In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics (...) holds far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism. (shrink)

While highlighting the inherent tension between the quest for universalization and the unavoidable particularity in philosophical hermeneutics, this essay argues against what it regards as the uncritical characterization of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s concept of “negritude” in terms of ethnophilosophy, a derogatoryterm employed in contemporary African philosophy to describe philosophy that is communal, and which can be sieved out from such genres as proverbs, wise sayings, and myths. It reviews the background and the contents of negritude, including its metaphysics (...) and its epistemology of emotion. It calls attention to Senghor’s ideas about communalism and his universalism seen in his theory of the civilization of the universal, and concludes that Senghor’s negritude is the outcome of a particular and personal interpretation of his experience of the African condition, and is therefore eminently hermeneutical. (shrink)

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were ????irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based (...) on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours. (shrink)

Hablar de islamofobia hacia comunidades negras africanas y afrodescendientes es difícil de abordar debido al orientalismo y a procesos de estereotipación de lo que concibe el ser musulmán, así como la racialización de un estatus espiritual. Esta percepción negativa y reduccionista del islam y de los musulmanes como un ente monolito y homogeneo, refuerza y configura dinámicas de poder. En el estado español, el orientalismo reduce a la persona musulmana bajo el sujeto “moro”, racializando una identidad religiosa desde el miedo (...) y el terror desde unas raíces históricas y estructurales, propiciando un señalamiento social racista que vigila y persigue. Esto ha invisibilizado a otras comunidades que también son objeto de la islamofobia y no entran en los cánones de la otredad de lo “moro”. Se pretende tener una noción más acertada de la realidad de los musulmanes que permitirá a su vez mejorar la identificación de la islamofobia en España. (shrink)

Quel message est apporté par le courant littéraire de la négritude, et comment procède-t-il pour le transmettre? C'est par le biais d'une écriture introspective que la diaspora noire a conquis sa dignité et dépassé le stade victimaire, par-delà le seul cadre de la communauté francophone. A travers l'histoire de la traite et de la colonisation, notre lecture procédera en trois phases: une phase locutoire, consacrée à un rappel chronologique du contexte noir dans l'Histoire; une phase illocutoire, où seront exposées les (...) différentes réactions de l'intelligentsia noire face à la ségrégation et au passif colonial; une phase perlocutoire, qui conclura l'étude en observant l'impact de la négritude sur la réalité sociale du genre noir. Au-delà du courant historique francophone, l'idée de négritude incarne le problème des constructions d'identité et illustre parfaitement la difficulté de la condition humaine: être ce que nous voulons de ce que les autres veulent faire de nous. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay, in order to grasp the complex and ambivalent relation of Fanon with negritude, I will recover the context from which emerged the ideology of negritude by focusing on the views of Léopold Senghor and the ways in which these views determined Sartre's interpretation of the movement. I will also examine Sartre's Black Orpheus and the influence it had on Fanon, especially on his Black Skin, White Masks. In the second part, I (...) will adumbrate Fanon's critique of the advocates of negritude, whom he refers to as 'men of culture', who fell back on archaic cultural practices far removed from the political realities of their colonized societies. In the third section, I will turn to Memmi's critique of Fanon with a view to establishing two points: first, Memmi misreads Fanon's rejection of negritude as a failure on the part of Fanon to 'return to self'; second, far from being an oppositional post-modern figure whose work is rife with contradiction, I will argue that the political project of Fanon is consistently Sartrean, despite his disagreement with Sartre on some issues. (shrink)

While highlighting the inherent tension between the quest for universalization and the unavoidable particularity in philosophical hermeneutics, this essay argues against what it regards as the uncritical characterization of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s concept of “negritude” in terms of ethnophilosophy, a derogatoryterm employed in contemporary African philosophy to describe philosophy that is communal, and which can be sieved out from such genres as proverbs, wise sayings, and myths. It reviews the background and the contents of negritude, including its metaphysics (...) and its epistemology of emotion. It calls attention to Senghor’s ideas about communalism and his universalism seen in his theory of the civilization of the universal, and concludes that Senghor’s negritude is the outcome of a particular and personal interpretation of his experience of the African condition, and is therefore eminently hermeneutical. (shrink)

The Assimilation Argument purports to show that libertarians cannot plausibly distinguish supposed exercises of free will from random outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. If this argument is sound, libertarians should either abandon their position or else concede that free will is a mystery. Drawing on a parallel with the Manipulation Argument against compatibilism, Christopher Franklin has recently contended that the Assimilation Argument is unsound. Here I defend the Assimilation Argument and the Rollback (...) Argument, a second challenge to libertarianism that Franklin rejects. My aim in doing so is to underscore the force of these challenges, and thereby to resist what appears to be an emerging trend in the literature. By not coming to grips with the kind of power that libertarians must secure, many writers have recently downplayed or dismissed the pressing worry for libertarianism. (shrink)

Key text never before in English by central figure of the Negritude movement.

The idea of genetic assimilation, that environmentally induced phenotypes may become genetically fixed and no longer require the original environmental stimulus, has had varied success through time in evolutionary biology research. Proposed by Waddington in the 1940s, it became an area of active empirical research mostly thanks to the efforts of its inventor and his collaborators. It was then attacked as of minor importance during the ‘‘hardening’’ of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and was relegated to a secondary role for decades. (...) Recently, several papers have appeared, mostly independently of each other, to explore the likelihood of genetic assimilation as a biological phenomenon and its potential importance to our understanding of evolution. In this article we briefly trace the history of the concept and then discuss theoretical models that have newly employed genetic assimilation in a variety of contexts. We propose a typical scenario of evolution of genetic assimilation via an intermediate stage of phenotypic plasticity and present potential examples of the same. We also discuss a conceptual map of current and future lines of research aimed at exploring the actual relevance of genetic assimilation for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

This chapter examines when and how mental simulation--the consideration of alternatives to present reality--produces emotional responses that reflect either contrast or assimilation. The chapter begins with a description of a comparison domain that is most commonly associated with mental simulation--counterfactual thinking. Then the authors consider how mental simulation plays a critical role in determining assimilative and contrastive responses to other type of comparisons. The chapter concludes with a presentation of a model of mental simulation-based comparison processes and describe its (...) relationship to other contemporary comparison models. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These changes (...) are ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

Review of recent works on the Negritude movement, with critical remarks and interventions.

El presente artículo ofrece una revisión crítica de la noción de injusticia hermenéutica de Miranda Fricker a partir de dos elementos de la obra de Frantz Fanon: 1) la «historicidad» como una carga cultural en las categorías sociales que es productiva, lo que exige cuestionar la definición de injusticia hermenéutica como ausencia o tergiversación de categorías; 2) la redefinición que Fanon hizo del «esquema corporal» de Merleau Ponty: la experiencia vivida del cuerpo, lo que muestra que los recursos hermenéuticos no (...) son solo categorías mentales, sino que están imbricados con la dimensión material. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar cómo estos dos elementos de la teoría fanoniana hacen una contribución a la noción de injusticia hermenéutica y por qué esta es relevante para entender la injusticia estructural del racismo. (shrink)

The exchange between the Borg and Captain Jean‐Luc Picard illustrates what's truly horrifying about the Borg. In philosophical terms, the Borg strips the assimilated of their autonomy. Choice is essential to autonomy, but autonomy means more than the freedom to act on whims. Autonomous can be applied to two different sorts of things: there are autonomous beings and autonomous actions. Beings that can rationally deliberate in the face of amoral choice are called autonomous, and many of their actions display autonomy. (...) Autonomous actions are done intentionally, with understanding, and without controlling influences that determine. As crucial as the idea of autonomy seems to be to the moral life, it is also been criticized for relying on a highly individualistic and overly rationalistic notion of humanity. Autonomy is a good thing that we can encourage in others by helping them develop deliberative skills and by interacting with them during decision making. (shrink)

Seth Shabo has presented a new argument that attempts to codify familiar worries about indeterminism, luck, and control. His ‘Assimilation Argument’ contends that libertarians cannot distinguish overtly randomized outcomes from exercises of free will. Shabo claims that the argument possesses advantages over the Mind Argument and Rollback Argument, which also purport to establish that indeterminism is incompatible with free will. I argue first that the Assimilation Argument presents no new challenges over and above those presented by the Rollback (...) Argument, and second that the Rollback Argument itself neither presents a deep challenge to, nor raises the cost of, accepting libertarianism. (shrink)

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory and its posthistory.

von Behrens, Dierk Assimilation is a process by which a person or group belonging to one culture adopts the practices of another, thereby becoming a member of that culture.

En los estudios sobre el Caribe se ha vuelto un tópico común entender la región en términos de afrodescendencia y negritud. Con eso, se ha perfilado cierta tendencia de encerrar el espacio cultural tan diverso del Caribe y Centroamérica en una nueva concepción limitada y esencialista que hace abstracción de las múltiples y complejas convergencias transculturales a lo largo de su historia. Sin embargo, ya a partir de los años setenta y ochenta del siglo XX se han generado ensayos abarcadores (...) e innovadores en y desde el espacio caribeño mismo que introducen nuevas dimensiones en los debates sobre caribeñidad, antillanidad, mestizaje, ‘creolidad’ etc. En las literaturas caribeñas y centroamericanas han emergido numerosas obras que tematizan, ironizan y parodian la búsqueda de una identidad exclusivamente negra de los Caribes y de los intentos de regresar a la “Madre África”. El ensayo se dedica al análisis de este fenómeno en cuatro novelas de los Caribes francófono e hispanófono: Ti Jean l’horizon (1979) de Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadalupe), Calypso (1996) de Tatiana Lobo (Costa Rica), Limón Blues (2002) de Anacristina Rossi (Costa Rica) y Black is black (2008) de Raphaël Confiant (Martinica). (shrink)

Ultimate value is rarely fully realized as people have to maintain a balance between values in their everyday life. Robbins notes, however, that it may be perfectly exemplified through ritual. In this paper, I want to show that the perfect exemplification of a value that fundamentally matters to a society may otherwise be attained through the incorporation of an overwhelming stranger. Anthropologists have shown that the presence of a potent foreigner incites a sense of categorical disunity that leads to the (...) dialectical counter movement to assimilate them. In this imaginary process of establishing a new unity, I argue, people are not simply attempting to incorporate the pervading stranger but also to encompass them within their hierarchically arranged idea of value. Subsequently, during the moment of assimilation - which can occur through myth, ritual, or other social forms - the community makes their ultimate value socially present. I will try to exemplify my argument by examining key cultural representations of the other among upland-lowland people in North Seram, Eastern Indonesia. (shrink)

Jean-Michel Roessli | : Cette brève contribution a pour but de revenir sur une question soulevée par Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, à propos de la façon dont les historiens de l’Antiquité tardive envisagent les contacts ou échanges entre Juifs, chrétiens et païens et, plus particulièrement, les phénomènes d’acculturation ou d’appropriation culturelle. Cette question est abordée à la lumière de la figure d’Orphée, dont Miguel Herrero se sert pour illustrer sa thèse dans le domaine de l’iconographie religieuse, alors qu’il recourt à (...) d’autres thèmes ou motifs pour vérifier son hypothèse dans la sphère des rites et de la poésie. La question soulevée est de savoir si l’opinio communis selon laquelle certains éléments de la culture païenne ont été « assimilés » à et par la culture chrétienne est une représentation biaisée qui se fonde sur une construction apologétique plus ou moins inconsciente ou s’il s’agit d’une réalité culturelle historiquement attestée. | : This short paper aims to respond to a question raised by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui with respect to the way historians of Late Antiquity see contacts or exchanges between Jews, Christians and Pagans and, more specifically, the phenomenon of acculturation or cultural appropriation. This question is addressed in the light of the mythological figure of Orpheus, which Miguel Herrero uses to illustrate his thesis in the field of religious iconography, while referring to other themes or motifs to verify his hypothesis in the area of rites and poetry. The issue raised is to know whether the opinio communis according to which elements of the pagan culture were “assimilated” to and by the Christian culture is a biased representation based on a more or less unconscious apologetic construction or if it relies on a historically attested reality. (shrink)

The interest in supererogation and supererogatory actions derives from the perception that there is something problematic about them. I shall argue that there is nothing problematic about them. The perception to the contrary arises from preconceptions common in ethical theory. When these are relaxed or dismissed, supererogatory actions are easily assimilated as well-motivated, responses to moral situations. Assimilating, rather than denying, them is important for a sound moral philosophy.

Drawing on postmodern feminist theories of culture and identity, this article explores a model of ‘masquerading’ instead of ‘assimilation’ in analysing self-constructions of migrant women of ‘mixed race’ living in the Netherlands. Rather than as assimilated objects, these migrant women, called Indo-Dutch women, are regarded as agents who effectively intervene in the construction of national identities through masquerading strategies and ways of communication. The article also shows how masquerading strategies form a part of the conflicted colonial history of Indo-Dutch (...) women and as such constitute contemporary life narratives and identities. One incident in a life narrative is used as an example to illustrate different interpretations. (shrink)

The articles in this issue are a selection of the papers presented at the conference Knowledge as Assimilation, held at the University of Helsinki on 9-11 June 2017. The conference was the result of a collaboration between two research groups that have been established in Finland and Sweden from 2013 onwards: the research project Rationality in Perception: Transformations of Mind and Cognition 1250-1550, funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the University of Helsinki, and the research programme (...) Representation and Reality: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Aristotelian Tradition, funded by the Riksbankens jubileumsfond and located at the University of Gothenburg. (shrink)

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

There are many advantages and disadvantages to central locations. These have shown themselves in the long course of European history. In times of peace, there are important economic and cultural advantages (to illustrate: the present area of the Czech Republic was the richest country in Europe between the two World Wars). There are cross-currents of trade and culture in central Europe of great advantage. For, cultural cross-currents represent a potential benefit in comprehension and cultural growth. But under threat of large-scale (...) conflict, these locations have proved extremely dangerous. Historically, Germany and Austria may be regarded as having had two chief models of their relationships to Europe. In the Holy Roman Empire, Germany was at the center of an aspiring “universalistic” European cosmopolitanism. (In some ways similar to the present situation of the European Union.) Austria maintained a great multi¬cultural empire, until it was destroyed in the First Word War. Generally, middle-European powers have promoted the integration of European diversity, when peace and stability have been plausible objectives. But when European diversity has declined toward ethnic or national conflict, Germany has drawn away from Europe and into itself, seeking inner unity and distinctness to protect it against possible combinations of enemies. This is true of central Europe generally, in degree, but interest often centers on Germany. Generally, central Europe is a cultural pressure cooker. (shrink)

Fanon’s insistence that the oppressed retain their ability to resist and (re)configure their subjectivity has political, ethical, and philosophical import, as it highlights the fact that the subjugated are not mere things determined from the outside. To the contrary, just as several contingent factors coalesced to create the historical situation in which the colonized subject finds herself, other equally contingent factors can emerge and help to bring about socio-political transformations. Like Aimé Césaire, Fanon understood that the process of decolonization would (...) occur over time and in various stages. By studying Fanon’s complex relationship to the Négritude movement, his resistance tactics come into sharper focus. In short, I argue that Fanon’s employment of essentialized narratives can be interpreted as a variant of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak). Consequently, Fanon’s historically attuned strategy signals a movement beyond a mere reactionary response trapped within an abstract Manichaean binary. (shrink)