Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism

Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism
Author: Devon R. Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-11-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538153505

This is an innovative work in Africana philosophical thought that links the phenomenon of nihilism in black America, in particular black American youth, to modern traditions of Western philosophy. Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism engages defining themes of black existential life by offering a framework for considering the relationships between antiblack racism, pessimism, nihilism, weakness, strength, maturity, freedom, and hope in the 21st century. This book readdresses themes popularly raised by Cornel West in 1994 regarding the nature, causes, evaluations, diagnoses, and prognoses of what has been called, “nihilism in black America.” Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism seeks to recontextualize discussions of nihilism and its possibilities for American cultural life. As a result, this book bears important questions, offers unique analyses, and suggests radical responses that are relevant for studies of black life and theories of justice in twenty-first century America.

Ontological Terror

Ontological Terror
Author: Calvin L. Warren
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2018-05-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822371847

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

Sartre on Contingency

Sartre on Contingency
Author: Mabogo Percy More
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-09-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538157055

The problem of antiblack racism has a long history in the world, with as long a history of thinkers writing and theorizing against it. Few philosophers have opposed institutionalized racialism as vehemently as Jean-Paul Sartre, both in his intellectual work and in his political action. This book argues that not only does a relationship exists between Sartre’s existentialist philosophy and antiracism but also, more profoundly, that it is precisely his existential ontology that informs his anti-racist social and political commitments. He sought to examine the complexity of our existence as conscious bodies and thus provides the ontological basis for understanding the situation of a black person in an antiblack world. This book is about how Sartre’s philosophy – especially his early writings – can be applied to address the problem of racism against black people. It argues that among the many concepts in Sartre’s work that are useful in understanding the problem of racism against black people, the philosophical notion of contingency is one of the most significant. Contingency in Sartre is the view that whatever exists, need not exist, and that therefore it can be changed; that the fact that one is born white or black without their choice, has no moral weight at all in treating others as though they are responsible for what they are. In this book Mabogo More contends that through Sartre’s philosophical notion of contingency, he provides us with the ammunition to understand and deal with racism broadly, and antiblack racism in particular.

Race Matters

Race Matters
Author: Cornel West
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780807009727

Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium."--BOOK JACKET.

Afropessimism

Afropessimism
Author: Frank B. Wilderson III
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1631496158

“Wilderson’s thinking teaches us to believe in the miraculous even as we decry the brutalities out of which miracles emerge”—Fred Moten Praised as “a trenchant, funny, and unsparing work of memoir and philosophy” (Aaron Robertson,?Literary Hub), Frank B. Wilderson’s Afropessimism arrived at a moment when protests against police brutality once again swept the nation. Presenting an argument we can no longer ignore, Wilderson insists that we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of memoir, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit.“Wilderson’s ambitious book offers its readers two great gifts. First, it strives mightily to make its pessimistic vision plausible. . . . Second, the book depicts a remarkable life, lived with daring and sincerity.”—Paul C. Taylor, Washington Post

Critique of Black Reason

Critique of Black Reason
Author: Achille Mbembe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822373238

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

Mabogo P. More

Mabogo P. More
Author: Tendayi Sithole
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2022-04-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1538166127

Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology is the first book to provide an extensive treatment of More’s Africana existential thought. This book locates him, as it is clear in his body of work, in the Azanian (Black and Indigenous) existential tradition. As a philosopher, he is engaged from the perspective of black radical thought. From this intervention, it is clear that his philosophical project originates and is expressed from the existential condition of being-black-in-an-antiblack-world. It is from the lived experience and the fact of being black that More is meditated upon and this book, which is the extension of his work, brings to the forth the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that that illuminate his philosophical project.

How Non-being Haunts Being

How Non-being Haunts Being
Author: Corey Anton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1683932854

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what will be,” “what might be” and “what should be.” It is a world of desires, dreams, fictions, historical figures, planned events, spatial and temporal distances, in a word, absent presences and present absences. Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves. A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.

A Realist Metaphysics of Race

A Realist Metaphysics of Race
Author: Jeremy Pierce
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2014-12-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739175610

In A Realist Metaphysics of Race: A Context-Sensitive, Short-Term Retentionist, Long-Term Revisionist Approach, Jeremy Pierce defends a social kind view of racial categories. On this view, the biological features we use to classify people racially do not make races natural kinds. Rather, races exist because of contingent social practices, single out certain groups of people as races, give them social importance, and allow us to name them as races. Pierce also identifies several kinds of context-sensitivity as central to how racial categorization works and argues that we need racial categories to identify problems in how our racial constructions are formed, including the harmful effects of racial constructions. Hence, rather than seeking to eliminate such categories, Pierce argues that we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate their problematic elements, with an eye toward retaining only the unproblematic aspects. A Realist Metaphysics of Race contains insights relevant not just to professional philosophers in metaphysics, philosophy of race, social philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, but also to students and scholars working in sociology, biology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and political science.

Black Existentialism

Black Existentialism
Author: danielle davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1786611481

Few contemporary intellectuals have attempted to inform theory, the academy and social change as does Lewis Gordon. Following his own path of Fanon, Cesaire and Said, Gordon’s work is an urgent call to action that is critical ‘in the trying times’ in which we find ourselves. In this important book, international scholars from many disciplines and areas of life engage in Gordon’s work to prod, rattle and rethink our thinking to inform and change our practices as humans in institutions, politics, and the personal, legal and social paradigms. The book focuses on the importance of radical theory and thinkers to push for projects of change in the area of Black Existentialism. Gordon’s now extensive oeuvre personifies this. The essays use the work of Lewis Gordon to demonstrate how theory and thought be can used for transformation of existence, antiracism and critiques of alterity, resistance, pedagogy, political action theory and disciplinary decadence in the academy and beyond.