Save Philosophy at Howard University.

The Department of Philosophy at Howard University is in danger of being shut down. The administration is poised to fold this BA and MA degree granting department into an interdisciplinary program offering only core and service courses. This will mark the end of the only graduate degree program in philosophy at an HBCU; it will weaken the university’s commitment to the kind of humanistic self-examination that underwrote the US black freedom movement; and it will repudiate the legacy of philosophy at Howard, a legacy forged by the likes of Alain Locke, one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Please help us encourage Howard’s president to strengthen philosophy rather than abolish it.

For more information, visit the SAVE PHILOSOPHY AT HOWARD website here: http://savehowardphilosophy.wordpress.com/.

Outlaw, Lucius T. "Africana Philosophy." (STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

“Africana philosophy” is the name for an emergent and still developing field of ideas and idea-spaces, intellectual endeavors, discourses, and discursive networks within and beyond academic philosophy that was recognized as such by national and international organizations of professional philosophers, including the American Philosophical Association, starting in the 1980s. Thus, the name does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition. Rather, Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing—that is, activities of reflective, critical thinking and articulation and aesthetic expression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and of African descent who were and are indigenous residents of continental Africa and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide. In all cases the point of much of the philosophizings has been to confer meaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural and social worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, and radically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive, endure, and flourish across successive generations.

The emergent third-order work defining the field has been focused on identifying for research and teaching, and for further refinements and new developments of, instances of philosophical articulations and expressions regarding what has been, and is, of thoughtful, aesthetic significance to persons African and of African descent. This work has produced educative catalogings and critical surveys of particular ideas and idea-spaces; intellectual and aesthetic expressive agendas, practices, and traditions; and networks of individuals, organizations, and institutions serving philosophizing in African and African-descended life-worlds. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/africana/.

Cfp: "Geographies of Black Internationalism," Institute of British Geographers, Royal Geographical Society, London, September 1-3, 2010.

The study of black internationalism examines the critical historical engagement of black thinkers and actors with global politics, and the often international channels through which such engagements have taken place. Scholarship has explored how black internationalism has functioned through movements as diverse as pan-Africanism, Négritude, Communism, Surrealism, Liberalism and differing religious movements, to name only some examples (Patterson and Kelley, 2000). We can thus conceptualise multiple black internationalisms, articulated in diverse historical and geographical settings (West, Martin and Wilkins, 2009). Particular attention has been given both to the constructed nature of racial communities and identities within black internationalism, and also the gendered and class-stratified nature such constructions have taken (Edwards, 2003; Stephens: 2005). Such work has opened a space for debate over the meanings of both 'blackness' and 'internationalism' within global cultures and politics. The study of black internationalism offers considerable opportunities for geographers working on the spatialities of anticolonialism, political activism, the (historical) geographies of social movements, and the relationship between space and politics. However, at present it remains the terrain primarily of historians and literary critics. Indeed, debates around political geography and nationalism have been accused of remaining 'woefully ignorant of . . . African diasporic movements' (Tyner, 2004: 343). This session will explore the historical and political geographies of these movements in order to think more deeply about the relationship between space and the heterogeneous politics of black internationalism. Topics for discussion might include, but are not restricted to, the following: · The 'imaginative geographies' of black internationalism; · Black internationalism and the spaces of print or public culture; · Place-based articulations of black internationalism; · The relationship between black internationalism and other political or cultural movements; · The gendering of black internationalist discourse and practice; · Geographical conceptualisations and contestations of 'black' and/or 'internationalism'; · Black internationalism's historical geographies; · Spatialities of black internationalism today; · Methodological reflections on researching black internationalisms. Proposed papers, in the form of an abstract (max. 250 words), should be submitted to Daniel Whittall at d.j.whittall@rhul.ac.uk by Friday 12 February 2010.

"Afromodernisms 1: Re-Encounters with the French and Anglo-Atlantic Worlds, 1907 to 1961," University of Liverpool, April 15-17, 2010.

Keynote Speakers: Professor David Scott, Columbia University, NY Professor Demetrius Eudell, Wesleyan University, CT In the context provided by Paul Gilroy’s configuration of the black Atlantic as a counterculture to modernity, this symposium is the first in a series seeking to re-examine the Atlantic as a locale for the emergence of modernism. Over the period 2010–12, we hope to consider the centrality of black folk, artists, writers, intellectuals, social scientists, musicians, as core members of the modernist avant-garde, and of “blackness” as a key representative and political category in the work of other modernists. We begin from a formulation of modernism as a heterogenous cluster of responses to locally specific experiences of modernity, rather than as a qualitative set of aesthetic indicators privileging formal innovation over political rhetoric. In doing so, we hope to enable further discussion of a widening spectrum of modernist languages in which the experience of modernity is delineated and inscribed. The symposium addresses the interactions, exchanges, conflicts, and collaborations occurring across the French and Anglo Atlantic, and within experienced and imagined spaces of blackness, in the period 1907–61. We begin therefore with Picasso’s masked Demoiselles, and end with the publication of Fanon’s radical rejection of western colonialism in Les damnés. The aims of the symposium are fourfold: First, it seeks to stage a re-encounter with avant-garde aesthetic, political and social practice in the context of black responses to modernity across the French and Anglo Atlantic. Second, it explores the emergence of new disciplines or schools, and underexplored interdisciplinary relationships in the human sciences that may have effected or at least contributed to the formal innovation or “newness” considered so characteristic of modernism. Third, it takes Perry Anderson’s claim that one of the indispensible co-ordinates for locating modernism is its “proximity to social revolution” and resituates it in the context of an anti-colonial avant-garde operating across the Atlantic in the inter- and postwar years. Fourth, it considers the degree to which a variety of actors operating from what might be termed “alternative” or “displaced” metropoles interacted to produce, in Jameson’s terms, an “active sense” of the history of modernity, one in which a black presence was of key aesthetic, political and cultural importance. Individual papers and proposals, in English, for panels addressing any aspect of the interrelationship between Afromodernism and the French and Anglo-Atlantic worlds are invited from, but not limited to, the disciplines of literature, anthropology, history, art history, philosophy, music, or combinations of these; and concerning regions including but not limited to: Africa, the Caribbean, insular and continental Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America. Teaching or curating panels and papers are also welcomed. Topics might include: The Harlem Renaissance/New Negro; Performance and/of blackness; Expressionism; fascism; exoticism; the tropics; ethnographic fieldwork narratives/collections; the WPA; négritude; negrophilia; World War 1; configurations of the Black Atlantic; masking; marxism and modernity; World War 2; primitivism; folk and established religious expression; jazz; blues; surrealism; Boasian anthropology; tragedy; Windrush; aesthetic politics; drumming; new histories; revisionist historiography; beauty; comedy; revolution and anticolonialism; myth; reaction; gender and modernity; nationalism; the metropole(s); psychoanalysis; science and relativism; positivism; migration and/or displacement; civilization; degeneration. Contact: Fionnghuala Sweeney (email: fsweeney@liverpool.ac.uk) or Kate Marsh (email: clmarsh@liverpool.ac.uk) Deadline for submission: Thursday, 21 January 2010. Conference website: http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/conferences/Afromodernism/index.htm.

Carter, Jacoby Adeshei. "Review of Lewis R. Gordon's AN INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (November 2008).

Gordon, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy begins, as any text with that or any similar title should, with a discussion of the difficulties of firmly fixing an accurate conception of Africana philosophy. It is Gordon's aim to introduce Africana philosophy as a modern philosophy, where the modern period is inaugurated by the discovery of the "new world" and the institution of the Atlantic Slave Trade and continues on to the present. Gordon presents the reader with a veritable Who's Who of intellectuals who have made some contribution to Africana philosophy from antiquity to the present day. The result is a comprehensive, yet nuanced, account of how and by whom central themes in Africana philosophy have originated and been developed over time throughout the diaspora. For the most part, Gordon's book gives a comprehensive account of the wide ranging field of Africana philosophy while also providing a close look at its instantiations in particular thinkers and select geographic regions. Gordon makes an effort to pay attention to the emergence and development of central themes in various parts of the diaspora though, on the whole, the book is heavily weighted in favor of discussions of African American and Afro-Caribbean philosophy over African philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14705.

Reviews of Mary Lefkowitz's HISTORY LESSON: A RACE ODYSSEY.

Lefkowitz, Mary. History Lesson: a Race Odyssey. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. I found the following three reviews online (there are others):

• Leo, John. "The Hazards of Telling the Truth." Wall Street Journal April 15, 2008(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120821739801814533.html?mod=opinion_journal_books);
• Boyle, Brenda. "Siege of the Ivory Tower." New York Sun May 21, 2008(http://www.nysun.com/arts/siege-of-the-ivory-tower/76754/);
• Preston, John. "History Lesson: a Race Odyssey." Times Higher Education May 29, 2008(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402177&c=1).

"Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism," University of Wisconsin, Madison, June 20-21, 2008.

The term 'diaspora' designates the scattering of a given population like seeds (spore) on the wind through migration—conventionally often in the form of forced migration rather than its opposite. The term 'cosmopolitanism' refers to the politics and philosophy of inhabiting a polis or political community on the scale of the cosmos rather than the metropolis. Both paradigms thus constitute alternatives to models of community in which a society is organized around a single geographic space, with the metropole at its center. While diaspora studies are generally associated with the identities and claims of marginalized populations, cosmopolitanism has, in the words of Amanda Anderson, "close ties with universalism." Cosmopolitanism, Anderson notes, "endorses reflective distance from one´s own cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity." Recently, Anthony Appiah has suggested that cosmopolitanism in the wake of globalization is virtually inevitable through not only the cultivated praxis of reflective distance as a means of accommodating a world of difference, but also the quotidian praxis of mimetic acquisition of diverse cultural tastes, behaviors, and relationships in globalized societies. Yet histories of the non-integration of migrants, of the hostile co-existence of "hosts" and "guests" in the state framework, or of the explosion of national populations into new traumatic diaspora through economic, military, ecological, and cultural upheavals, provide challenges to political and philosophical models of cosmopolitanism. Diaspora and cosmopolitanism are mutually decentered, but along the contrasting metaphorical trajectories of the spore and the cosmos. The tension between these epistemological frames arguably opens a space for reconsideration of the new millennial politics of postcolonial identities. Diaspora studies have a clear affiliation with the study of the colonial and imperialist cultures responsible for many large scale forced migrations since Columbus. Cosmopolitan theory from Kant onward was instrumental in the conception of global political bodies and declarations of rights, and since the late twentieth century it has addressed the predicament of many postcolonial immigrant groups in former colonial metropoles (and less frequently, the predicament of postcolonies). In the 21st century, how do the models of diaspora and the cosmopolitical allow us to reflect on the undoing of former social and political geographies, and the formation of new ones? How do these models merge or overlap, and how do they contradict or undermine each other? . For general information, please visit: http://www.africa.wisc.edu/postcolonial/postcolonial-introduction.htm. Speakers are listed here: http://www.africa.wisc.edu/postcolonial/Speakers.html. Abstracts are here: http://www.africa.wisc.edu/postcolonial/abstracts.html.

McWhorter, John. "Blackness: a Quick and Dirty Primer." THE ROOT February 13, 2008.

Especially over the past forty years, the number of black Americans growing up in all-black circumstances has decreased. The diversity of black experience is vaster than ever. For this reason, just as we will not view culturally "blacker" people as lesser, we will not view culturally less black people as suspicious. But most importantly, we cannot evade the issue by treating black culture as something so ambiguous and profound that we aren't really talking about anything at all. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.theroot.com/id/44794.

CFP: "Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa," University of Toronto, May 20-23, 2009.

The export of men, women and children from Africa to the America lasted over four hundred years and touched most communities in Africa, directly or indirectly. We now know a great deal about this trade: its gender and age composition, the ways in which individuals and communities responded to the trade, the extent to which warfare, kidnapping, legal mechanisms, economic processes and religious institutions generated a pool of people to be bought and sold. We know about resistance, the formation of slave-trading states and the increased use of slaves within Africa. We have some autobiographical accounts by those who were literate or achieved literacy after their capture, but these are few. Most of the sources used to write the history of slavery in Africa are European, but the memories of the external and internal slave trade remain and are embedded in African ritual, song, and memory. We are inviting proposals dealing with the exploration of new research methodologies and the re-examination of old ones. Our major objective is to make available to students and scholars African sources on slavery, enslavement, the slave trade and to improve our understanding of these documents. The conference will deal with all parts of Africa and is open to any methodology that taps African voices. Our goal is to seek out and explore newer methodologies, to find more African sources, and if possible, to look for the voices of the slaves themselves. We also want to make these sources more widely available. We can accept sources originating from other continents only if they involve memories of Africa and the trade from Africa. This conference follows on one organized at Bellagio, Italy in September 2007 and entitled 'Finding the African Voice: Narratives of Slavery and Enslavement.' It explored a wide range of different kinds of sources: oral traditions, life histories recorded by missionaries, court documents from both colonial and Islamic courts, petitions to colonial authorities, proverbs, folk-lore, music, and personal correspondence.Because of space limitations at Bellagio, we limited ourselves to West and Northwest Africa and to the historic past. We are now interested in opening up a wider range of questions, for example, the impact of the slave experience on witchcraft belief and on contemporary representation of political power, personal and social memories relating to trajectories of emancipation/resubordination in colonial and postcolonial times, and narratives of contemporary enslavement. We are also interested in a fuller exploration of music, dance, proverbs and folklore and would like to collect as many life histories as possible from the point of view of descendants of slaves and of former masters and slave-dealers.

Interested persons should submit a title and an abstract to http://www.blogger.com/ <http://www.blogger.com/>. All participants will be expected to post on the conference web-site a month before the conference a copy of their papers and at least one document on which the paper is based. Our objective is to publish both a collection of sources and a volume ofessays. We hope to have funds available to bring scholars from Africa, including graduate students working on questions of slavery. Other participants will be expected to find their own funding.