188, 214, 218, 246, 264 Heidegger, Martin, 90, 160, 162, 211, 217, 220, 222, 224 n.3 Heilbroner, Robert L., 224 n.6, 225 Hellenic peoples, 210 Henderson, Thelton, 282 Hendrix, Jimi, 125–35, 289 as a composer, 132 Dionysian, 133 ironic performer, 133–4 Henry, Paget, xiv, 26–7, 32 n.19, 50 n.14, 93, 96, 99 n.29, 111 n.3, 135 n.13, 146 n.2, 167, 173 n.10, 175, 205 n.1, 221, 241 Herndon, Calvin, 112 n.15 He-Yin Zhen, 221, 306 Hicks, John, 172 n.3 Higginbotham, Leon, 282 Hinduism, 214, 10, 255 Hindus, x, 2–3 hip-hop/hip hop, 9, 12, 38, 126, 130, 133 Hirani, Rajkumar, 289 Hiromi (Hiromi Uehara), 289 history, 27, 29, 31, 39, 42, 44–5, 73 n.34, 88, 107, 113, 130, 140, 163–74, 242, 258, 265, 275–6, 280, 287, 298, 306, 308 agency in and agents of, 216, 294 of colonial subjects, 5 discipline of, 2, 48 n.16, 142–2, 154, 202 of disciplines, 152 intellectual, 17, 27–30, 143, 151, 202, 214, 221, 297

Index so-called end of, 307 theology and, 10 and time, 239 written, 7 Hitler, Adolf, 64, 69 Hobbes, Thomas, 265 Hobbesianism, 159, 242 Holocaust / Shoah, 189, 195–7 home, ix–x, 23, 58, 77, 86, 96, 202, 216, 254, 275 -lessness, 30, 118–19, 129, 142, 172, 216, 294 planet, 70 homeostasis, 69 homophobia, 105, 107 Homo sapiens, 20, 24, 67–8, 210 hope, 61, 223 Hor-Djed-Ef, 211 Houston, Charles, 244 humanism, 51, 171, 237 human sciences, 29, 85, 117, 142–3, 152, 183, 202–3, 217, 251, 262, 264, 295 Hume, David, 30, 42, 168 Husserl, Edmund, 27, 66, 72 n.25, 90–92, 98 n.19, 105, 111 n.7, 115, 152, 160 n.6, 191, 217, 221, 223, 264 Hutt, Curtis, 272 Ibrahim, Abdulla, 289 identity, 54, 57, 64, 66, 68, 76–8, 93, 103–4, 107–8, 114, 117–18, 126–7, 145, 214, 246, 295, 302 black, 169, 198 and identification, 39, 88 indigenous, 8, 247 n.1, 249 intellectual, 210 Jewish, 180, 187, 197–8 national, 118, 171 political, 191, 231, 295 racial, 46, 180, 191 see also Dougla, gender, trans idolatry, 20, 132, 153, 155, 168–9, 191–2, 222, 286 see also bad faith, gods idols, 18–20, 28, 115, 218, 222–3, 252, 255, 286–7 see also gods imagination, 127, 152, 219, 251, 258, 287–8, 309–10 Imhotep, 151, 211 imitation, 143, 203, 296 incompleteness, 19, 76, 89, 114, 116, 122, 220, 298 India, ix–xi, 1–3, 7–12, 158, 180, 218, 258, 264, 289, 302, 303 Gujarat, Punjab, Rajasthan, Telangana, x Indian Ocean, 25, 66, 141, 166, 201, 298 Indians (East), x, 1–3, 7–8, 12, 25, 41, 75–6, 87, 179, 301, 303 Indigenous peoples, 5–8, 73, 75–6, 120, 197, 214–18, 237–8, 240, 257, 274–5, 277–9, 282, 294, 303 Australian, 25, 73 n.38, 141, 201

Native Americans, 54, 85, 134, 141, 144, 179, 196–7, 201, 216, 278, 287 Oceanic, 85, 211 individual (the), 18, 121, 131, 155, 228, 253, 255 innocence, 54, 60–3, 256 Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 179, 195 intersectionality, 44, 297 intersubjectivity, 23, 47, 64, 80, 230, 232, 234 invisibility, 182, 210, 247 n.1, 293 Ireland, 1, 6, 289 Isaac, Walter, 173 n.12, 183–4, 126 n.22 Islam, 31, 41, 77, 147, 165–6, 171, 179, 181, 206 n.3, 239, 247 n.5, 265 sharia in, 246 Islamophobia, 10, 181 isomorphism, 39, 44, 61, 86, 91, 156, 244 Israel, 172, 179, 189, 192, 195, 216 Lost “Tribe” of, 25, 166 Israelites, 145, 163 Bene, 185 n.13, 187–8, 239 Italy, 6 Iya, Philip, 247 Jackson, Sherman, 49 n.22, 171, 172 n.3, 173 n.7, 175, 247, 274 Jamaica, 1–2, 169–70, 183, 195, 272, 289, 292–3 Jamaicans, 183 James, C.L.R., 174 n.27, 302–3 James, William, 52, 115, 221 Jameson, Frederick, 49 n.18 JanMohamed, Abdul, x, 94, 96, 99 n.32, 96, 99 n.32 Japan, 6, 73, 158, 218, 282–3, 310s Japanese, 75 Jarganath-Pithouse, Vashna and Rahul, ix Jaspers, Karl, 27, 33 n.20, 86, 89–90, 97 n.6, 98 n.16, 142, 147 n.11, 202, 206 n.10, 207, 218, 221, 255, 260 jazz, xiii, 2, 9, 37, 38, 93, 125–32, 227–8, 290, 292 Jewish Studies, 2 Jews, 9–10, 24–5, 31 n.6, 32 n.7, 40–41, 49 n.23, 77, 82 n.1, 83, 85, 87, 97 n.9, 120, 140, 165–7, 173 n.6, 174, 177–8 Afro-, 1, 10, 32 n.177–8, 180–81, 185 n.19, 187–9, 192 Ashkenazi, 75, 179–81, 183, 187, 189, 192, 196 Asian, 180, 185 n.13—e.g., Bene Israel, Baghdadi, Cochin, and Meshuari of India and Kaifeng Jews of China, 185 n.13 Hebrew-Israelite, 183 Igbo, 180 Kushite, 180 Lemba, x, 180 “Mischling,” 197 Mizrahi, x, 180, 183, 189, 192, 195, 302

333

Index Russian, 181, 185 n.15 Sephardi, x, 75, 179–83, 187, 192, 195, 302 South African, 75 Jha, Mandakini V., xi7 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 289 Jones, Nate, 282 Jones, William R., 49 n.22, 55 n.4, 170–71, 173 n.18, 174 n.25, 175, 185 n.9, 221 Judaism, 164–5, 167, 179–84, 187–93, 195–98, 239–50, 255, 264 Afro-, Amerindian, and other forms, 183 bhira (“election,” or “chosen”) in, 192 conception of ethical life, 191–93 decolonial, 187 denominations of, 181 First Temple, 181 halakha (Jewish law), 167, 183, 192, 239–40, 242 kashrut (kosher), 182–3, 192 not naming, uttering, or writing the name of G-d in, 192 Pesach (Passover), 149, 187–8 priestly, 196 rabbinic, 179–81,185 n.15, 196–7, 239–42, 247 n.11, 264 Second Temple, 196 Seders (Passover ritual meals), 145, 187, 205 Tzedek (includes but not exclusively reduced to justice), 192 Julien, Isaac, 112 n.16 justice, x, 7–8, 62, 79, 94–5, 99 n.34, 114–15, 144–5, 192, 213, 237–50, 274, 281, 283, 298–9, 309 activism, 7 as fairness, 243 injustice, 8, 40, 117, 141, 153, 164, 189, 201, 240, 252, 302 see also Charles Houston, MAat, John Rawls, theodicy, Ubuntu justification, 17–18, 26, 36, 55 n.2, 129, 145, 168, 204, 240, 255, 298 Kagemni, 211 Kant, Immanuel, 30, 42, 55 n.2, 57–8, 70 n.3, 87, 90, 92, 97 n.7, 98 n.22, 156–8, 161 n.12, 162, 191, 218, 231, 235, 242–3, 248 n.14, 249 Kaplan, Gabe, 35 Kar, Prafulla, x, xi, xiv Kar Ka (Boubcar Traoré), 289 Karenga, Maulana, 248 n.16, 249 Karmis, Dimitrios and Wayne Norman, 266, 267 Kenaan, Hagi and Illit Ferbert, 147 n.16 Kerwick, Jack, 253, 260 Key, Andre, 184 n.8 Kierkegaard, Søren, 35, 47 n.1, 55 n.6, 155, 161 n.9, 162, 232, 235, 251, 255, 260 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, 139, 199, 239

334

Kmt (ancient, pre-Persian, Greek, and Arabian Egypt), 24, 77, 126, 140, 151, 157, 172, 187, 210–11, 213, 224 n.2, 238, 243, 247 n.2, 309 royal armies of, 200 Knies, Kenneth, 28, 33 n.22 Ku Klux Klan, 134 Kuti, Fela, 289 labor, laborers, and workers, 12, 52, 54, 166, 170, 261–6, 276, 197, 301, 303 alienated, 29, 257 intellectual, 199 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 25, 41, 49 n.26, 166, 168, 173 n.9, 263 Latin (language—concepts and terms), 41–2, 47, 60, 114, 121–2, 140, 152, 157, 195, 197, 200, 210–12, 229, 243, 248 n.15, 253 Latin America, 12, 181, 186, 225 Latin Americans, Latinas, Latinos, Latinx, and Latin@, 48 n.8, 179, 182, 320 n.20 Latin American Studies, 285 laws, 45, 48 n.9, 165, 213, 241, 247 of Judah, 238–9 moral, 57, 164 Nuremberg, 197 see also Judaism, Kant, Ubuntu leftism, 254, 308 legitimacy, 17–18, 20, 27–30, 35, 43, 58, 76, 79, 87, 89, 91, 118, 131, 141, 159, 170, 172 n.5, 174, 178, 201, 218, 221–223, 240, 252 archival, 143, 203 delegitimation, 190 divine, 153 illegitimacy, 23, 26 legitimation, 26, 125, 129 of freedom, 169 see also justification Lehman High School, 228, 271, 292 Lehman Scholars Program, 228, 292 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 247 n.6 Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights, 271 Levin, Vuma, 290 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 25, 89,98 n17, 126, 134 n1, 158, 261, 264 liberalism, 75, 80–82, 187, 191, 248 n.15, 251, 253, 308–9 neoliberalism, 80–82, 125, 247, 248 n.15, 251, 255, 266, 279 liberation, 88, 93, 144–6, 161 n.7, 162, 167, 169, 187–93, 203–5, 223, 246, 261, 286–7, 298–9, 311 philosophy of liberation, 33, 213 Liberation Theology, 171, 187, 293 Lincoln, Abbey/Aminata Moseka, 289 Linnaeus, Carlous, 25, 42

Index Locke, Alain, 105, 111 n.8 Locke, John, 221, 265 logic (formal), 19, 89–91, 98 n.14, 116, 213, 220, 222 logicism, 130, 218 see also consistency London (UK), 196 Lorde, Audre, 101, 111 n.11, 112 n.12, 261 Lott, Tommy, 320 n.17 love, xi–xii, 1, 6, 21, 26, 30, 54, 102, 172, 233 love of learning, 299 love of writing, 227 radical love, xii lynching, 107, 109, 134 MAat, 213, 243–4, 249 the goddess, 309 Maart, Rozena, ix, xi, xiv, 1–2, 4, 75, 83, 301–303 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 248 n.16, 249 Mckigney, Erin, 184 n.8 Maimonides, Moses (Moshe ben Maimon, Mūsā ibn Maymūn and the RaMBam), 179 Makanda National Arts Festival, 290 Makanda (formerly Grahamstown), x Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 28, 33 n.22, 91, 98 n.25, 146 n.2, 205 n.1, 223, 225, 247 n.7, 249 Mamdani, Mahmood, 9, 81, 83 Manganyi, Chabani, ix Manichaeism, 64, 257 Manji, Firoze, 308 Marcuse, Herbert, 191 market(s), 82, 209, 221, 248, 252, 255–6, 295, 299, 310 marketability, 218–19, 256, 295 Marshall Plan, 283 Marx, Groucho, 23, 31 n.1, 75 Marx, Karl, 43, 191, 264–5, 306 Marxism, 171, 291 Mdw Ntr (language—concepts and terms in), 41, 77, 114, 140, 200, 210–11, 243 see also Kmt, MAat Martinique, 232 Mbembe, Achille, 144, 147 n.14, 245, 250 Meagher, Thomas, xivs meaning, xi, 9, 19, 21, 23, 26–8, 36, 39, 43–6, 64, 75–8, 85–6, 95, 102, 110, 118, 120, 127 scientific, 105–6, 140, 155, 158–9, 165, 200, 223, 230, 237, 244, 288–9, 299 social, 43, 45, 104, 106 spiritual, 169 Meer, F., 8, 12 melancholia, 26, 32, 129, 132, 145, 147 n.16, 204, 215, 294 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 66, 72 n.25, 78, 98 n.28, 105, 109, 111 n.9, 112 n.20, 115, 264 metaphysics, 17–18, 39–41, 121, 127, 213–14, 221, 223 metastability, 46, 53, 121

method and methodology, 3, 10, 19, 29, 43, 45–7, 65, 79, 86–91, 110, 117, 139, 141–4, 149, 152–60, 160, 178, 182–3, 199, 204, 217, 222–3, 232, 251, 288 fetishization of, 153, 178, 220, 298 of no method or suspension of, 89, 201–2, 218 Mexico, 7, 182 Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, 325 n.48 Mignolo, Walter, 32 n.10, 49 n.23, 82 n.1, 83, 97 n.9, 98 n.18, 146 n.1, 147 n.5, 184 nn.1 and 5, 205 n.1, 225, 241, 247 n.7, 250, 260, 264, 267, 313 n.12 Mill, John Stuart, 221, 265 Miller, J. Reid, 33 n.27 Mingus, Charles, 289 Minotaur, 95 miraculous, the, 163 Mitchell, Adam, 135 n.8 Mitchell, Joni, 289 modernity, 29,125, 128, 139, 167, 181, 199, 237–8, 239–41, 248 n.16, 265 definition of, 190, 298 white, 66, 85 see also Afromodernity, Euromodernity modernization, 181 Moguls, 264 Monahan, Michael J., 219, 225 monarchists, 253 Monk, Thelonious, 131, 289 Moody-Adams, Michelle M., 48 n.5 moralism, 251, 256 morality, 58, 155–6, 251, 253, 255 im-, 164 More, Mabogo P., ix, 5, 75, 83, 146, 218, 241, 247 Moses (Moshe), 145–6, 187, 205, 309 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 48 n.7, 174 n.19 ,175 Mudimbe, V.Y., 72 n.24, 158, 218 Muhammad (the Prophet), 165 music, 2, 9, 12, 125–35, 228, 285, 288, 289, 292 musicians, 9, 125, 132, 152, 227 musicology, 2 Muslims, 2, 25, 37, 40–1, 85, 87, 120, 140, 165, 167, 177, 181–2, 200, 239, 240, 263, 265 Afro-, 49 n.22, 181, 196 racialization of, 48 n.8 myth, mythic, mythological, and mythopoetic, 41, 76, 82, 86–7, 89, 98, 101, 114–15, 145, 205, 239, 241, 261–2, 288, 309 Nagel, Ernst, 293 Naidoo, R., 8, 12 Nanda, Renu, xi Natanson, Maurice Alexander, 32 n.14, 72 n.18, 112 n.18, 160 n.6, 162, 293, 319 National Union of Metal Workers (NUMSA), x Nazis, 196

335

Index N’Dour, Youssou, 289 Neanderthals, 68, 73 n.31 Négritude, 31, 46 “Negro,” “negro,” 23, 31, 36, 43, 46, 50 n.35, 99 n.30, 105, 166–7, 169, 174 nn.19, 20 and 26, 184 n.5, 197 Negrophobia, 107, 109 Nelson, Eric, 220, 224 n.1, 225 Neocosmos, Michael, ix New Frame, x New York City, x, 125, 228, 292, 294 New Zealand, 6, 8, 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51, 89, 132–3, 135, 172 n.1, 214, 221, 251, 260 “nigger,” 35 Nighthawk, Sarah, ix nihilism, 216, 251, 256, 289, 295, 307 Nirenberg, David, 31 n.6, 49 n.23, 82 n.1, 82, 97 n.9, 184 n.1 Nishitani, Keiji, 116, 158, 218 Nissim-Sabat, Marilyn, 71 n.7, 161 n.7, 162 Nubia, 24, 210, 224 Nzegwu, Nkiru, 297 Obama, President Barack, 279–80 Obenga, Théophile, 224 n.2, 225 O’Connor, Sinéad, 289 ontology, 17, 90, 101, 109, 213, 220, 222 opinion, 216, 251, 253, 295 oppression, 18, 20, 60–63, 80, 122, 189–90, 192, 272, 274, 280, 283, 286, 288, 295, 298, 305–6 options, 23, 52, 60–62, 102, 119, 121, 133, 144, 182, 204 Ossome, Lyn, 297 Ottomons, the, 166 Ouma, Chris, x Oyĕwùmí, Oyèrónké, 297 Palcy, Euzhan, 289 Panas, Kendall, 284 Panda, Manoj Kumar, x Paris (France), 4, 291 Park, Peter J.K., 224 n.1, 225 Parker, Charlie, 131–2, 228, 292 Parsons, Lucy, 297 Pateman, Carole, 42, 49 Pateman, Carole and Charles Mills, 49 n.28, 266–7, 316 n.44 patriarchy, 10 Peele, Jordan, 289, 305, 311 Peseshet, Lady, 211 phallus, the, 107–8, 112 n.12 phenomenology, 9–10, 27, 31–2, 33 n.22, 36, 45, 47, 72 nn.25 and 26, 49 n.17, 50 n.41, 66, 72 n.25 and 26, 75–6, 78, 80, 89–91, 93, 98 n.28, 99 n.29, 101–2, 106, 109–10, 113,

336

133, 135 n.13, 150–52, 158, 160 n.6, 161 n.7, 162, 213, 215, 223, 230, 249, 264, 271, 294 Africana existential, 31, 32 n.19, 50 n.41 existential, 48 n.16, 51, 293 philosophy as a hymn to reason, 89 beyond philosophy, 91 of culture, 85–6, 93, 127, 213 departments, 5 of music, 9 of race, 8, 48 n.8 physics, 2, 151, 154 Pinn, Anthony, 49 n.22, 171, 175, 247 n.6 Plato, 40, 115, 151, 212, 263 pluriverse, 151 police, 271, 273, 278, 281, 308–9 polis, 78, 265s political, the, xi, 80–83, 95, 251, 255 political action, 121, 170, 242, 255 economy, 2, 52, 261 life, 41, 78–81, 144, 219, 227, 234, 251–2, 256–9 theory, 223, 253, 255, 311 subjects, 255–6; see also citizenship politics, 9, 11, 78–81, 94–5, 119, 139, 144, 199, 203–4, 219, 234, 252–9, 261, 265, 277, 295 global, 57, 78 race, 178 Portugal, 6, 73, 77, 188 poststructuralism, 158 poverty, 1, 81, 131, 197, 240, 279 power, xi, 40, 46, 55 n.5, 57, 62, 71 n.12, 79, 103–4, 107, 121, 144–5, 159, 224, 246, 258, 298, 3 10 coercive, 257–9 definition of, 118 disem-, 119, 121, 256–7, 259, 283, 286 divine,117, 149, 218, 233, 252–7 em-, 11–12, 27, 121, 254, 257, 264, 266, 286 erotic as, 111 n.11 institutional, 52, 110, 219 /knowledge, 158 life of, 256 negotiation of, 213 phallic, 112 n.12 powerful, the, 53, 60, 62, 79, 129, 159 pragmatism, 31, 213, 217 pride, 37–8, 178, 280 primitive, 44, 216, 257 Prince (the musical artist), 289 privatization, ix–xi, 219, 257–8, 279 privilege, 3, 57–60, 63, 70 n.2, 240 under-, 3 property, 29, 276 psychoanalysis, 23, 75, 87, 94, 111, 112 n.13 psychology, 2, 154, 323 n.63

Index Ptah-Hotep, 211 purity and purification, 19, 76, l14, 117, 126–7, 209, 219–23, 302 of blood, 24, 40, 263 moral, 256 national, 264 Queen’s University (Canada), 59 queens, 62 queer, 122, 304 Quijano, Aníbal, 214, 225 race, 8–10, 19–25, 35–50, 52, 54–5, 69–70, 77–83, 97 n.9, 114, 116–122, 132, 143, 177–83, 197, 203, 261–4, 266–7, 291, 301, 305 biological view of, 36, 38–9, 42, 44–5, 48 n.9, 50 n.34, 211 and class, 296 concept, idea, and history of, 24, 32 nn.9 and 10, 35–44, 57, 111 n.6 challenges and troubles disciplines, 46 Darwinian conceptions of, 36, 42–4, 65–6, 72 n.23, 169 eliminativism, 50 n.35, 111 n.5, 120 -less, 103–4 in matrices of desire, gender, power, and sexuality, 101–112 mixed, 75, 104–5, 177, 190, 197–8, 301 -neutrality, 63, 80–81, 103–4 raza, 24–5, 31 n.6, 40–41, 77, 82 n.1, 87, 120, 166, 189–90 razza, 25, 40, 77, 263 relations, 178, 276 social construction of, 8, 35–8, 46, 64–6, 105, 120, 197, 306 see also antiblack racism, caste, critical race studies, racism racialization, 8, 11, 48 n.8, 113–21, 196, 241, 274 racism, 8–12, 28–30, 35–8, 41, 44, 46–50, 51–55, 60, 77, 93–4, 101–112, 117–22, 125, 129, 131, 168, 177–92, 198, 215, 228, 258, 266, 273, 280, 286–7, 293–8, 303, 306–10 antisemitism as a form of, 196 see antiblack racism Radebe, Zandi, ix Radical Philosophy Association (RPA), ix Radical Philosophy Review ix Rains, Frances V., 70 n.2 Rajshekar, V.T., 303 Ramose, Mogobe, 5 rape, 107 Rastafari, 170–71, 174 n.28 rationality, 19, 42, 88–90, 109, 116, 141–2, 201–2, 240, 242, 298 Rawls, John, 243–5, 248 n.15, 249, 250, 253 Rawls, John and Erin Kelly, 248 n.19

reality, x, 3, 18–20, 21, 35–9, 45–7, 57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 90, 69, 80, 86, 91, 106, 113–20, 123, 125–34, 142–4, 149–60, 178, 191–2, 198, 203, 212–23, 228–38 beyond being, 307 disobedient to consciousness, 142, 202, 251–9, 262, 266, 286–8, 293–310 divine, 168–9, 218 historical, 195 human, xi, 8, 20, 46, 51, 54, 101–2, 113, 115–22, 127, 129, 153, 155, 228, 234, 262, 286, 293 lived-, xi, 26, 29, 78, 143, 203 political, 81, 283, 295, 310 social, 36, 46, 48, 66, 106, 115, 118, 126, 262 subjunctive, 109 vastness of, 92 reason, xiii, 17–20, 24, 26–31, 86–90, 96, 116, 129, 141–4, 163, 171–2, 199, 202, 213–17, 220, 232–4, 242, 256–9, 261 geography of, xiii, 245, 1999, 204, 258–9 instrumental, 285 metacritique of, 93, 298 practical, 90, 95 teleological, 91–2 reasonability, 19, 142, 201 un-, 19, 23–4, 30, 88, 116, 129, 157, 215, 220, 258 Reconstruction (in the USA), 29, 279 Reductionism and reductive thinking, 17, 51, 91, 108, 132, 159, 191, 218–219 religion(s), 10, 72 n.20, 118, 163–75, 189–91, 196, 214, 219, 239, 246, 265, 301 Renan, Ernest, 177 responsibility, xi, 19, 23, 51, 53–4, 57, 62, 102, 117–18, 129, 157, 164, 213, 216, 229–30, 240, 242–3, 246, 247, 275, 281, 286 collective, 253, 274 epistemic, 153, 156, 293, 299 ethical, 80, 146, 192, 198 for the future, 166, 233, 254 moral, 63, 255, 273, 276 political, 117, 198, 255, 277 for reason, 258 for responsibility, 152, 192 Restrepo, Ricardo Sanín, 321 n.36 revolution(s), 41, 79, 238, 265, 299 counter-, 171 revolutionaries, 2, 78, 131, 170, 215, 245, 289 revolutionary times, 54 Rhodes University (South Africa), x, 5, 195 right, the, 81, 187, 191, 253–7, 259, 291, 308 Riggs, Marlon, 289 rights, 30, 58–60, 63, 168, 248 n.15, 255–6, 273–4, 279, 281–2, 303 Rites & Reason Theater, 290 Roach, Max, 289

337

Index Robinson, Cedric, 174 n.27, 250 Roma people, 197, 282 Roman law, 240 Romans (ancient), 24, 26, 60, 69, 140, 164–5, 179, 181, 183, 188, 198, 231, 264–5 Empire, 184, 196, 238–9, 246 Roos, Neil, 75 Rorty, Richard, 33, 97 n.1, 146 n.2, 205 n.1, 206, 249 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18, 89, 217 Ruism, 213 Russell, Bertrand, 27, 89, 221, 293 Russia, 6 Sachs, A., 250 Sanders, Senator Bernie, 279 Sanders, Charles, 96 Sanders, Mark, 71 n.8 Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo, 321 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8–9, 39, 45–6, 49 n.18, 51, 53, 66, 72, 75, 83, 89, 112 n.14, 115, 160 n.1, 162, 174 n.27, 264, 267, 293, 306 critic of the transcendental ego, 91 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 172 n.4 Schwab Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, 271 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 89, 102, 191 Schulweis, Harold M., 185 n.9, 247 n.11, 250 Schutz, Alfred, 64, 66, 72 n.18 Schwartz, Gary, 292 science, 23, 25, 140, 142, 155–6, 200, 202, 211, 214, 218, 252, 292, 293, 298 decolonial, 28 European, 28 human, 29, 48 n.15, 50 n.35, 85, 117, 142–3, 152, 183, 202–3, 217, 251, 261, 264, 295 life, 65, 89, 141, 200 modern, 41, 89, 142, 202 natural, 43, 105, 143, 149, 217, 251–2, 291 political, 154, 292, 297 social, 44, 65, 89, 141, 143, 173 n.15, 202 Second Chance Program, 228, 271, 292 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 216, 225 self, the, xii, 18, 26–7, 39, 46, 57, 61, 76, 78–81, 87, 93, 94, 118, 126–7, 150, 224, 230, 241, 243, 251, 256 Semite(s), 177, 197 Seneca Falls Convention of 1846 Senegal, ix, 6, 20, 275, 289 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 25, 41, 263 Serbia, 6 Serequeberhan, Tsenay, 247 n.10, 250 Sertima, Ivan Van, 32 n.13, 49 n.24, 83 sexism, 296 Shariati, Ali, 116, 218, 221, 247 n.5, 250 Sharpe, Samuel, 2 Sheth, Falguni, 48, 316 n.51 signs, 24, 64, 78, 85–6, 127

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Silver, Horace, 289 Simone, Nina, 289 Singh, Jagjit, 289 Singh, Jaspal Kaur, x, xiv Sithole, Tendayi, ix Slabodsky, Santiago, 187 Slovenia, 6 social contract theory, 266 institutions, 44, 119, 145, 204, 243 media, 114 world, 23, 36, 43, 61, 62, 64–6, 86, 94–5, 115, 180, 191, 230, 258, 262–3, 296 socialism, 80, 234, 265 sociality, 19, 243, 245 Socrates, 60, 131, 151, 212 Sonneborn, Liz, 147 n.5, 206 n.3, 207 Soprano, Gizelxanath, 290 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 11, 146 n.1 South Africa, ix–xi, 1–2, 4– 12, 31, 75–6, 79–82, 128, 144, 187, 195, 198, 218, 241–3, 271–83, 289, 303 South America, ix, 7, 42, 67, 73 n.30, 130, 168, 188, 196–7, 298 Soviet Union, 32 n.9, 283 Spain, 77, 188 spatial-temporal compression and configurations, 47, 265–6 speech, 2, 78–81, 85, 96, 115, 128, 144, 204, 234, 253, 265, 311 fearless, 30 spirit of seriousness, 51, 112 n.15, 190, 248 n.13 Steele Pulse, 289 Strayhorn, Billy, 289 Suàrez-Krabbe, Julia, 32 n.10 Sudha, Bini Babu, xi suffering, 9–10, 18, 57, 60–62, 96, 117, 130, 134, 144, 159, 169–71, 254, 273, 286, 306 Sweden, 6 symbolic, the, 45, 47, 86–7, 168–70 symbols, 24, 43–4, 53, 64, 78, 85–6, 94, 97 n.10, 230 Tasmania, 6 Tattersall, I. and J.H. Schwartz, 73 n.31 and 32 teleological suspension(s), 85, 91, 133, 144, 256 of disciplinarity, 91, 118, 143, 203, 221, 232–3, 252, 255, 298 of epistemology, 251 of the ethical, 255 of moral life, 155 of philosophy, 143, 203, 222–3, 298 theodicy, 10, 18, 40, 42, 49 n.22, 62, 87, 117, 157, 163–4, 168, 163–4, 168, 163–70, 172 n.3, 192, 218, 240, 247 n.6, 251–2 secularized, 152 theodicean anthropology, 42

Index theory, 17, 38–9, 51, 87–8, 92–3, 95 of freedom, 29–30 meta-, 38–9, 90 Theory from the Global South (seminar), x Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa, vii–xiii Thiruvananthapuram / Trivandrum (in Kerala, India), x Thomas, Greg, 308 Thornton, Russell, 196 Thurman, Howard, 170 Tiku, Nimrata, xi Tillotson, Michael, 306 Tlostanova, Madina, 32 n.9 Tobin, Gary, 182–3, 186 n.23 Tobin, Gary A., Diane Kaufman Tobin, Sid Groeneman, and Scott Rubin, 185 n.17, 186 n.24 tokenism, 4 Traoré, Boubacar (Kar Kar), 289 trans identities, 113–14 transcendental conditions, considerations, and formulations, 42, 76, 90–2, 152, 158, 180 n.6, 191, 213 transdisciplinarity, 47, 143, 203 Trouilot, Michel-Rolph, 237, 250 Trump, President Donald, 279 truth, 29, 86, 114–15, 118, 129–30, 134, 153, 212–13, 216–17, 221, 244, 251–5, 275, 283, 288, 295, 299 Truth and Reconciliation commissions, 144, 272, 274, 277–8, 281–2 Tunstall, Dwayne, 161 n.7, 162 Turkey, 210 Tuvel, Rebecca, 113–14, 116 uBuntu/Ubuntu, x, 5–6, 11, 237, 241–2, 244–7 United Kingdom (UK), 8, 11, 59, 132, 187, 276, 289 United States of America (USA), 7–12, 20, 27, 31, 48 n.9, 62, 95, 120, 125, 144, 163, 171–2, 179, 182, 184, 187, 188, 191, 195, 198, 244, 271, 274, 276–83, 289, 291–2, 296–7, 302–3, 308 Revolutionary War, 168 War on Terror, 141, 201 see also Reconstruction universality, 47, 92, 144, 157, 177, 214, 216, 231, 241, 244, 246 universalizing, 47, 133, 157–8, 246 universals, 254, 257 University of Birmingham (UK), 4 University of California at Berkeley, 96 University of Cape Town, 273 University of Connecticut (UCONN), 195, 271 University of Halle, 31 University of Kwazulu-Natal (UKZN), x, 5

University of Nebraska at Omaha, 272 University of South Africa (UNISA), x University of the West Indies at Mona, 195 University of Witwaterstrand (Wits), x values, 36, 51, 64, 95, 108–9, 118, 153, 190–91, 193, 197, 216, 237–9, 242–3, 251, 253, 286, 291 Vasquez, Rolando, 127 Victimization, 57, 60–63, 256 victims, 18, 38, 189, 256, 272–4, 278, 281, 306, 309 violence, 19, 35, 133, 277–8, 285–7 police, 271 symbolic, 39, 45, 47, 107 visual art, 289 artists, 290 vitalism, 213 voice, 3–4, 81, 85, 127, 187, 266, 306 voting, 121 Vulliamy, Ed, 135 n.8 Walker, David, 169, 173 n.16 Walker, Jacqueline, 195, 197–8 Walsh, Catherine, 223, 225, 257, 260 war(s), 78–81 Cold War, 265 crimes, 271 World War I, 179 World War II, 179, 196, 282 Weil, Simone, 115, 220 Weiner, Eric, 224 n.1, 225 Wertmüller, Lina, 289 West, the, 3, 102–3, 188, 239, 242, 252 West, Cornel, 174 n.27 whiteness, 8, 10, 27, 29–30, 38, 48 n.11, 53, 57–60, 64, 66, 68–70, 71 n.6, 76, 103–8, 133, 145, 180, 189–91, 196, 198 studies, 4, 57, 64, 69–70 Wilmore, Gayraud, 175 Wilson, Paula, 290 Wiredu, Kwasi, 48 n.5, 83, 92, 98 n.27, 116, 146 n.2, 161 n.16, 162, 224 n.1, 225, 244, 250 Woods, Ellen Meiksins, 224, 225 Woodstock, 139 World Conference of Philosophy, 6 Xenophobia, 220 Yacob, Zera, 158, 218 Young, Iris Marion, 260 Zack, 73 n.29, 111 n.6 Zeno of Elea, 212 zoom, 5–6 zone of nonbeing, 26, 78, 94, 241, 306–7

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