This post is mostly an opportunity to circulate an excellent short article by Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman in Times Higher Education. Coleman’s article offers a brief reflection on the systematic exclusion – and we have to call it systematic, at this point – of black Atlantic traditions from the discipline of philosophy. It’s a topic that concerns me as well, and I’m really happy to see such a smart, precise reflection in a prominent place. Continue reading “Philosophy and race, dead white and dead wrong”
Language, race, memory, home
Below is the conclusion to my essay “Vernaculars of Home,” in which I explore James Baldwin’s conception of language. In the essay, I argue that Baldwin’s defense of what he calls “black English” works as an epistemological and ontological account of African-American subjectivity. This account links black English to the sorrow songs, and so to long-standing accounts of how sound and musicality function as the foundation of the African-American intellectual tradition – which, in turn, links Baldwin to Douglass, Du Bois, Locke, and others. The full essay can be found HERE (in draft form, of course, with all those caveats in place). Photos in this post are not in the essay, but are included here just for decoration. Continue reading “Language, race, memory, home”