SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
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Another Mind-Body Problem
A History of Racial Non-being
by John Harfouch
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Demonstrates the profound overlap of philosophy's mind-body problem and various racist doctrines found in thinkers ranging from Descartes to Kant.
The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.
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Beyond Bergson
Examining Race and Colonialism through the Writings of Henri Bergson
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Examines Bergson's work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America.
Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson's social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson's writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson's work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine Bergson's influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson's writings-for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues.
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Living Alterities
Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience.
Broadening the philosophical conversation about race and racism, Living Alterities considers how people's racial embodiment affects their day-to-day lived experiences, the lived experiences of individuals marked by race interacting with and responding to others marked by race, and the tensions that arise between different spheres of a single person's identity. Drawing on phenomenology and the work of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Iris Marion Young, the essays address the embodiment experiences of African Americans, Muslims, Asian Americans, Latinas, Jews, and white Americans. The volume's focus on specific situations, temporalities, and encounters provides important context for understanding how race operates in people's lives in ordinary settings like classrooms, dorm rooms, borderlands, elevators, and families.
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Kant and the Concept of Race
Late Eighteenth-Century Writings
by Jon M. Mikkelsen
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Late eighteenth-century writings on race by Kant and four of his contemporaries.
Kant and the Concept of Race features translations of four texts by Immanuel Kant frequently designated his Racenschriften (race essays), in which he develops and defends an early theory of race. Also included are translations of essays by four of Kant's contemporaries-E. A. W. Zimmermann, Georg Forster, Christoph Meiners, and Christoph Girtanner-which illustrate that Kant's interest in the subject of race was part of a larger discussion about human "differences," one that impacted the development of scientific fields ranging from natural history to physical anthropology to biology.
Jon M. Mikkelsen is Professor of Philosophy at Missouri Western State University.
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Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy
Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830
by Peter K. J. Park
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.
Winner of the 2016 Frantz Fanon Prize for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association
In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant-a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gérando's Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast's and Thaddä Anselm Rixner's systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over "pantheism."
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Retrieving the Human
Reading Paul Gilroy
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
An interdisciplinary consideration of Paul Gilroy's contributions to cultural theory and understandings of modernity.
In the more than twenty years since the publication of his book The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy has become a leading Afro-European intellectual whose work in the cultural studies of race has influenced a number of fields and made the study of black Atlantic literatures and cultures an enduring part of the humanities. The essays in this collection examine the full trajectory of Gilroy's work, looking beyond The Black Atlantic to consider also his work in the intervening years, focusing in particular on his investigations of contemporary black life in the United States, histories of human rights, and the politics of memory and empire in contemporary Britain. With an essay by Gilroy himself extending his longstanding examination of fascism, racial thinking, and European philosophical thought, in addition to an interview with Gilroy, this volume features Gilroy's own words alongside other scholars' alternative conceptualizations and critical rereadings of his works.
Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature, also published by SUNY Press. Jay Garcia is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University and author of Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America.
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Existence and Heritage
Hermeneutic Explorations in African and Continental Philosophy
by Tsenay Serequeberhan
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Explores overlapping concerns and themes in African(a) and continental philosophy.
In Existence and Heritage, Tsenay Serequeberhan examines what the European philosophical tradition has to offer when encountered from the outsider perspective of postcolonial African thought. He reads Kant in the context of contemporary international relations, finds in Gadamer's work a way of conceiving relations among differing traditions, and explores Heidegger's analysis of existence as it converges with Marx's critique of alienation. In the confluence of these different assessments, Serequeberhan articulates both a need and example of responding to Fanon's call for a new kind of thinking in philosophy. He demonstrates both how continental philosophy can be a useful resource for theorizing Africa's postcolonial condition and how postcolonial thought and African philosophy can provide a new way of approaching and understanding the Western tradition.
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Decolonizing American Philosophy
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Wide-ranging examination of American philosophy's ties to settler colonialism and its role as both an object and a force of decolonization.
In Decolonizing American Philosophy, Corey McCall and Phillip McReynolds bring together leading scholars at the forefront of the field to ask: Can American philosophy, as the product of a colonial enterprise, be decolonized? Does American philosophy offer tools for decolonial projects? What might it mean to decolonize American philosophy and, at the same time, is it possible to consider American philosophy, broadly construed, as a part of a decolonizing project? The various perspectives included here, contribute to long-simmering conversations about the scope, purpose, and future of American philosophy, while also demonstrating that it is far from a unified, homogeneous field. In drawing connections among various philosophical traditions in and of the Americas, they collectively propose that the process of decolonization is not only something that needs to be done to American philosophy but also that it is something American philosophy already does, or at least can do, as a resource for resisting colonial and racist oppression.
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Jews Out of the Question
A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism
by Elad Lapidot
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
A provocative study of opposition to anti-Semitism in contemporary political philosophy.
In post-Holocaust philosophy, anti-Semitism has come to be seen as a paradigmatic political and ideological evil. Jews Out of the Question examines the role that opposition to anti-Semitism has played in shaping contemporary political philosophy. Elad Lapidot argues that post-Holocaust philosophy identifies the fundamental, epistemological evil of anti-Semitic thought not in thinking against Jews, but in thinking of Jews. In other words, what philosophy denounces as anti-Semitic is the figure of "the Jew" in thought. Lapidot reveals how, paradoxically, opposition to anti-Semitism has generated a rejection of Jewish thought in post-Holocaust philosophy. Through critical readings of political philosophers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Arendt, Badiou, and Nancy, the book contends that by rejecting Jewish thought, the opposition to anti-Semitism comes dangerously close to anti-Semitism itself, and at work in this rejection, is a problematic understanding of the relations between politics and thought-a troubling political epistemology. Lapidot's critique of this political epistemology is the book's ultimate aim.
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Phenomenology in an African Context
Contributions and Challenges
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
African phenomenology is an emerging subfield within the broader domain of African and Africana philosophy. The phenomenological method, with its various approaches to studying the seminal structures and meaning of human experience, has been a cornerstone in the thought of African philosophers such as Paulin Hountondji, Tsenay Serequeberhan, Achille Mbembe, D. A. Masolo, and Mabogo More, as well as proponents of Africana philosophy such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Lucius Outlaw, and Lewis Gordon. Technically, however, the term "African phenomenology" is not used as widely, or introduced as systematically, as Africana phenomenology. This anthology aims to fill this gap by exploring contributions and challenges to phenomenology in its African context and demonstrating the differences this context makes to the practice of phenomenology. Written by some of the most eminent scholars in the field-including Hountondji, Serequeberhan, Mbembe, More, Gordon, and M. John Lamola-the sixteen original essays here address the relation of African phenomenology to African/Africana philosophy, postcolonial/decolonial discourse, and deliberations within the international phenomenological community.
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Think Like an Archipelago
Paradox in the Work of Edouard Glissant
by Michael Wiedorn
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
A broad exploration of Irigaray's philosophy of life and living.
Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women's and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy's traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray's criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray's "solutions" for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray's relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray's relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film.
Gail M. Schwab is Special Assistant to the Provost and Professor Emerita of French at Hofstra University. The author of many articles on Luce Irigaray's philosophy, she is also the translator of several works by Irigaray, including To Speak Is Never Neutral.
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The Politics of Unreason
The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism
by Lars Rensmann
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
The first systematic analysis of the Frankfurt School's research and theorizing on modern antisemitism.
Although the Frankfurt School represents one of the most influential intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, its multifaceted work on modern antisemitism has so far largely been neglected. The Politics of Unreason fills this gap, providing the first systematic study of the Frankfurt School's philosophical, psychological, political, and social research and theorizing on the problem of antisemitism. Examining the full range of these critical theorists' contributions, from major studies and prominent essays to seemingly marginal pieces and aphorisms, Lars Rensmann reconstructs how the Frankfurt School, faced with the catastrophe of the genocide against the European Jews, explains forms and causes of anti-Jewish politics of hate. The book also pays special attention to research on coded and "secondary" antisemitism after the Holocaust, and how resentments are politically mobilized under conditions of democracy. By revisiting and rereading the Frankfurt School's original work, this book challenges several misperceptions about critical theory's research, making the case that it provides an important source to better understand the social origins and politics of antisemitism, racism, and hate speech in the modern world.
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In-Between
Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self
by Mariana Ortega
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood.
This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega's project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega's work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits.
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Good White People
The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism
by Shannon Sullivan
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Argues for the necessity of a new ethos for middle-class white anti-racism.
Building on her book Revealing Whiteness, Shannon Sullivan identifies a constellation of attitudes common among well-meaning white liberals that she sums up as "white middle-class goodness," an orientation she critiques for being more concerned with establishing anti-racist bona fides than with confronting systematic racism and privilege. Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity and outlines four ways this orientation is expressed, each serving to establish one's lack of racism: the denigration of lower-class white people as responsible for ongoing white racism, the demonization of antebellum slaveholders, an emphasis on colorblindness-especially in the context of white childrearing-and the cultivation of attitudes of white guilt, shame, and betrayal. To move beyond these distancing strategies, Sullivan argues, white people need a new ethos that acknowledges and transforms their whiteness in the pursuit of racial justice rather than seeking a self-righteous distance from it.
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Nos/Otras
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance
by Andrea J. Pitts
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Offers a timely reconsideration of the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, treating issues of multiplicitous agency, identarian politics, and the stakes of coalition building as core themes in the author's work.
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Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences
by Susanne Lettow
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Investigates the impact of theories of reproduction and heredity on the emerging concepts of race and gender at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
Focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this volume highlights the scientific and philosophical inquiry into heredity and reproduction and the consequences of these developing ideas on understandings of race and gender. Neither the life sciences nor philosophy had fixed disciplinary boundaries at this point in history. Kant, Hegel, and Schelling weighed in on these questions alongside scientists such as Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Karl Ernst von Baer. The essays in this volume chart the development of modern gender polarizations and a naturalized, scientific understanding of gender and race that absorbed and legitimized cultural assumptions about difference and hierarchy.
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Anti-Music
Jazz and Racial Blackness in German Thought between the Wars
by Mark Christian Thompson
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Examines how African American jazz music was received in Germany both as a racial and cultural threat and as a partner in promoting the rise of Nazi totalitarian cultural politics.
Anti-Music examines the critical, literary, and political responses to African American jazz music in interwar Germany. During this time, jazz was the subject of overt political debate between left-wing and right-wing interests: for the left, jazz marked the death knell of authoritarian Prussian society; for the right, jazz was complicit as an American import threatening the chaos of modernization and mass politics. This conflict was resolved in the early 1930s as the left abandoned jazz in the face of Nazi victory, having come to see the music in collusion with the totalitarian culture industry. Mark Christian Thompson recounts the story of this intellectual trajectory and describes how jazz came to be associated with repressive, virulently racist fascism in Germany. By examining writings by Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, T.W. Adorno, and Klaus Mann, and archival photographs and images, Thompson brings together debates in German, African American, and jazz studies, and charts a new path for addressing antiblack racism in cultural criticism and theory.
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Seeking the Beloved Community
A Feminist Race Reader
by Joy James
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Selected essays on radical social change.
Written over the course of twenty years, the essays brought together here highlight and analyze tensions confronted by writers, scholars, activists, politicians, and political prisoners fighting racism and sexism. Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse-those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.
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Habitations of the Veil
Metaphor and the Poetics of Black Being in African American Literature
by Rebecka Rutledge Fisher
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
A hermeneutical study of metaphor in African American literature.
In Habitations of the Veil, Rebecka Rutledge Fisher uses theory implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois's use of metaphor to draw out and analyze what she sees as a long tradition of philosophical metaphor in African American literature. She demonstrates how Olaudah Equiano, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison each use metaphors to develop a critical discourse capable of overcoming the limits of narrative language to convey their lived experiences. Fisher's philosophical investigations open these texts to consideration on ontological and epistemological levels, in addition to those concerned with literary craft and the politics of black identity.
Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Reframing the Practice of Philosophy
Bodies of Color, Bodies of Knowledge
by George Yancy
Part of the SUNY series, Philosophy and Race series
Reflections by leading Latin American and African American philosophers on their identity within the field of philosophy.
This daring and bold book is the first to create a textual space where African American and Latin American philosophers voice the complex range of their philosophical and meta-philosophical concerns, approaches, and visions. The voices within this book protest and theorize from their own standpoints, delineating the specific existential, philosophical, and professional problems they face as minority philosophical voices.
George Yancy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. His many books include Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race.
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