Black Existential Freedom

Black Existential Freedom PDF Author: Nathalie Etoke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153815708X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
The history of slavery, colonization, subjugation, gratuitous violence, and the denial of basic human rights to people of African descent has led Afro-Pessimists to look at black existence through the lens of white supremacy and anti-blackness. Against this trend, Black Existential Freedom argues that Blackness is not inherently synonymous with victimhood. Rather, it is inextricable from existential freedom and the struggle for political liberation. This book presents an existential analysis of continental and diasporic African experiences through critical interpretations of music, film, and fiction that portray what it means to be human— to persevere in the tension between life and physical, psychological, and social death—for the sake of freedom. With its transdisciplinary perspective and convergence of Africana existential philosophy, African-American Studies, Afro-French Studies, Diaspora Studies, and African studies, this book is not concerned with disciplinary boundaries or certain appropriations of European metaphysics that are committed to a reading of black “non-being.” Black Existential Freedom explores the continuities and discontinuities of black existence and the manifestations and the meanings of blackness within different countries, time periods, and social and political contexts. Etoke's book empowers the reader to understand and process the complexities of racialized identity in a globalized contemporary society. Ultimately, it is an ode to human survival and freedom.

Black Existential Freedom

Black Existential Freedom PDF Author: Nathalie Etoke
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153815708X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
The history of slavery, colonization, subjugation, gratuitous violence, and the denial of basic human rights to people of African descent has led Afro-Pessimists to look at black existence through the lens of white supremacy and anti-blackness. Against this trend, Black Existential Freedom argues that Blackness is not inherently synonymous with victimhood. Rather, it is inextricable from existential freedom and the struggle for political liberation. This book presents an existential analysis of continental and diasporic African experiences through critical interpretations of music, film, and fiction that portray what it means to be human— to persevere in the tension between life and physical, psychological, and social death—for the sake of freedom. With its transdisciplinary perspective and convergence of Africana existential philosophy, African-American Studies, Afro-French Studies, Diaspora Studies, and African studies, this book is not concerned with disciplinary boundaries or certain appropriations of European metaphysics that are committed to a reading of black “non-being.” Black Existential Freedom explores the continuities and discontinuities of black existence and the manifestations and the meanings of blackness within different countries, time periods, and social and political contexts. Etoke's book empowers the reader to understand and process the complexities of racialized identity in a globalized contemporary society. Ultimately, it is an ode to human survival and freedom.

Existence in Black

Existence in Black PDF Author: Lewis Ricardo Gordon
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415914512
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

Black Existentialism

Black Existentialism PDF Author: danielle davis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786611481
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
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.

Melancholia Africana

Melancholia Africana PDF Author: Nathalie Etoké
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 9781786613028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony. From these experiences a theme of loss resonates--loss of land, of freedom, of language, of culture, of self, and of ideals born from independence. Nathalie Etoke demonstrates that, beyond territorial expropriation and the pain inflicted upon the body and the soul, the violence that seals the encounter with the 'other' annihilates an age-old cycle of life. In the wake of this annihilation, continental and diasporic Africans strive to reconcile that which has been destroyed with what has been newly introduced. Their survival depends on their capacity to negotiate the inherent tension of their historical becoming. The book develops a transdisciplinary method encompassing historicism, critical theory, Africana existential thought, and poetics.

Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization

Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization PDF Author: Lewis R. Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000244733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, and the decolonization of justice and normative life. Gordon issues a critique of the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason.

Living Existentialism

Living Existentialism PDF Author: Gregory Hoskins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498249843
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Writing in the late 1990s about the tendency of encyclopedists to designate existentialism a finished project, Thomas W. Busch cautions that such hasty periodization risks distorting our understanding of the contemporary philosophical scene and of depriving ourselves of vital resources for critiquing contemporary forms of oppression, what Garbriel Marcel referred to as processes of dehumanization. We should recall that ""existentialism made possible present forms of Continental philosophy, all of which assume the existentialist critique of dualism, essentialism, and totality in modern philosophy,"" and we should acknowledge that ""existentialism remains capable of haunting today's scene as an important and relevant critic."" Offered in honor of Thomas W. Busch after his more than fifty years of work in philosophy, the essays in this volume attest to existentialism as a living project. The essays are written by scholars who championed existentialism in America and by scholars who now seek to extend existentialist insights into new territory, including into research in cognitive science. The essays range from studies of key figures and texts to explorations of urgent topics such as the nature of freedom and the possibility of what Busch calls ""incorporation,"" a sense of communicative solidarity that respects difference and disagreement. ""While each essay opens up a world of its own and invites the reader along a skillfully guided argument, the entire collection is a refreshing contribution to the existentialist scholarship. Instead of a partisan defense of the tradition's timelessness, this volume faithfully echoes Thomas W. Busch's sober approach and demonstrates the thematic timeliness of existentialism."" --Farhang Erfani, American University; author of Aesthetics of Autonomy: Sartre and Ricoeur on Emancipation, Authenticity, and Selfhood ""This collection testifies to the diverse and lasting impact of Tom Busch's thinking and teaching. Busch's interest in thinkers including Marcel, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty has translated, for his readers and students, into enduring contributions in fields as varied as feminist philosophy, political theory, cognitive science, and literary analysis. Many of these essays have inherited from Busch's teaching and writing the element of hopefulness that he himself found in existentialism and phenomenology."" --Rebecca Steiner Goldner, St. John's College, Annapolis Gregory Hoskins, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, is the Assistant Director of the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program at Villanova University. J. C. Berendzen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans.

Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism

Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism PDF Author: Devon R. Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538153505
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
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.

Sartre on Contingency

Sartre on Contingency PDF Author: Mabogo Percy More
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538157055
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
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.

Time and Freedom

Time and Freedom PDF Author: Christophe Bouton
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810168138
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Christophe Bouton's Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy's reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later), Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton's is the first major work of its kind since Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889), and Bouton's "mystery of the future," in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.

No Ashes in the Fire

No Ashes in the Fire PDF Author: Darnell L Moore
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568589492
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir. When Darnell Moore was fourteen, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire. They cornered him while he was walking home from school, harassed him because they thought he was gay, and poured a jug of gasoline on him. He escaped, but just barely. It wasn't the last time he would face death. Three decades later, Moore is an award-winning writer, a leading Black Lives Matter activist, and an advocate for justice and liberation. In No Ashes in the Fire, he shares the journey taken by that scared, bullied teenager who not only survived, but found his calling. Moore's transcendence over the myriad forces of repression that faced him is a testament to the grace and care of the people who loved him, and to his hometown, Camden, NJ, scarred and ignored but brimming with life. Moore reminds us that liberation is possible if we commit ourselves to fighting for it, and if we dream and create futures where those who survive on society's edges can thrive. No Ashes in the Fire is a story of beauty and hope-and an honest reckoning with family, with place, and with what it means to be free.