Philosophy in Multiple Voices by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1330396
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

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What Is Afro-Caribbean Philosophy?a

LEWIS R. GORDON

Temple University

AFRO-CARIBBEAN philosophy is a subset of Africana philosophy and Caribbean philosophy. By Africana philosophy, I mean the set of philosophical reflections that emerged by and through engagement with the African diaspora, and by Caribbean philosophy, I mean both philosophy from the region and philosophies about the unique problems of theorizing Caribbean reality. The latter could also be characterized as the discourse on the convergence of reason and the New World.

The etymology of the word “Caribbean” points to the Caribs, a group of Native peoples, in addition to the earlier-arrived Taínos or Arawaks, among others, living in the region at the time of Columbus’s landing. The term “cannibal,” by the way, also has its roots in Carib, and the name “Caliban,” which refers to the villain in Shakespeare’s Tempest, is also a variation of the word Carib. “Taínos” and “Arawaks” were not the names of the earlier people; those names were ascribed to them by European archaeologists in the first half of the twentieth century. As we will see, the etymology of cannibal betrays the colonial logic that rationalizes much that happened in the region, and that logic contextualizes the philosophy there as well.

Afro-Caribbean philosophy is a form of philosophy rooted in the modern world and that takes the question of modernity as one of its central concerns. It is modern because the Caribbean itself is a modern creation. Although the indigenous people preceded that creation, its convergence with the African diaspora, marked by the consequences both of exploration and slavery, is indigenous to the modern world.

Afro-Caribbean philosophy, then, consists of the philosophical meditations on the question of African presence in the Caribbean and the modern questions of blackness raised by that presence. The latter, however, raise additional questions since “blackness” is, as Frantz Fanon points out near the end of his introduction in Black Skin, White Masks, “a white construction” (p. 14). By this, he means that the people who have become known as black people are descendants of people who had no reason to regard themselves as such. As a consequence, the history of black people has the constant motif of such people encountering their blackness from the “outside,” as it were, and then developing, in dialectical fashion, a form of blackness that transcends the initial, negative series of events. Again, paraphrasing Fanon, this time from A Dyiny Colonialism, it may have been whites who created the concept of the Negro, but it was the Negro who created the concept of negritude.

Although other groups have been yoked to the categories of Negro and blackness in the modern world in such places as Australia and the Polynesian islands, it is the descendants of the people kidnapped and enslaved from the coasts of the Atlantic and along the Arabic and East Indian trade routes who are most commonly linked to those terms. Thus, when Las Casas, the famed priest who sought salvation for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and to ward off their impending

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