Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) has intrigued American society since its inception in 1930. Historically, the religio-nationalist organization has been the object of admiration for its uncanny ability to reform the lives of downtrodden blacks. At the same time, the NOI has garnered condemnation for the controversial, racialized and divisive doctrine that it espouses. This condemnation has led to a dismissal of the NOI’s doctrine as reactionary, bigoted, and fanciful myth-making. In recent decades however, scholars have begun interrogating the doctrine (...) of the NOI. Rather than dismissing it, scholars in various fields have recognized the critical and phenomenological nature of its doctrine as it goes about the “mental, physical, and spiritual resurrection” of black Americans. In this article, I interrogate three of the most controversial claims of the NOI: The White man is the devil, the Black man is God, and its endorsement of the separation of Blacks into their own territory. Viewed through the lens of phenomenology, I submit that the NOI’s doctrine and actions should be viewed as the establishment of an emancipative and recuperative “Phenomenology of Blackness” that counters a lifeworld built upon the disembodiment and dehumanization of Black bodies. Reframing the NOI’s doctrine in this way positions it as a linguistic, religiously stylized, praxis-oriented critical hermeneutic phenomenology. (shrink)

When the “object” gazed at is called Africa and when the gazing subject is Africa, the observer cannot help but conclude that any gaze that is related to Africa is an intersection of gazes calling forth several questions: Who is looking at Africa? What is Africa looking at? Who looks at the one who is looking at Africa? Two problems emerge from this: the identification of the subject, and the discrimination among objects and themes produced by the limited scope of (...) these gazes. If the gaze at (or of) Africa is an intersection of perspectives, these perspectives will only find stability if they are related to the African history that is in the making. This is a plural history, for geographic diversity, and the multiplicity of acting figures and sociopolitical organizations give African history a “changeable and diverse” character. Any evaluation of the relationship of Africans to their history must be an attempt, a sketch that makes no pretense of providing a unique and certain interpretation of the African lived experience (Erlebnis) by implementing the kind of controlling philosophy of history that fixes the beginning, the length, and the order of a people's history. It is more a question of restating, with the uncertainty that characterizes any evaluation of a specific history, the problem of the relationship of African history to its becomings. How, by which conditions and through which actors does this plural history speak its moments of creation today? At its heart, how does it articulate the conflicting overlap of the gravity of existing institutions and the audacity of creation? The exploration of these questions first centers around the often discussed theme of African identity (self). The stakes at this level involve the detachment of the conditions of a dynamic re-appropriation from this notion of identity - at the very moment when globalization is conjugating itself by turns in the imperative, the indicative, and the conditional. Next, the examination will focus on relationships to otherness (the other). How can intersubjective relations be declined differently? (shrink)