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Month: December 2013

April 30, 2016 / African-American

Race, Apology, and Ani DiFranco

The time of social media events is short, so writing a few words on Ani DiFranco’s apology (or apologetically toned press release) is at this point probably already out of date. Still, the talk around her event – a now-canceled plan to host a retreat at a plantation house – raises the most American of …

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April 30, 2016 / Caribbean

Derrida, Eurocentrism, decolonization

While I am not the biggest advocate of Aimé Césaire’s work, I’ve always been taken in – in ways that would take more words than I write below to explain – by his comment at the beginning of Discourse on Colonialism that European culture is sick. That bit from Césaire came to mind when I …

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April 30, 2016 / Caribbean

Decolonizing the colonizer: three aspects

What does it mean to decolonize the colonizer? In a previous post, I asked the question – which has largely been suppressed in white European thought – of what would it mean to decolonize the colonizer. First, there is the question of why this hasn’t been asked of the colonizer, but only of the colonized. …

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April 30, 2016 / Caribbean

On decolonizing the colonizer

One of the central questions of my Levinas and the Postcolonial is why we haven’t asked what should be a very basic, wholly necessary question: if the colonized have been tasked with decolonizing themselves – at every level – why haven’t the colonizers been tasked with the same? I tried to sketch what that looks like, …

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April 30, 2016 / African

Mbembe, democracy, animism

Achille Mbembe’s talk at Harvard University this past Thursday (4 December) set out the terms of a new project, described in the straightforward title: “Democracy in the Age of Animism.” It was a fascinating talk and asked a lot of critical and urgent questions. A few thoughts.

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April 30, 2016 / African-American

Baldwin, race, identity

In his 1964 essay “The White Problem,” dating from the period of the publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin sets out what he calls “two levels of experience.” These two levels operate as the dialectical tension within which whiteness as an American identity emerges. “In this country, for a dangerously long time,” Baldwin writes

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April 30, 2016 / African-American

Baldwin, language, spirituals

The function of the spirituals in the African-American intellectual tradition is well-known, especially in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke – for both, the spirituals work as a foundation to the tradition. The spirituals are an enigma. They represent content as both lyric and sound; indeed, the distinction between those two forms …

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April 30, 2016 / African-American

Baldwin, language, blackness

In “Letter on Humanism,” a letter written to French theorist Jean Beaufret in response to the claim that his book Being and Time did not contain an ethics, Martin Heidegger famously remarks that “language is the house of Being.” This is a signature moment in Heidegger’s work, one that (roughly) shifts his work from the …

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  • Black Existentialism – revised syllabus
  • Seminar on Angela Davis
  • Vernacular Culture and Belonging
  • ReBIT19 – Pessimism as Interpretative Frame
  • The Poetics of Beautiful Blackness

Categories

  • African
  • African-American
  • Caribbean
  • Courses
  • European
  • Glissant
  • Middle Passage
  • Music Film Culture
  • Postcolonial
  • The Profession
  • U.S. Politics
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Tags

abjection academic freedom affect afro-Surrealism animism anti-Semitism archive art Baldwin bodies Booker T. Washington boycott boys Brian Leiter Caribbean colonialism commodification créolité Césaire death decolonization deconstruction democracy Douglass Du Bois embodiment Fanon Glissant history Huey Newton James Baldwin language Marisa Parham memory Naipaul philosophy postcolonial race racism Raoul Peck spirituals tradition trauma vernacular Walcott

Recent Comments

  • ReBIT19 – Pessimism as Interpretative Frame – John E. Drabinski | Black Studies | Amherst College on ReBIT
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  • Reginald C.W. Anderson on “A School Shooting”; or, Necropolitics Again
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