Culture and African-American Philosophy

The idea of artificial intelligence implies the existence of a form of intelligence that is “natural,” or at least not artificial. The problem is that intelligence, whether “natural” or “artificial,” is not well defined: it is hard to say what, exactly, is or constitutes intelligence. This difficulty makes it impossible to measure human intelligence against artificial intelligence on a unique scale. It does not, however, prevent us from comparing them; rather, it changes the sense and meaning of such comparisons. Comparing (...) artificial intelligence with human intelligence could allow us to understand both forms better. This paper thus aims to compare and distinguish these two forms of intelligence, focusing on three issues: forms of embodiment, autonomy and judgment. Doing so, I argue, should enable us to have a better view of the promises and limitations of present-day artificial intelligence, along with its benefits and dangers and the place we should make for it in our culture and society. (shrink)

International Journal of Radical Critique is a peer-reviewed open-access journal of radical inquiry edited by international academics and intellectuals. IJRC publishes speculative interventions of analytical rigor and encourages philosophical, sociological, cultural, political, and media studies that provide revolutionary appraisals of historical and contemporary social issues.

This analysis challenges the discourse of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." Drawing on prior research and historical literature it offers an in-depth discussion of the flawed contextual framework and fundamental problems of The New Jim Crow. It establishes that The New Jim Crow paradoxically excludes an analysis of mass incarceration’s most central and defining factors, its most salient, affected and revolutionary voices (especially the voices of African Americans), and shows how the book engages in (...) a paradoxical counterrevolutionary protest that misleads readers about the context, causes and possible remedial methods of mass incarceration in the United States. In extension, it suggests that readers, students and would-be agents of social change move “toward détournement of The New Jim Crow,” or toward a discovery of “the strange career of The New Jim Crow.”. (shrink)

African-American/Africana philosophy has made a name for itself as a critical perspective on the inadequacies of European philosophical thought. While this polemical mode has certainly contributed to the questioning of and debates over the universalism of white philosophy, it has nonetheless left Africana philosophy dependent on these criticisms to justify its existence as “philosophical.” This practice has the effect of not only distracting Black philosophers from understanding the thought of their ancestors, but formulates the practice of Africana philosophy as “racial (...) therapy” for whites. By making the goal of Africana philosophy the transformation of the white racist to the white non-racist, Africana philosophy takes up a decidedly political (integrationist) agenda. Making this agenda the guiding ethos of Africana philosophical praxis censors both the Africana thinkers available to study and the interpretation of the figures deemed “fit” for study. Thus I conclude a culturalogic approach is the best way to delineate between the political and methodological in Africana philosophy. (shrink)

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in the family home on Auburn Ave. in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 1929, as the second child of Alberta and Rev. M.L. King. Alberta’s husband had taken up the duties of her father as pastor of the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church, and her second son was destined to assume leadership of the congregation and community that had nurtured the family life. -/- Along with his older sister, Christine, and his younger brother A.D., the (...) young Martin King enjoyed the kind of security and prestige that would come with life in one of the leading families of Atlanta. He wrote and spoke of a childhood that was experienced with love and fullness. . . . (shrink)

Is power the ability to influence something or someone? Does power have anything to do with authority or control? Is power given by others or earned by the individual? I begin this article with the word and idea of power because some of the chapters in this book focus on power dynamics and all of the authors in this volume discuss how landscapes are perceived in the past or in the present. In this chapter, I will explore landscapes as more (...) than just places affected by people, but made of living species – plants, trees, birds, animals, fish, and so forth, while recognizing that it is people who bring social and symbolic meaning to these places. Therefore, I see power in who transformed the plantation from a “natural landscape” to “cultural landscape” as the central component in understanding black cultural production in the 19th century. Taking my lead from the work of cultural geographers, landscape historians, and landscape architects, I wanted to examine the transformative process in cultural landscapes and perhaps tease out who ultimately shapes these cultural locations. (shrink)

Historically, for Black writers, literary fiction has been a site for transforming the discursive disciplinary spaces of political oppression. From 19th century “slave narratives” to the 20th century, Black novelists have created an impressive literary counter-canon in advancing liberatory struggles. W.E.B. Du Bois argued that “all art is political.” Many Black writers have used fiction to create spaces for political and social freedom—from the early work of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)—to (...) the enduring works of the Harlem Renaissance (Toomer, Hurston, and Schuyler)—to the great revolutionary Black literature after WWII (Wright, Baldwin, Williams)—to contemporary Black writers (Toni Morrison, Edward Jones, Samuel Delany)—Black fictive space continues to be a necessary site for resistance. Black literary fiction is a vast counter-canon to mainstream literature which unquestioningly reinforces global white supremacy, capitalistic political oppressions, and the dominance/subordinance relations upon which they depend. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) argued that newly emancipated black Americans should assimilate into Anglo-American society and culture. Social assimilation would then lead to the entire physical amalgamation of the two groups, and the emergence of a new intermediate group that would be fully American. He, like those who were to follow, was driven by a vision of universal human fraternity in the light of which the varieties of human difference were incidental and far less important than the ethical, religious, and political (...) idea of personhood. Douglass’s version of this vision was formed by natural law theories, and a Protestant Christian conception of universal human fraternity, as it was for much of the abolition movement in the US and Britain. His vision and his fierce commitment to abolitionism, moreover, were characterized by his own experience of slavery. His political and ethical vision, his moral universe, generated his conception of America, his interpretation of the US constitution, and his solution to the Nation’s race problem. Unpacking Douglass’s vision will help us understand those positions that follow his legacy. Just as those who argue that race ought to be conserved turn to the figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, those who disagree with the conservation of race need to consider Douglass’s arguments, and their relationship to Douglass’s assimilation-amalgamation solution. Moreover, those that work under the long shadow of Douglass would do well to carefully consider the historical reasons why Du Bois’s and Booker T. Washington’s strategies for racial justice eclipsed Douglass’s. This chapter reviews Douglass’s religious and political ideals, his application of them to the issues of race, black American identity, and constitutional interpretation, and how his ideals and positions developed into his projection about the future of race in the US. All of these matters are guiding features of the anti-race and racial nominalist positions in the contemporary conservation of race debate. Additionally, this paper asks that we consider the cognitive and emotional conflicts that arise within us as we reflect upon Douglass’s vision and this Nation’s contradictions and failures in its long racial history. Douglass, of course, frequently referenced this conflict; it was at the center of his experience of being American. In his first narrative, Douglass characterized this conflict as his “soul’s complaint.” As a slave he yearned for freedom, and came to understand the liberal political and religious ideals that surrounded him. God’s justice or the ideal of American justice were not immanent; this gave him much pain and caused in him a good measure of moral disorientation, yet he resolved to make up for the absence of divine and natural justice through his own and other subaltern resources. And as a freeman and abolitionist he yearned for a greater reconciliation of the Nation: between black and white, and between the Nation and its ideals. In both instances the obstacles to his desires, the enormity of the task, and the elusiveness of Justice often left him somewhere between madness and reconciliation to his misery. His turmoil, a reaction of moral indignation and disorientation, a reaction to bondage in the putative land of liberty, is ours as well. (shrink)

Zora Neale Hurston produced some of the most provocative literature of the twentieth century. This book examines the numerous scenes of violence against women in her fictional works and the development of her feminist ideals. This groundbreaking book is the first full-length discussion of Hurston's repetitive rendering of violently controlled women. It gives significant insight into why Hurston's themes often questioned the power dynamics of heterosexual relationships. It also explores the effect of death and loss on Hurston's life and reveals (...) intertwined relationships between writing and healing. (shrink)

The author examines almost three decades of sociolinguistic and anthropological research to present the most up-to-date definition of African American English or “Ebonics” and offers a defense of its value in contemporary American culture.

During the 1960s the Cuban Revolution was a seminal influence on black Americans. In July 1959, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Harold Cruse traveled to Cuba, where they witnessed the Rebel Army becoming the new Cuban government. That trip shaped Cruse's and Jones' ideas about the relationship between First World protest and Third World revolution. Jones' participation in the Black Arts Movement and Cruse's ideas in Rebellion or Revolution? and The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual were informed by their (...) comparison of African Americans to colonized peoples and their assertions that cultural production was central to the forging of oppositional identities. Consideration of their political and cultural activism lends critical insight into the U. S. Third World Left, a group of African-American, U. S. Latino/a, and U. S. Asian writers, artists and activists who created cultural, material and ideological links to the Third World in order to challenge U. S. economic, racial and cultural hierarchies. (shrink)

One day a newly hatched eagle fell from its mother's clutches as she was flying over a chicken yard. The young eagle grew up in the chicken yard with young chickens and took on the habits, customs, and behavior of chickens. He ate like a chicken, walked like a chicken, and generally performed his daily routine like the birds who surrounded him. One day an eagle flew over the chicken yard, perhaps a parent eagle, looking for the lost eagle. Perched (...) high on a tree's limb over-looking the chicken yard, the eagle saw the young eagle that had fallen out of its mother's clutches. The old eagle called to the young eagle, “Eagle, can you hear me?” The young eagle thought of himself as a chicken and did not respond to the call of the eagle in the tree. However, the old eagle continued to call out to him, “Eagle down there, hello.” Finally the eagle in the chicken yard thought, can that eagle in the tree be yelling to me? So he looked up at the tree and saw that the old eagle was beckoning to him to fly up to the tree's branch. The young eagle said, “I cannot fly. I am a chicken.” Insisting that he try to fly the old eagle said, “No, you are not a chicken you are an eagle and I know your parents, in fact, I am your mother and your father is waiting for me to bring you.”. (shrink)