Menkiti, Ifeanyi. "On Rationality and the Burden of the Ijele Masquerade: a Note on Emmanuel Eze's Work." Special Issue on Eze. SYMPOSIA (2009).

There is a saying that the eye cannot see what the mind does not already know. Here, Eze is surely right in reminding us that the mind’s knowing, and consequently its seeing, is anchored in an irreducible way in the specificities of circumstance, the exigencies of experience in history. There can be no one fell swoop global perceptual act that anchors all our knowledge, or anchors all our rationality conceived with a capital R. . . . Read the rest here: http://web.mit.edu/sgrp/2008/eze/MenkitiEZE08.pdf.

Symposium on Emmanuel Eze's ON REASON. SYMPOSIA Special Issue (2008).

Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. On Reason: Rationality for a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. Durham: Duke UP, 2008 (forthcoming). Here is a description of the book offered at Amazon.Com:

Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In On Reason, the philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality and, by extension, philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of difference--the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity, political correctness, the culture wars, and identity politics--Eze expounds a rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity. Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of affirming both identity and difference. Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores models of rationality in the thought of a broad range of philosophers from Aristotle, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Jacques Derrida, and Cornel West. He considers portrayals of reason in the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race, and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and unreason in the hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical and cultural circumstances.

Here is an extract from John Pittman's review:

Eze is perhaps best known for his critical reading of Kant’s anthropological writings and the philosophical ‘raciology’ they contain, in his important article, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology.” He extended that critique to include Hume as well in his edited volume on Race and the Enlightenment. Indeed, Emmanuel Eze was the contemporary writer who most consistently explored the issue of the racial logic of the founding thinkers of the European enlightenment. In Achieving our Humanity: the Idea of a Postracial Future (2001), Eze extended that inquiry, discussing at length the history of race conceptions in European thought, arguing that the modern origins of philosophical racism in Europe lie in the writings of Hume and Kant, and reflecting on the cultural issues faced by Africans in the diaspora. He was something of a ‘hardliner’ on the role of modern European philosophy, arguing both that the racism that ravaged Africa and produced the horrors of the middle passage and New World slavery was a modern invention underwritten by the ‘greats’ of the modern philosophical tradition, and that the philosophical foundation of the ‘Enlightenment project’ was itself compromised by the pervasive racialization of the social thought of its celebrated founding figures. He emphatically rejected the suggestion that “we ‘separate’ the ideal from the real [Enlightenment], holding on to one while rejecting the other.” (Eze 1997, 12). “It is more appropriate,” Eze claimed, ”to consider Africa’s experience of the ‘Age of Europe’ as the cost of Occidental modernity” (Eze 1997, 13). There were signs his hard-line attitude had softened by the time Achieving our Humanity was written. There he justified his concerns about what he saw as Kant’s racializing of reason by referring to himself as one of those “who do not wish to continue to see the word ‘universalism’ regarded as a curse word (to damn nonwhite cultures or as an expletive against white cultures) [and] are interested in separating true from false universalism” (Eze 2001, 81). On Reason (2008) can be seen as Eze’s constructive response to his abiding concern with the consequences of European enlightenment’s racialization of reason: if no nonracialized version of European philosophy’s method can be recuperated, then we must look elsewhere for a truly universal account of reason.

Read the rest of the review here: http://web.mit.edu/sgrp/2008/eze/PittmanSP08.pdf.

Janz, Bruce. "Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 1963-2007: a Personal Reflection."

I was in the Philosophy department at the University of Nairobi in the summer of 1994, meeting whoever I could, buying all the books I could find, generally just trying to find out what interested the philosophers there. I had come to Kenya for the summer, not my first visit and certainly not my last, to help my partner at the time with her development work in Western Kenya. I'd already run into Jay van Hook, who introduced me to Henry Odera Oruka, and I'd met Fred Ochieng Odhiambo and many others as well. One day, another visitor of Oruka's dropped by the department. Emmanuel Eze was making a tour of major philosophers in Africa. We quickly found out that we had a great deal in common, as far as our academic interests and background were concerned. We talked about our training, mine in Canada and his in what was at the time Zaire, and then also Fordham in New York. We stayed in touch when we were back in North America. It became clear to me, the more I read and the more I thought about our discussions, that African philosophy was much richer than I'd realized. I learned from Emmanuel the way to look at African philosophy as something other than a sub-specialty of philosophy, a small area of interest only to those who were brought up on the continent or were part of the diaspora. My interest at the time, and to this day, was with the question of how philosophy related to the conditions of the production of its concepts, as I've come to think of it, its place. Emmanuel asked me to work some of these concerns out by contributing a paper to a volume he was editing. That volume became Postcolonial African Philosophy. I saw in Emmanuel someone whose concern was to develop a field, to make it robust, active, and impossible to ignore. He was constantly talking to people about this, and he knew just about everyone in the field, and many people in related fields. This energy and vision bore fruit. He raised the issue of how difficult it was to find out about activities in African philosophy, and out of that AFRI-PHIL was born. It began its life at Bucknell University, where he was at the time, and Frank Wilson and I were the first listmasters. When Frank retired, Julie Maybee agreed to be a listmaster, and it moved to CUNY Lehman, where it resides to this day. Emmanuel began talking to me and others about the transitory nature of publishing in African philosophy, how journals came and went, and how difficult it was to find a place to publish work in more mainstream journals. Out of that came African Philosophy (at the time a collaborative effort with SAPINA), which eventually became Philosophia Africana (which now comes out of DePaul Philosophy Department). The driving force of these initiatives, and many more, was Emmanuel's vision for the field, and for Africa. He was a rare mix, of someone with real philosophical insight and ability, along with a kind of academic entrepreneurial spirit. He made things happen. But more than that, I think what I found so significant about him as a person was his gentle intelligence. He knew more than he said, always, and he had a way of challenging you that made you feel better, rather than worse about your ideas. He expected the best from those around him, and from himself, and I always enjoyed rising to his level when we discussed ideas. If there is one abiding intellectual passion that Emmanuel had, it concerned the nature of reason. You might have thought that I would say "race", and that, indeed, was a central focus for him, but what made it a focus was the way in which reason became "coloured" (to quote the title of one of his best known essays, "The Colour of Reason") throughout its formative period in the European Enlightenment and to the present. You can see it in most of his published work, but you can also see it in how he conducted himself. This is the gentle intelligence I saw in him. He was adept at shining a light in the dark places of Enlightenment philosophy, showing the racial assumptions in the supposedly universal pronouncements on reason. His Race and the Enlightenment will stand as an essential volume in modern philosophy, and his Achieving Our Humanity will only become more appreciated as time goes by, I believe. And, I look forward to his forthcoming On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. All these, along with his papers and other anthologies, have been centrally concerned with reconstructing reason.That reconstruction did not amount to an abandonment, nor did it mean that he wanted to fragment reason into hermetically sealed compartments. He once accused me of something that I think applied better to himself. He said "At the core, you're an Enlightenment philosopher". Despite the thoroughgoing critique he made of the Enlightenment heritage, I believe he actually meant this as a compliment, and as something that he felt was fundamentally important for himself as well. Reason mattered to him; the problem was, how do we not be naïve about the ways in which it has been used for domination, exclusion, and control? Where could we see models within traditional African social and political structures for a form of reason that had not fallen prey to the blinders of the European Enlightenment? How have these blinders continued throughout the 20th century, both in anthropology as well as in writers such as Habermas? How might we reason about Africa, while recognizing that the disciplinary forms of that reason over the past two hundred years have served European interests, not African ones, and have served to prolong the privilege inherent in much of Enlightenment reason? How has reason systematically mis-categorized its objects of inquiry (in particular the way in which racial categories infiltrated supposedly "universal" reason), and what might be done about that? And, how does individual reason relate to social and, especially, political structures? The last time I saw him was in Johannesburg in October 07. We were both at an excellent conference on the future of African philosophy, hosted by Gerard Walmsley, at St. Augustine Seminary. Emmanuel did the opening keynote, and established the standard for the conference. What touched me at the time was the sheer grace he exhibited to everyone throughout the conference. He was there for everyone, me included. He told me after my paper that "if I were his brother, he'd have to kill me" - his very amusing way of putting a compliment in terms of brotherly rivalry. But the thing was, I realized that in some small way we were brothers. At least, we'd been through a lot together, and we shared a strong sense of the importance of philosophy in Africa and in the diaspora, first for Africans, but also for the world of philosophy. He didn't know at that point that his liver was failing him, and I recall thinking at the time that I was looking forward to a long and fruitful collaboration with him on future projects. When I heard he was gone, after the denial had subsided ("no, it must be another Emmanuel Eze") for some reason all I could think of was Derrida's comment at the death of Deleuze: "I'm going to have to wander all alone" (see, for this, The Work of Mourning, which came out of a conference at DePaul). But I also went back to a memorial that Emmanuel and I wrote for Derrida, in Philosophia Africana (8:1, March 2005, 79-82), a piece that carried the epigram "Uprooted African am I". Here's how we finished that short piece:

In fact, when he wrote about debt-especially debt to the dead-Derrida came closest to revealing a unique strain of the "Afro": he thinks that the dead belongs to the living as much as the living belongs to the dead. Once again, on the subject of mourning a friend who had died, he mused, "When I say Roland Barthes it is certainly him whom I name, him beyond his name. But since he himself is now in accessible to this appellation . . . it is him in me that I name, toward him in me, in you, in us that I pass through his name." This is how, without any metaphysical or functional guarantees, the dead becomes, for the living, ancestors or the living dead. The living-dead are alive because their words, their works, earn a life in the words and works of those still capable to live death.

Emmanuel probably didn't think about it this way for himself, but for me, he's now an ancestor. He surely "earned a life in the words and works of those still capable to live death." And I will mourn him, and will miss him always. Bruce B. Janz Associate Professor of Humanities and Associate Chair, Dept. of Philosophy University of Central Florida 4000 Central Florida Blvd. Orlando, FL 32816-1352 TEL: 407-823-5408 DEPT: 407-823-2273 FAX: 407-823-6658 janzb@mail.ucf.edubbjanz@gmail.com http://brucejanz.com/ Director, Center for Humanities and Digital Research TR541 CHDR TEL: 407-823-1226 chdr@mail.ucf.edu

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1963 - 2007).

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1963-2007) was a Nigerian-born American philosopher. Eze was a specialist in postcolonial philosophy. He wrote as well as edited influential postcolonial histories of philosophy in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Influences in his own work include Paulin Hountondji, Richard Rorty, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Eze was most recently Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, where he also edited the journal Philosophia Africana. He died December 30, 2007 after a short illness. . . . More at Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Chukwudi_Eze.