Part I Philosophic Traditions Introduction to Part I 3 1 Philosophy and the Afro-American Experience 7 CORNEL WEST 2 African-American Existential Philosophy 33 LEWIS R. GORDON 3 African-American Philosophy: A Caribbean Perspective 48 PAGET HENRY 4 Modernisms in Black 67 FRANK M. KIRKLAND 5 The Crisis of the Black Intellectual 87 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS Part II The Moral and Political Legacy of Slavery Introduction to Part II 107 6 Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression 110 (...) RONALD A. T. JUDY 7 Social Contract Theory, Slavery, and the Antebellum Courts 125 ANITA L. ALLEN AND THADDEUS POPE 8 The Morality of Reparations II 134 BERNARD R. BOXILL Part III Africa and Diaspora Thought Introduction to Part III 151 9 “Afrocentricity‘: Critical Considerations 155 LUCIUS T. OUTLAW, JR. 10 African Retentions 168 TOMMY L. LOTT 11 African Philosophy at the Turn of the Century 190 ALBERT G. MOSLEY Part IV Gender, Race, and Racism Introduction to Part IV 199 12 Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought 205 PATRICIA HILL COLLINS 13 Radicalizing Feminisms from “The Movement Era‘ 230 JOY A. JAMES 14 Philosophy and Racial Paradigms 239 NAOMI ZACK 15 Racial Classification and Public Policy 255 DAVID THEO GOLDBERG 16 White Supremacy 269 CHARLES W. MILLS Part V Legal and Social Philosophy Introduction to Part V 285 17 Self-Respect, Fairness, and Living Morally 293 LAURENCE M. THOMAS 18 The Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson 306 MICHELE MOODY-ADAMS 19 Some Reflections on the Brown Decision and Its Aftermath 313 HOWARD McGARY 20 Contesting the Ambivalence and Hostility to Affirmative Action within the Black Community 324 LUKE C. HARRIS 21 Subsistence Welfare Benefits as Property Interests: Legal Theories and Moral Considerations 333 RUDOLPH V. VANTERPOOL 22 Racism and Health Care: A Medical Ethics Issue 349 ANNETTE DULA 23 Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition 360 ANGELA Y. DAVIS Part VI Aesthetic and Cultural Values Introduction to Part VI 373 24 The Harlem Renaissance and Philosophy 381 LEONARD HARRIS 25 Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Black Modernity 386 LORENZO C. SIMPSON 26 Black Cinema and Aesthetics 399 CLYDE R. TAYLOR 27 Thanatic Pornography, Interracial Rape, and the Ku Klux Klan 407 T. DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING 28 Lynching and Burning Rituals in African-American Literature 413 TRUDIER HARRIS-LOPEZ 29 Rap as Art and Philosophy 419 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 30 Microphone Commandos: Rap Music and Political Ideology 429 BILL E. LAWSON 31 Sports, Political Philosophy, and the African American 436 GERALD EARLY. (shrink)

What Makes That Black? The African American Aesthetic in American Expressive Culture delineates the African-American aesthetic in both the African-American culture and the artistic cultural formation of the United States. It presents a definition of the African-American aesthetic using a typology of seventy-four tenets-markers that expand the aesthetic's definition to include its artistic structure, cultural function, and consciousness.¿The book is both anecdotal and scholarly, creating an accessible dialogue in a research area (...) sometimes burdened by excessive scholarly nomenclature. The power of story (art) reaches into cognitive spaces and impact understandings unreachable by linear academic argument. ¿Physical features such as images, links to visual media, glossary, bibliography, and index make the project easier for teachers/students to use.¿The book approaches the African-American Aesthetic from wide-ranging sources, cross-referencing literature, dance, oration, music, dress, sub-Saharan African aesthetics, scholarly text, visual arts, athletics, children's games, and anecdotal accounts. (shrink)

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive culture In a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates for African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. Maintaining that realist representation reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to (...) challenge, Harper contends that abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. Arguing against the need for “positive” representations, Abstractionist Aesthetics displaces realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, re-centers literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and elevates experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. Drawing on examples across a variety of artistic production, including the visual work of Fred Wilson and Kara Walker, the music of Billie Holiday and Cecil Taylor, and the prose and verse writings of Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and John Keene, this book poses urgent questions about how racial blackness is made to assume certain social meanings. In the process, African American aesthetics are upended, rendering abstractionism as the most powerful modality for Black representation. (shrink)

Fern Logan’s collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. The Artist Portrait Series captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century.

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins and the Reconstruction of African-American CriticismAldon Lynn Nielsen (bio)“What does that signify?” “It don’t signify nothin’ Mr. Warner.”—Russell Atkins, MaleficiumThere are, everywhere unheard (as one might see deep in an electron microscope) rigidities violently breaking—Russell Atkins, WhicheverCritical debates about the applicability of recent literary theories to the reading of African-American writing have often been marked by curious lacunae. Despite the rapid (...) proliferation of critical texts addressing themselves to black writing, it remains the case that many critics come to black writing with methodologies and agendas already in hand, while few critics have taken upon themselves the task of rereading the critical history of African-American work in theory. This has often resulted in a sort of critical shortsightedness, with the field of black literary theory presented as a foreshortened, if now more level, playing field. While some have engaged in arguments about the question of whether or not African-American writing should be engaged by poststructuralist theorists (a question that seems to begin with the assumption that poststructuralism is a particularly white mode of mythology), the fact is that a form of deconstruction had been theorized by an African-American poet long before deconstruction had entered the American academy. That this fact is largely unknown among contemporary critics is the result of a continuing practice of not reading the theoretical work of black poets who have published outside the established circuit of the academic press. With the prominent exceptions of poets like Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Larry Neal, and Haki Madhabuti, the critical writings of recent African-American poets have seldom been collected and circulated in any very effective way. Characteristically, Neal’s essays were gathered into a book posthumously, and Madhabuti’s have been published and distributed primarily through his own publishing house. Even Baraka’s collections have been allowed to pass out of print in most instances, only the books on music remaining readily available throughout his career. This may change for black poets who write in more mainstream modes in the near future. Now that Rita Dove has served a term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Derek Walcott has won the Nobel Prize, we might expect a modest increase in interest by publishers and readers in critical works by poets whose forms are less troubling than their content. And black poets who attain academic credentials and write scholarly/critical essays, such as Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen, may succeed in getting their works published by the university presses. However, surveys of shelves in bookstores and [End Page 86] libraries will confirm that there has been little concern among even university and small presses to collect and preserve the critical legacy of black experimentalists in the way that the essays of Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, or Robert Creeley have been maintained before a public.Russell Atkins has been one of the most prolific and demanding of black poets writing criticism and theory in the last four decades, but like Percy Johnston, central figure of the Dasein group of poets centered at Howard University in the 1950s, he has had to publish most of this work through his own magazine and workshop press, and there has never been a published collection of his critical work. The special Russell Atkins number of the Free Lance, a journal with which Atkins was associated for two decades, included a section surveying his work in critical prose, but little of that work has found its way into the broader critical discourse of literary scholars (it has fared a little better with musicologists), and Atkins’s prose is infrequently cited. As eccentric as Atkins’s prose can sometimes be, these works are important early signs of a break with the “rigidities” of traditional humanist discourse among African-American writers. Atkins’s statements on music, literature, politics, and education parallel the works by Baraka leading into and out of the Black Arts Movement, but Atkins, as he does in his verse, travels an independent and often disturbing path.Speaking of Anthony Braxton’s experimentalism, Ronald Radano observes that it “emerged from the changing landscape of urban American life, from... (shrink)

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, 19 essays document the April 1998 international congress held at Harvard University. They ponder on such topics as the phenomenology of the experience of enchantment, Leonardo's enchantress, the ambiguous meaning of musical enchantment in Kant's Third Critique, art and the reenchantment of sensuous human activity, the creative voice, the allure of the Naza, Henri Matisse's early critical reception in New York, Zizek's sublimicist aesthetic of enchanted fantasy, (...) and enchantment in Baroque festive court performance in France. There is no subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

While the field of aesthetics has long been dominated by European philosophy, recent inquiries have expanded the arena to accommodate different cultures as well as different definitions. In this volume, scholars and teachers in the fields of African and African American studies advance the debate over the nature of African aesthetics, approaching the subject from a broad range of disciplines. Dance, music, art, theatre, and literature are examined in order to appreciate and delineate the specific qualities (...) and aspects of African aesthetics; additionally, theoretical concepts and issues are discussed to define more clearly the meaning of an "African aesthetic.". (shrink)

The literary relations between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement have, we believe, been sufficiently documented. It has been demonstrated that Senghor, Damas and Césaire avidly perused the pages of Crisis, Opportunity and Garvey's Negro World—Journals in which Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and Jean Tommer—the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first had their poems published. It is equally literary history now, that some of the poems of the Afro-American writers were reprinted in such Parisian Black-oriented journals (...) and little magazines as Les Continents, La Dépêche Africaine, Le Cri des Nègres, La Revue du Monde Noir and Légitime Défense. In this dissemination of ideas across the Atlantic, Paulette Nardal, Edward A. Jones, Louis T. Achille and Mercer Cook played the important role of literary intermediaries through their translations. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

In Interplay of Things Anthony B. Pinn theorizes religion as a technology for interrogating human experiences and the boundaries between people and other things. Rather than considering religion in terms of institutions, doctrines, and creeds, Pinn shows how religion exposes the openness and porousness of all things and how they are always involved in processes of exchange and interplay. Pinn examines work by Nella Larsen and Richard Wright that illustrates an openness between things and traces how pop art and readymades (...) point to the multidirectional nature of influence. He also shows how Ron Athey's and Clifford Owens' performance art draws out inherent interconnectedness to various cultural codes in ways that reveal the symbiotic relationship between art and religion as a technology. Theorizing that antiblack racism and gender- and class-based hostility constitute efforts to close off the porous nature of certain bodies, Pinn shows how many artists have rebelled against these attempts to counter openness. His analyses offer a means with which to understand the porous, unbounded, and open nature of humans and things. (shrink)

BackgroundCORE (Clarity and Openness in Reporting: E3-based) Reference (released May 2016 by the European Medical Writers Association [EMWA] and the American Medical Writers Association [AMWA]) is a complete and authoritative open-access user’s guide to support the authoring of clinical study reports (CSRs) for current industry-standard-design interventional studies. CORE Reference is a content guidance resource and is not a CSR Template.TransCelerate Biopharma Inc., an alliance of biopharmaceutical companies, released a CSR Template in November 2018 and recognised CORE Reference as one (...) of two principal sources used in its development.MethodsThe regulatory medical writing and statistical professionals who developed CORE Reference conducted a critical review of the TransCelerate CSR Template. We summarise our major findings and recommendations in this communication. We also re-examined and edited the Version 1 CORE Reference Terminology Table that we first published in 2016, and we present this as Version 2 in this communication.ResultsOur major critical review findings indicate that opportunities remain to refine the CSR Template structure and instructional text, enhance content clarity, add web links to referenced guidance documents, improve transparency to support the broad readership of CSRs, and develop supporting resources.The CORE Reference ‘Terminology Table’ Version 2 includes estimand as a defined term and an adaptation of the original ‘worked study example’ to incorporate the recently evolved concept of ‘estimands’.ConclusionsAs TransCelerate’s CSR Template represents an important milestone in authoring CSRs, we offer CSR authors advice and recommendations on its use, similarities, and differences with CORE Reference and advise them to consider shared interpretations between the two.RegistrationCORE Reference is registered with the EQUATOR Network. The TransCelerate CSR Template is not registered with any external organisation to the knowledge of the authors of this paper. (shrink)

This collection demonstrates the strong influence that humanism and freethought had in developing the history and ideals of black intellectualism. Most people are quick to note the profound influence that religion has played in African-American history: consoling the downtrodden slave or inspiring the abolitionists, the underground railroad, and the civil rights movement. But few are aware of the role humanism played in shaping the black experience: developing the thought and motivating the actions of powerful African-American intellectuals. (...) Section One of this book offers biographical sketches of such prominent black humanists as Frederick Douglass, Cheikh Anta Diop, W.E.B. DuBois, Hubert H. Harrison, and Richard Wright. Section Two features essays by black humanists: Douglass, DuBois, Charles W. Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Jaffree, Claude McKay, Melvin B. Tolson, and Bruce Wright. Section Three offers the views of contemporary black African humanists: Freda Amakye Ansah, Emmanuel Kofi Mensah, Nkeonye Otakpor, Franz Vanderpuye, and Kwasi Wiredu. Section Four contains interviews conducted by Allen on the subjects of black humanist activism, the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization, and the Harlem Renaissance with: Martin G. Bernal, Charles Faulkner, Leonard Harris, Norman Hill, and Alaine Locke. (shrink)

This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions.

This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity. The first two chapters focus on Gadamer's critical appropriation and movement beyond Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics (and includes a coda on Heidegger's influence). The final three chapters argue for the continued relevance of Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics by bringing his claims into conversation with (...) contemporary art and music, as well as the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of the Artworld and art-praxis. The ethical and sociopolitical aspects of art- and music-making are given particular attention in chapters devoted to 20th century African American artist Romare Bearden, Banksy's street art, and a range of jazz expressions, from traditional jazz to the complex practice of free jazz. Gadamer's Hermeneutical Aesthetics will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of contemporary art and music. (shrink)

Taylor exposes the concept of 'art' as a tool of ethnocentricity and radical ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin.

This paper is a study of a social-justice, arts-based literacy curriculum in a low income, working-class, predominately African-American school district in Newark, New Jersey. Participating students studied photography and poetry of established artists and took and developed their own photographs accompanied by written narratives. As a part of the curriculum students also wrote poetry and analytical essays. I present my findings within the context of a Vygotskian pedagogical approach that takes social consciousness and metaphor as its central concepts. (...) The paper lays out this conceptual apparatus and deploys it to analyze the curriculum and student work. The paper argues for curriculum that develops social consciousness as the most effective for preparing students to create and participate in democratic societies. The research and analysis show that an arts based curriculum, in addition to successfully teaching literacy, is one of the most effective ways of bringing students’ life experience into the classroom for analysis and discussion, making activity at school relevant for students lives, especially those whose daily activities regularly confronts issues of life and death. (shrink)

In this article, I bring together the archive of institutional activism of Niara Sudarkasa in the U.S. and the posthumous impact of activist and public administrator Marielle Franco. The 1970s historical sources show Sudarkasa’s institutional solidarity with students and faculty in the creation of one of the first Africana Studies departments in the U.S. Reading them, I articulate an ethos for the curation ‘715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back,’ a public digital art gallery comprised of art and history found in (...) the DAAS Papers (Department of Afroamerican and African Studies) housed in the Bentley Library’s digital and physical archives. The analysis of the primary sources is guided by an engagement with the ‘Marielle Effect,’ generating a historical parameter for Abolitionist solidarity between American, Brazilian, Latin American, African American, Diasporic, and ally scholarly communities. The discussion of these parameters is embedded in my discussion of the concept of pacification, a phenomenon of colonial and post-colonial policing that survives through the perpetuation of an extra-judicial policing impetus articulated along race, identity, legality, and sexual legitimacy of subjects. (shrink)

This essay asks why modernist art history has been unable to account for the career of the African American painter Rose Piper. One of the most gifted painters of her generation, Piper was also amo...

African-American Philosophers brings into conversation seventeen of the foremost thinkers of color to discuss issues such as Black existentialism, racism, Black women philosophers within the academy, affirmative action and the conceptual parameters of African-American philosophy.

Through the back door: the problem of history and the African American philosopher/philosophy -- The problem of philosophy: metaphilosophical considerations -- The search for values: axiology in ebony -- Philosophy of science: African American deliberations -- Mapping the disciplinary contours of the philosophy of religion: reason, faith, and African American religious culture.

One of the most significant developments in the art world of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s has been the rise to prominence of art made by minority cultures. Race, Sex, and Gender examines the controversial challenges these groups present to today's artists and critics. Works by African-Americans, feminists, homosexuals, and Latino-Hispanics - once considered marginal - have come to transform contemporary art. As this so-called minority art has moved into a more dominant position, museums - once official symbols of (...) culture - have formed a more secure alliance with the avant-garde. The result is that "minority" art has become, in effect, our most major concern. In this provocative volume, art historian Edward Lucie-Smith seeks to determine how these different groups came to acclaim, and how they have revolutionized the kind of art shown in museums and galleries. Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nancy Spero, Hannah Wilke, Larry Fuente, Cheri Samba, and Martin Puryear are among those artists whose work is pictured and discussed as Lucie-Smith probes issues of racial identity, sexual orientation, and gender politics. Statements from the artists as well as from theoreticians and critics are given, offering additional commentaries on these crucial new topics. Organized by profusely illustrated chapters devoted to specific minority groups, Race, Sex, and Gender is a timely introduction to the issues that are shaping contemporary art. (shrink)

_African-American Philosophers_ brings into conversation seventeen of the foremost thinkers of color to discuss issues such as Black existentialism, racism, Black women philosophers within the academy, affirmative action and the conceptual parameters of African-American philosophy.

A recent message on one of the e-mail bulletin boards sent by a college student read, “I believe that the AIDS virus was developed in government labs for the purpose of controlling black folks.” In September 1990, Essence, an African American magazine with a circulation of 900,000, had as a lead article “AIDS: Is It Genocide?” In 1991, the New York Times quoted Clarence Page, African American columnist and Pulitzer prize winner: “You could call conspiracy theories (...) about AIDS and drugs fringe ideas, but they seem, to have a large following among the black intelligentsia. … [And] you find it at all levels.” In April 1992, Lorene Gary explained in Newsweek “Why it's not just paranoia.” In that same month, another New York Times article reported: “Bizarre as it may seem to most people, many black Americans believe that AIDS and the health measures used against it are part of a conspiracy to wipe out the black race.”4 In February 1992, Science quoted Peter Breggin, director of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry in Bethesda, Maryland, as saying that research on violence “cloaks the intention to identify problem black children and then … prescribe pacifying drugs.”. (shrink)

This article focuses on the experiences of 29 African American teachers in K–12 institutions in Southern California. The article reports on the major themes of the participating teachers’ shared narratives in light of the theory of racial micro-aggression; their responses include evidence that racial micro-aggression during interactions with nonminority organizational members have had a negative impact on their experience. These findings, which are consistent with the neophyte literature, reveal a unique opportunity for scholars to engage in cutting edge (...) research and also suggest the need to integrate training specific to racial micro-aggression in professional development and teacher education programs in order to improve the experience of African American teachers in the future. (shrink)

Many African American children make use of African American English in their everyday lives, and face academic barriers when introduced to Standard American English in the classroom. Research has shown that students who can adapt and use SAE for academic purposes demonstrate significantly better test scores than their less adaptable peers. Accordingly, AAE use and its confirmed inverse relationship to reading achievement have been implicated in the Black-White Test Score Gap, thus becoming the focus of (...) intense research and practical interest. This volume discusses dialectal code-switching from AAE to SAE and stresses the benefits and importance of African American students becoming bi-dialectal. It provides background theory and science supporting the most promising educational approach to date, Contrastive Analysis, a set of longstanding methods drawn from Second Language research and used effectively with students ranging from kindergarten through college. It offers a deeper knowledge of AAE use by students, the critical features of Contrastive Analysis, and detailed information about successful applications which teachers can apply in their own pedagogy. (shrink)

Adrian Piper joins the ranks of writer-artists who have provided much of the basic and most reliable literature on modern and contemporary art. Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years. Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out (...) of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context. (shrink)

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to (...) move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1.When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that writing is related to (...) the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

This essay considers the recuperation of beauty as a productive critical strategy in discussions of African American dance. I argue that black performance in general, and African American concert dance in particular, seeks to create aesthetic sites that allow black Americans to participate in discourses of recognition and appreciation to include concepts of beauty. In this, I suggest that beauty may indeed produce social change for its attendant audiences. I also propose that interrogating the notion of (...) beauty may allow for social change among audiences that include dance theorists and philosophers. Through a case-study consideration of work by three African American choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947 – 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949), I ultimately hope to suggest critical possibilities aligning dance performance with particular aesthetic theory relevant to its documentation and interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Petrification of Cleopatra in Nineteenth Century Art MARGARET MALAMUD MARTHA MALAMUD What did Cleopatra look like? Was she a Roman, a Ptolemaic Greek, an Egyptian, an African? Was she a precocious child, a devastatingly beautiful seductress, an astute practitioner of imperial politics, a murderess, a longnosed blue-stocking? [Figure 1] Cleopatra is dead, but “Cleopatra ” exists in the eye of the beholder. What other human being has (...) been portrayed in such “infinite variety”? In her life, and even more in her afterlife, the protean queen of the Nile has, like a shaft of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, clarified and set ablaze underlying ideologies and overt assertions of race and gender, manifested differently in disparate times and places. Here we consider two case studies of nineteenth century representations of Cleopatra in stone: William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1860) and Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra (1876). [Figarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Figure 1: Bust of Cleopatra VII, 40–30 bce, Altes Museum, Berlin. 32 the petrification of cleopatra ure 2] Story, a wealthy and well-connected white expatriate living in Rome, gave the famous queen features that deviated from classicizing portrayals of the queen and struck critics as startling and original. American artist Edmonia Lewis, of Black West Indies / Ojibwa Native American descent, lived and worked in Rome, but as a poor, racially-mixed female artist she moved in quite different social circles than Story. Her decision to sculpt the Egyptian queen as a white woman Figure 2: William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858; this carving 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Margaret Malamud, Martha Malamud 33 dying in agony during the last moments of her suicide shocked and fascinated critics. Both works display a very different understanding of women, the Orient, the Classical past, and the exotic Black other. We understand and contextualize these strikingly different representations of Cleopatra by looking at the comments of contemporary writers and critics. Lewis and her Death of Cleopatra inspired the twenty-first century Black poet Tyehimba Jess, with whose poetic evocation of Lewis and her work we conclude. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when most portrayals were of Cleopatra as a classical Greek beauty, William Wetmore Story boldly gave the famous queen African features. Story, an American emigré artist and “cultural influencer,” was living in Rome on the eve of the American Civil War. While there, he sculpted Cleopatra, which he began in 1858, completed in 1860, and exhibited to great acclaim at the 1862 World Exposition in London. Story was from Boston, where abolitionist sentiments were prominent, and was well aware of racial politics in the United States. Concerned by British support for the American South, he wrote a series of letters from Rome to the British Daily News in December of 1861 in which he denounced the institution of slavery, explained why he was devoted to the Union, and urged British neutrality in the Civil War. His Cleopatra was a provocative abolitionist statement. From the late eighteenth century on, free African Americans faced two pressing tasks: to refute charges that they were racially inferior to white people and to insert themselves into the historical record. ManyAfrican Americans and their supporters argued that there was a clear connection between ancient Africa (Ethiopia and Egypt) and the classical world based on their reading of classical texts and late eighteenth and early nineteenth century world histories. Educated African Americans documented the debt of Greece and Rome to Egyptian civilization, and repeatedly pointed out that Egypt was a major source of the cultural achievements of Greco-Roman an- 34 the petrification of cleopatra tiquity.It was conventional wisdom that Egyptian civilization influenced Greece. What was new and controversial was the assertion of a racial connection between ancient Egyptians and modern African Americans. Abolitionists used this constructed racial history to argue that the magnificent civilization of ancient Egypt and its influences on Greek and Roman culture were proof that African Americans were not racially inferior and therefore fully worthy to be citizens with equal rights in the American Republic.1 By the 1860s it had become a commonplace in American abolitionist circles that antiquity ’s most famous queen was... (shrink)

Traditional African American foods, also referred to as “soul food,” are often given a blanket label of “poor food choices.” The cultural value of these ethnic foods may be disregarded without sufficient study of their nutrient content. This study showed that of the various foods perceived as traditionally African American by the local sampled population, greens were the most often identified as such by 78% and the most frequently consumed (22%) by the subjects. 37% perceived chitterlings (...) as a traditional food, yet only 30% consumed them, and only on an occasional basis. Okra, yams, and black-eyed peas had relatively high consumptions but were not often perceived as traditional African American foods. The latter may suggests a lack of historical food facts, relating to indigenous African foods or may indicate the mainstreaming of these foods. Cowpeas or black-eyed peas, okra, sesame seeds, and watermelon seeds were originally brought to North America from Africa. The literature contains scant information on this particular topic, which leaves unanswered: (1) the current consumption of traditional foods by African Americans, (2) certain availability of these foods; and (3) the positive contributions to the diet that these foods may contribute. The author recognizes that “African American” is the most appropriate and preferred term used widely today, to refer to African descendants in North America, however “Black” and “Black American” will be used interchangeably, to reflect consistency of literature cited herein. First, this article will define traditional African American foods and relate their historical significance. Secondly, it will present data on current food consumption from a sample population of African Americans surveyed in San Diego. Lastly, this article will explore possible applications of the research itself. (shrink)

Focused on preparing educators to teach African American students, this straightforward and teacher-friendly text features a careful balance of published scholarship, a framework for culturally relevant and critical pedagogy, research-based case studies of model teachers, and tested culturally relevant practical strategies and actionable steps teachers can adopt. Its premise is that teachers who understand Black culture as an asset rather than a liability and utilize teaching techniques that have been shown to work can and do have specific positive (...) impacts on the educational experiences of African American children. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article asks why African American Philosophy matters. The notion of the “Black philosopher” continues to be an enigma. African descendants are not generally associated with the revered location and status of “the philosopher” and with doing philosophy. In a celebration of the sustained work of the Black philosopher-practitioner, who continues to suffer a fate of deliberate academic “invisibility” and historical erasure, this article supports the expansion of philosophical categories, philosophical conversation, and philosophical inclusivity. This work (...) contends that the marginalization of African American philosophy can be understood from a synthesis of Foucault’s thesis of “subjugated knowledge” and Black philosopher Lewis Gordon’s explanation of “subverted realization,” which is built in to “white” modern thought. Both key philosophers help locate the problem questioned here. The overriding current of the “white stream” of philosophy, by its deliberate exclusion of African American philosophy, disqualifies it. (shrink)

A special issue of The Philosophical Forum , one of the most prestigious philosophy journals, is now available to a wider readership through its publication in book form. The volume includes twelve essays in three sections-- Philosophical Traditions; the African-American Tradition; and Racism, Identity, and Social Life. Contributors are: K. Anthony Appiah, Kwasi Wiredu, Lucius Outlaw, Leonard Harris, Bernard Boxill, Frank M. Kirkland, Tommy L. Lott, Adrian M.S. Piper, Laurence Thomas, Michele M. Moody-Adams, Anita L. Allen, and Howard (...) McGary. The introduction is by John P. Pittman. (shrink)

One can understand humor in terms of one or some combination of the three types of humor and also by envisioning humor as a finite-province of meaning in the tradition of Alfred Schutz’s essay “On Multiple Realities”. Exemplifying varieties of humor articulated by philosophical theory, especially the superiority theory, which undermines those thought “superior,” African-American humor, from the days of slavery until the 1960s, struggled against widespread cultural suppression, as a brief survey of its history shows. Contemporary philosophical (...) discussions of trust elucidate why it would have been perfectly rational and prudent for African-Americans to avoid sharing humor that vents legitimate aggressiveness against whites even though modified by humor, and yet these discussions present the possibility that by trusting another one can transform that other. One can find examples in African-American folklore, particularly the John/ole Massa stories, of a dream of doing what was impossible in pragmatic everyday life, namely to engage in a comic engagement with white slave-owners. In that dream, African-American slaves utopianly imagined themselves as able through humor understood as a finite province of meaning shaped by an epoché, form of spontaneity, reduced tension of consciousness, sense of self, and a distinctive temporality and sociality, to express outrage at injustice, transform even white slave-owners, and even win freedom for humorists themselves. (shrink)

This book analyzes the sociopolitical sensibilities of Black aesthetics in society by examining the historical and political context in which Black aesthetics emerged; analyzing various Black aesthetic perspectives that speak to social justice; exploring the interpretive conditions necessary to perceive Black aesthetics as a language of social justice.