Abstract

My thesis focuses on Black Vernacular Phenomenon as modalities that implicitly critique traditional Western Philosophy's reliance upon binary oppositions. Black Vernacular Phenomenon place traditional Western philosophy under an interrogation that unsettles the ground of its hegemony, while simultaneously calling for this philosophy to be otherwise. Consequently, traditional notions of the self, autonomy, and freedom are called into question. Ultimately, by means of Black Vernacular Phenomenon, philosophy is refashioned by a black vernacular community who, using vernacular, evoke a strategy of perpetual critique and performance making the practice of philosophy an ethico-political intervention. ;The thesis begins with the imperative to understand philosophy as a practice that can make a difference in academic and non-academic life pursuits. This perspective leads to an examination of Black Vernacular Phenomenon as tri-modal expressions of philosophy as intervention. In its polyvalent, dynamic revision, and blues stylization, Black Vernacular Phenomenon exercise a play that resists reifications of Blackness, notions of the self, and revolution. ;Black Vernacular Phenomenon trace a non-thematizable, indeterminate Blackness that invokes play in the service of philosophy such that performance is performing difference in a manner that indicates a trace that always exceeds its concept, that cannot be spoken, but only traced in its remnants. This play renders an oblique critique of mechanisms that reify understandings of Black people---many of which find their inception in European Enlightenment projects. ;The lenses of Black Vernacular Phenomenon, consequently, lead to critiques of the Enlightenment and Black Philosophy's crypto-Enlightenment tendencies, opening the way for Black Vernacular to refashion traditional notions of self and revolution under the rubric of an ethico-political responsibility issued on behalf of the Other who invokes an ethical demand while continuing in its alterity . ;This study marks a different way of doing philosophy, making it a strategy that places one in the posture of perpetual critique and performance that insures the practice of philosophy as ongoing interventions on behalf of Others, particularly Black Others