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"African American philosophy"
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Blackness Visible
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.
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Health Disparities and the Ancestral Environment
This book makes the case that disparities in health outcomes affecting people of West Central African descent in the United States (African Americans) are due, in large part, to evolutionary physiological adaptations to potentially lethal infectious organisms in the ancestral environment of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular Plasmodium falciparum, coupled with exposures unique to the environment of North America. According to the proposed theory, inherited characteristics acquired over millennia from adaptations to endemic tropical organisms helped to increase survivability in the original African environment. However, in the different natural and dietary environment of North America, these adaptations render people of West Central African descent susceptible to the same chronic diseases that affect other Americans. The theory has implications for disease treatment and for overall health and longevity.
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The Sovereignty of Quiet
African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. InThe Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person's desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos's protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander's reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks'sMaud Martha, James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison'sSulato move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
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What White Looks Like
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
George Yancy holds the McCracken Fellowship in Africaana Studies at New York University. He has edited three previous books, including African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (Routledge, 1998), Cornel West: A Critical Reader (2001), and The Philosophical i: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy (2002).
\"Not only are these essays provocative, but they are illuminating and useful both to scholars and to neophytes. The anthology as a whole deserves an unqualified recommendation for all interested in this matter.\" -L. Sebastian Purcell, Boston College
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Postmodern racial dialectics
Postmodern Racial Dialectics is a collection of ten essays on African American philosophy. Addressing issues as disparate as why there are no graduate programs in philosophy at the more than one hundred traditionally black colleges and universities in the U.S.—to conceptions of Black utopianism—to the nature of postmodern revolutions, these essays are beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between changing ways that the races talk to one another. The book is postmodern in that it is beyond modernity's linear logic. Postmodern Racial Dialectics is also a political entreaty for African Americans to be wary of conventional ways of thinking, and to begin thinking transgressively beyond narrowly prescribed conceptions from both sides of the color line.
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