Beyond Ontological Blackness

Beyond Ontological Blackness PDF Author: Victor Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474287689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
In this study, Victor Anderson traces instances of "ontological blackness" in African American theological, religious and cultural thought, arguing that African American critical thought has been trapped in a racial rhetoric that it did not create and which cannot serve it well. Drawing together 18th- and 19th-century accomodationism and its assimilationist heirs with the movements of Black Power and Afrocentrism, Anderson shows that all exhibit a similar structure of racial identity. He suggests that it is time to move beyond the confines of "the cult of black heroic genius" to what Bell Hooks has termed "postmodern blackness": a racial discourse that leaves room to negotiate African American identities along lines of class, gender, sexuality, and age as well as race.

Beyond Ontological Blackness

Beyond Ontological Blackness PDF Author: Victor Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474287689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, Victor Anderson traces instances of "ontological blackness" in African American theological, religious and cultural thought, arguing that African American critical thought has been trapped in a racial rhetoric that it did not create and which cannot serve it well. Drawing together 18th- and 19th-century accomodationism and its assimilationist heirs with the movements of Black Power and Afrocentrism, Anderson shows that all exhibit a similar structure of racial identity. He suggests that it is time to move beyond the confines of "the cult of black heroic genius" to what Bell Hooks has termed "postmodern blackness": a racial discourse that leaves room to negotiate African American identities along lines of class, gender, sexuality, and age as well as race.

Beyond Ontological Blackness

Beyond Ontological Blackness PDF Author: Victor Anderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474287662
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, Victor Anderson traces instances of "ontological blackness" in African American theological, religious and cultural thought, arguing that African American critical thought has been trapped in a racial rhetoric that it did not create and which cannot serve it well. Drawing together 18th- and 19th-century accomodationism and its assimilationist heirs with the movements of Black Power and Afrocentrism, Anderson shows that all exhibit a similar structure of racial identity. He suggests that it is time to move beyond the confines of "the cult of black heroic genius" to what Bell Hooks has termed "postmodern blackness": a racial discourse that leaves room to negotiate African American identities along lines of class, gender, sexuality, and age as well as race.

Pragmatic Theology

Pragmatic Theology PDF Author: Victor Anderson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791494861
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Pragmatic Theology argues for a vision of religious life that is derived from the tradition of American pragmatism (James, Dewey, Royce); empirical theology (Chicago School, D.C. Macintosh, H. Richard Niebuhr); and American philosophy of religion (Stone, Frankenberry, Corrington). The author argues that there is a divine reality in human experience that when encountered gives meaning and value to a person's need for cultural fulfillment and to his or her religious need for self-transcendence. The book commends the openness of nature, the world, and human experience to creative transformation and growth. It supports the increase of human capacities to create morally livable and fulfilling communities, the enhancement of the free play of interpretation, and a social order where democratic utopian expectations are envisioned and actualized.

Blackness Visible

Blackness Visible PDF Author: Charles W. Mills
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702947
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention.Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

Otherwise Worlds

Otherwise Worlds PDF Author: Tiffany Lethabo King
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism. Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds. Contributors Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

Becoming Human

Becoming Human PDF Author: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479873624
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

Black Men from behind the Veil

Black Men from behind the Veil PDF Author: George Yancy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666906484
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The Black male scholars within this important book are painfully aware that the brutal murder of George Floyd was not due to a few "bad apples." They understand that they are perceived as "threats" and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary that is embedded with processes of mythopoetic construction, racial capitalism, and a deep anti-Black male social ontology. Edited by prominent philosopher George Yancy, Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations emphasizes the importance of Black male epistemic agency and the courage to speak the truth regarding an America that values Black male life on the cheap and that attempts to control the movement of Black men, their capacity to breathe, and their being through anti-Black technologies of surveillance, confinement, policing, and white nation-building. There is no single monolithic Black male voice that dominates this crucial and necessary text. Each voice speaks of pain behind the Veil, revealing narrative specificity and an important recursive truth: Black men, within the white American psyche, are both necessary and yet disposable. The existential and sociohistorical weight of this truth is made painfully clear through the voices of these Black men.

Critique of Black Reason

Critique of Black Reason PDF Author: Achille Mbembe
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373238
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Ontological Terror

Ontological Terror PDF Author: Calvin L. Warren
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822371847
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
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.

Physics of Blackness

Physics of Blackness PDF Author: Michelle M. Wright
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816687305
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Reveals how assumptions we make about time and space inhibit more inclusive definitions of Blackness. What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a "what," it in fact always operates as a "when" and a "where." (Publisher).