Disciplinary Decadence (The Radical Imagination Series) by Lewis R. Gordon

Disciplinary Decadence (The Radical Imagination Series) by Lewis R. Gordon

Author:Lewis R. Gordon [Gordon, Lewis R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317261209
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-02T18:30:00+00:00


Conclusion

Africana philosophy—African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy—is thriving, and it seems to have been able to negotiate its place between the historicist-poeticist divide and the unyielding misrepresentations by mainstream or Eurocentric approaches to human studies.27 One could argue that this is because of how squarely it has placed at the forefront not only the question of how Africana peoples should be studied, but also the constitutive question of the grounding of such peoples in the first place— namely, their humanity. The impact of this turn cannot be underestimated since it is raising a question that crosses disciplinary divides as hoped by the cultural studies considerations with which this chapter began. This is certainly the case in the historical-phenomenological and poststructural-psychoanalytical reflections of Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001).28 Writes Mbembe: “[T]he African subject is like any other human being: he or she engages in meaningful acts” (6). In the anthropology of Africa, the impact of at least philosophical language, particularly in the foundational rationalizations of ethnographies of peoples on the continent, has clearly been advanced through fusions of Marx and Foucault by leading scholars in the field such as Jean and John Comaroff (1997).29 The philosophical challenge of contemporary African philosophy, more so than African cultural studies, is whether they and other social scientists—those in history, political science, and sociology—and scholars in the humanities who study Africa will draw upon the insights and intellectual resources of contemporary African philosophical thought. For it is the case that the natives have transcended the status of informants and now offer an opportunity to coinvent a new relationship beyond African studies as white hegemony, the achievement of which would be, at least in part, a genuinely new world.



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