Africa Development, Volume
XXXIX, No. 1, 2014, pp. 81-92
© Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2014
(ISSN
0850-3907)
Disciplinary
Decadence and the Decolonisation of Knowledge
Lewis R. Gordon*
Abstract
In celebration of the
fortieth anniversary of CODESRIA, an institution from the Global South devoted
to taking responsibility for the production of social science knowledge, this
article explores what it means to pursue such a task under the threat of colonial
imposition at methodological and disciplinary levels, which, the author argues,
carries dangers of disciplinary decadence marked by the fetishisation of
method. The author offers alternatives through what he calls ‘a teleological
suspension of disciplinarity, and raises the question not only of the
decolonisation of knowledge but also norms.
Resumé
Pour célébrer le quarantième
anniversaire du CODESRIA, une institution des pays du Sud dévouée dans la
production de connaissances en sciences sociales, cet article explore les
implications de mener une telle tâche sous la menace de l’emprise coloniale à
des niveaux méthodologiques et disciplinaires, qui, selon l’auteur, provoque
des dangers sur la décadence disciplinaire marquée par la divination de la méthode.
L’auteur propose des alternatives à travers ce qu’il appelle « une suspension
téléologique de l’interdisciplinarité, et pose la question non seulement de la
décolonisation de la connaissance, mais aussi celle des normes.
This article, offered in celebration of
CODESRIA’s fortieth anniversary, addresses some recent theoretical developments
in the decolonisation of knowledge. That knowledge has been colonised raises the question of whether it was ever free. The formulation of
knowledge in the singular already situates the question in a framework that is
alien to times before the emergence of European modernity and its age of global
domination, for the disparate modes of producing knowledge and notions of
knowledge were so many that knowledges
would be a more appropriate designation.
* Professor of Philisophy, African and Judaic
studies, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Email: lewis.gordon@uconn.edu
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Unification was a function of various
stages of past imperial realignment, where local reflections shifted their
attention to centres elsewhere to the point of concentric collapse. On their
way, those varieties of knowledge coalesced into knowledge of the centre, and
successive collapses of centres under the weight of other centres led, over
time, to the global situation of the
centre (centrism) and its concomitant organisation of knowledges into
knowledge.1 This path has not, however, been one
exclusively built upon alienation, for along with the strange and the alien were
also the familiar and, at times, the welcomed.
Enrique Dussel is a member of a community of scholars who
have questioned the logic of self-reflection offered by the most recent stage
of centric productions of knowledge.2 The philosophical
framework of such rationalisation is familiar to most students of Western
philosophy: René Descartes reflected on method in the seventeenth century, grew
doubtful, and articulated the certainty of his thinking self in opposition to
the fleeting world of physical appearance. A result of such intellectual labour
is a shift of first questions from meditations on what there is to what can be
known. This focus on epistemology as first philosophy charted the course of
philosophy in modern terms against and with which contemporary philosophers and
social theorists continue to struggle and grapple. For political thinkers, the
new beginning is a little earlier, in the late fifteenth century – through
early sixteenth-century reflections on politics by Niccolò Machiavelli. Against
these intellectualist formulations of modern life, Dussel raises the question
of its underside, of the geopolitical, material impositions and the unnamed
millions whose centres collapsed not simply from the force of ideas but sword
and musket. That modernity was ironically also identified by Machiavelli but is
often overlooked through how he is read today: in The Prince, Machiavelli wrote of the effects of King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella’s victory over the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula.3
His focus on the repression wrought in the name of Christendom presumed,
however, the continued significance of the Mediterranean in the commerce of
world-constituting activity. Dussel’s (and others’) work argues that the
continued conflict spread westward across the Atlantic Ocean, and by October of
that year, 1492, a series of new relations were established with a New World
that de-centreed the Mediterranean, stimulated a new economy and, with it, an
organisation of its management (new epistemologies), and realigned the western
peninsula of Asia into a new political territory in the form of a continent,
namely, Europe.4
Prior to the emergence of Europe, there were maps of the
Mediterranean that would have to be turned upside down to be familiar to
contemporary travellers, for, as was the case with ancient organisations of
locations of
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regions that included northeast Africa,
whose most known civilisation was Egypt (Km.t, as it was originally known
before acquiring the Greek name by which it is now known), ‘upper’ pointed
south, and ‘lower’ northward.5 One, in other words, travelled up
to what became known as Africa and down to what became known as Europe. The
birth of new centres produced new geopolitical relations, and as focus on the
New World eclipsed the effort to establish trade with southwest and middle
Asia, the bourgeoning economies affected the cultural life as well. In the
production of cultural considerations also emerged those of new forms of life.
A transition followed from Jews, Christians, and Muslims to Europeans, Asians,
Africans, and New World peoples forced into some variation of the misnomer
‘Indians’ or ‘red savages’ at first along old Aristotelian categories of
developed versus undeveloped ‘men’. This movement, negotiated through conquest,
colonisation, disputations, and enslavement, brought to the fore reflections of
‘man’ on ‘man,’ with constant anxiety over the stability of such a category. In
such study, the process of discovery, of uncovering, also became one of
invention and production: The search to understand ‘man’ was also producing
him. Its destabilisation was inevitable as
his possibilities called his
exclusion of ‘her’ into question. The concomitant reorganisation of
understanding him and her is oddly a schema that befits the dominating
knowledge scheme of the epoch: Science.
The word ‘science,’ although also meaning knowledge,
reveals much in its etymology. It is a transformation of the Latin infinitive scire (to know), which, let us now add, suggests a connection to the verb scindere (to divide – think, today of
‘schism’), which, like many Latin words, also shares origins with ancient Greek
words, which, in this case would be skhizein (to split, to cleave). Oddly enough,
this exercise in etymology is indication of a dimension of epistemological
colonisation, for most etymological exercises report a history of words as
though language itself is rooted in Greek and Roman classicism. The tendency is
to find the sources of meaning from either the European side of the Mediterranean
or from the north. There is an occasional stop off in Western Asia, but for the
most part, the history of important terms suggests a geographical movement that
is oddly similar to the movement of Geist in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy
of History.6 Some further inquiry reveals, however, the
relationship of the Latin and Greek words to more ancient Egyptian/Km.tian
words Crethi and kotket by way of the Hebrew Crethi, which was derived from the root carath,
which means ‘to cut’. The word Crethi referred to the ancient Egyptian/ Km.tian royal armies, which were
split into two classes.7 We thus see here
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a transition from one form of ancient
centre to various others on a course to European modern times. Oddly enough,
there is an etymological link during the Latin transition with another Latin
infinitive, secare (which also means ‘to cut’), through
which is more transparently connected the Hebrew carath (if one imagines cara as a possible spoken form).
Secare is the source of the
English word sex. A link between
science and sex brings biology to the fore and the question of life sciences.
Such a consideration indicates the importance of life reflections on the
unfolding developing of systematic inquiry: As the question of a supreme deity
motivated theological reflections and metaphysical inquiry, so, too, did
concerns over the generation of life initiate scientific inquiry, although life
was loaded with metaphysical content as anxieties and fear over the salvation
of the soul without the theological guarantees attested to this day.
The subsequent unfolding story is familiar to most of us
who study colonisation. Along with the expansion of Christian kingdoms into
nationstates and their colonies, which resulted over the course of a few
hundred years into European civilisation on a global scale, was also a series
of epistemological developments that have literally produced new forms of life:
new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups
of them occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship by which
they are indigenous to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong to.8
These people have been aptly described by W.E.B. Du Bois as ‘problems’.9
They are a function of a world in which they are posited as illegitimate
although they could exist nowhere else. I am speaking here primarily of blacks
and Indians/Native Americans, and by blacks I also mean to include Australian
Aboriginals and related groups in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Such
people are treated by dominant organisations of knowledge, especially those
falling under the human or social sciences, as problems instead of people who
face problems. Their problem status is a function of the presupposed legitimacy
of the systems that generate them. In effect, being perfect, the systems that
produce their condition resist blame for any injustice or contradiction that
may be avowed by such people. They become extraneous to those systems’ functions in spite
of having already been generated by them. The contradictory nature of such
assessments distorts the process of reasoning and the production of knowledge
into doubled structures of disavowals and concealment, at times even with
claims of transparency, and more problem people result. A consequence of such
reflection is the proliferation of more kinds of problem people. Since 2001,
when the US War on Terror was inaugurated, the production of such people has
increased.
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At this point, I should like to make some distinctions that
may anchor some of the abstract terms of this discussion. That modes of
producing knowledge can be enlisted in the service of colonisation is evident.
Frantz Fanon, for instance, reflected, in Peau
noire, masques blancs, that
methods have a way of devouring themselves.10 In doing so, he
brought into focus the problem of evaluating method itself, of assessing
methodology. If the epistemic conditions of social life were colonised, would
not that infection reach also the grammatical level, the very grounds of
knowledge? Put differently, couldn’t there also be colonisation at the
methodological level? If so, then, any presumed method, especially from a
subject living within a colonised framework, could generate continued
colonisation. To evaluate method, the best ‘method’ is the suspension of
method. This paradox leads to a demand for radical anti-colonial critique. But
for such a reflection to be radical, it must also make even logic itself
suspect. Such a demand leads to a distinction between rationality and reason.
The former cannot suspend logic, for to be what it is, it must, at minimum,
demand consistency. The demand for consistency eventually collapses into
maximum consistency, in order to be consistent. In effect, this means that
rationality must presume its method, and it must resist straying from its
generating grammar. Reason, however, offers a different story. To be maximally
consistent, although logically commendable, is not always reasonable.
Reasonability can embrace contradictions. Even more, it must be able to do so in order to evaluate even itself. This means
that the scope of reason exceeds rationality.
Science is more at home with rationality than it is with
reason. Departure from consistency-maximisation would disintegrate an important
foundation of modern science, namely, the notion of a law of nature. A law in
this sense cannot have exceptions. Since reason at times demands exceptions, a
marriage between science and reason would be shortlived. The project of much of
modern European philosophical thought, however, has been the effort to
cultivate such a marriage. Toward such a goal, the instruments of rationality
are often unleashed with the result of the effort to yoke reason to
rationality. This effort could be reformulated as the effort to colonise
reason.
The effort to colonise reason has had many productive
consequences. Many disciplines have been generated by this effort. On one hand,
there are the natural and exact theoretical sciences. On the other, there are
the human sciences. The former set seems to behave in a more disciplined way
than the latter. Although disciplining the latter has resulted in a variety of
disciplines, the underlying goal of maximum rationalisation has been
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consistently strained. The source of such
difficulty – reality – has been unremitting. Karl Jaspers, in Philosophy
of Existence, summarised the
circumstance well: reality is not always obedient to consciousness.11
Any discipline or generated system for the organisation of reality faces the
problem of having to exceed the scope of its object of inquiry, but since it,
too, must be part of that object (if it is to be something as grand as
reality), it must contain itself in a logical relationship to all it is trying
to contain, which expands the initial problem of inclusion. There is, in other
words, always more to, and of,
reality.
Failure to appreciate reality sometimes takes the form of
recoiling from it. An inward path of disciplinary solitude eventually leads to
what I call disciplinary decadence.12
This is the phenomenon of turning away from living thought, which engages
reality and recognises its own limitations, to a deontologised or absolute
conception of disciplinary life. The discipline becomes, in solipsistic
fashion, the world. And in that
world, the main concern is the proper administering of its rules, regulations,
or, as Fanon argued, (self-devouring) methods.13 Becoming ‘right’ is
simply a matter of applying, as fetish, the method correctly. This is a form of
decadence because of the set of considerations that fall to the wayside as the
discipline turns into itself and eventually implodes. Decay, although a natural
process over the course of time for living things, takes on a paradoxical
quality in disciplinary formation. A discipline, e.g., could be in decay
through a failure to realise that decay is possible. Like empires, the
presumption is that the discipline must outlive all, including its own purpose.
In more concrete terms, disciplinary decadence takes the
form of one discipline assessing all other disciplines from its supposedly
complete standpoint. It is the literary scholar who criticises work in other
disciplines as not literary. It is the sociologist who rejects other
disciplines as not sociological. It is the historian who asserts history as the
foundation of everything. It is the natural scientist that criticises the
others for not being scientific. And it is also the philosopher who rejects all
for not being properly philosophical. Discipline envy is also a form of
disciplinary decadence. It is striking, for instance, how many disciplines in
the humanities and the social sciences are now engaged in intellectual history
with a focus on the Western philosophical canon. And then there is decadence at
methodological levels. Textualism, for example, infects historiography at the
level of archival legitimacy. Or worse, in some forms of textualism, the
expectation of everything being contained in the text becomes evident in work
in the human sciences that announce studying its subject through an analysis
exclusively of texts on the subject. There are scholars in race theory, e.g.,
who seem to
87
think that theorising the subject is a
matter of determining what has been said on it by a small set of canonical
texts. When appearance is reduced to textuality, what, then, happens to
inquiry? What are positivism and certain forms of semiological imitation of
mathematical phenomena but science envy? When biologism, sociologism,
psychologism, and many others assert themselves, to what, ultimately, are they
referring? In the human sciences, the problem becomes particularly acute in the
study of problem people. Such people misbehave also in disciplinary terms. The
failure to squeeze them into disciplinary dictates, from a disciplinarily
decadent perspective, is proof of a problem with the people instead of the
discipline. It serves as further proof of the pathological nature of such
people.
A response to disciplinary decadence (although not often
identified as such) has been
interdisciplinarity. A problem with this response is that it, too, is a
decadent structure. This is because presumed disciplinary completeness of each
discipline is compatible with disciplinary decadence. Disciplines could simply
work alongside each other like ships passing in the night. A more hopeful route
is transdisciplinarity, where disciplines work through each other; yet although more
promising, such a route is still susceptible to decadence so long as it fails
to bring reality into focus. But doing that raises questions of purpose. It
raises considerations that may need to be addressed in spite of disciplinary dictates. I call this process a teleological
suspension of disciplinarity. By that, I mean the willingness to go beyond
disciplines in the production of knowledge. This ‘beyond’ is, however,
paradoxical. In some instances, it revitalizes an existing discipline. In
others, it generates a new one. For example, a teleological suspension of
philosophy generates new philosophy in some instances, and in others, it may
generate new social thought that may not be philosophical. A teleological
suspension of topology, chemistry, and biology could offer much to genetics and
other sequencing notions of life. Germane to this special forum, it could also
transform ways in which one theorises the relationship of dependency to
development.
Teleological suspensions of disciplines are also epistemic
decolonial acts. The discussion I have offered thus far places such acts
squarely in, although not exclusive to, Africana philosophy. By Africana
philosophy, I mean the exploration of modern life as understood through
contradictions raised by the lived-reality of African Diasporic people. Because
such people are often linked to many other communities whose humanity has been
challenged, Africana philosophy is also a philosophy that speaks beyond the
Africana community. Among the pressing themes of Africana philosophy are: (1)
philosophical anthropology, (2) freedom and liberation,
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and (3) metacritiques of reason. Their
presence in this discussion is evident, but to summarise: The first is raised
by the dehumanisation of people (making them into problems) in the modern
world; the second pertains to the transformation of (emancipation from) that
circumstance; and the third examines whether the first two, especially at the
level of the reasons offered in their support, are justified. I cannot provide
a detailed discussion of these thematics here because of limited space.
Instead, I should like to close with several additional considerations.
The first is regarding the political significance of this
critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over
relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that
rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes
politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to
appear, to exist. Colonisation involves the elimination of discursive
opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence
of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of
political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It
is not that colonised groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks
appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of
speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as
gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech –
namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics
of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor
other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against
models of decolonial practice that centre ethics. The additional challenge,
then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical
life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of
coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European
modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of
epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be
called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces
its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes
instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that
demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as
blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means,
then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political
conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony,
which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity.
It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethics-centred
approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate.
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This challenge to ethics raises the question of the scope
of normative life. An example of this is the presumed universality of the
concept of justice. What many people in the Global South have experienced is
that justice could be consistently advanced in the interest of profound
suffering simply by rendering illegitimate the humanity of whole groups of
people. Thus, it could be claimed that justice was achieved in the United
States through the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation it occasioned or that
it was accomplished in South Africa through the ending of legal Apartheid and
the process of the Truth and Reconciliation commissions, or that the many
former colonies that have become what Achille Mbembe aptly calls
‘postcolonies’.14 These moments of justice (or, as some readers
might prefer, supposed justice) did not transform the question of the human
status of black peoples and the presumption of humanness enjoyed by people
with, or those who have managed to acquire, the special credit or capital of
whiteness. The result has been an effort to seek in normative life what is, in
effect, beyond justice. In fact, the particularity of justice could be such
that while necessary for a certain dimension of political and legal activity,
it is insufficient for the deeper question of establishing a human relationship
to human institutions. If this is correct, a more radical inquiry into the
decolonisation of normative life is needed along with that of epistemic
practice.
The third is about the imperial significance of standards
as a correlate of the second critical concern. Consider the problem of
philosophical anthropology. Simply demonstrating that one group is as human as
another has the consequence of making one group the standard of another. In
effect, one group seeks justification while the other is self-justified. The
demonstration itself must be teleologically suspended. Shifting the geography
of reason means, as we take seriously such developments as South-South dialogue
and what the Caribbean Philosophical Association has called ‘shifting the
geography of reason’,15 that the work to be done becomes one
that raises the question of whose future we face.
Fourth, at least at the epistemological level, every empire
has a geopolitical impact by pushing things to its centre. In the past, the
range of empires was not global. Today, because global, we face the question of
the traces they leave when they have dissolved. In the past, empires
constructed civilisations that lasted at least a few thousand years. They soon
diminished to several hundred, then to a few hundred. Today, time is imploding
under the weight of rapid and excessive consumption (with the bulk of natural
resources being consumed in North America, Europe, and increases on the horizon
in Asia), and we must now struggle through
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a complex understanding of decay and the
dissolution of empires. As with all empires, the consciousness from within
continues to be susceptible to an inflated sense of importance, where the end
of empire is feared as the end of the world.
Fifth, subjects of dehumanising social institutions suffer
a paradoxical melancholia. They live a haunted precolonial past, a critical
relation to the colonial world from which they are born, and a desire for a
future in which, if they are able to enter, they are yoked to the past. A true,
new beginning stimulates anxiety because it appears, at least at the level of
identity, as suicide. The constitution of such subjectivity, then, is saturated
with loss without refuge.16
Sixth, the theme of loss raises challenges of what
decolonial activity imposes upon everyone. I call this the Moses problem.
Recall the biblical story of Exodus, where Moses led the former enslaved
Israelites (and members of other tribes who joined them) to the Promised Land.
Moses, we should remember, was not permitted to enter. Commentary, at least at Passover
Seders, explains that Moses’s sense of power (and ego) got in the way, and he
presented his might as a source of the Israelites’ liberation. There is much
that we who reflect upon decolonisation, those of us who seek liberation, could
learn from the mythic life of ancient people. Fanon paid attention to this
message when he wrote the longest chapter of Les Damnés de la terre,
namely, ‘Les Mésaventures de la conscience nationale’.17
The admonition is this: Those who are best suited for the transition from
colonisation/enslavement to the stage of initial liberty are not necessarily the
best people for the next, more difficult stage: Living the practice of freedom.
It is no accident that instead of the end of colonisation, new forms of
colonisation emerge. The movements, in other words, are as follows: from
initial freedom to bondage/colonisation, to decolonisation/initial liberation,
to neocolonisation, to internal opposition, to postcolonies (neocolonialism in
a world in which colonialism is shameful), to concrete manifestations of
freedom. What this means is that the more difficult, especially in political
and ethical terms, conflict becomes the one to wage against former liberators.
Like Moses, they must move out of the way so the subsequent generations could
build their freedom. We see here the sacrificial irony of all commitments to
liberation: It is always a practice for
others.
And seventh, but not final, as a consequence of the problem
of leadership, Fanon was critical of what is now called postcolonial leadership
and ruling groups in many Afro-majority societies. This leadership, whose moral
evocations led the process of decolonization, continues to formulate capital in
moral terms. Theirs is a supposedly or at least avowedly moral leadership.
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The European bourgeoisie developed
concepts, however, in coordination with infrastructural resources with great
social reach. We see here another blow to the kinds of liberation argument that
prioritise ethics over other modes of action and the organisation of knowledge.
The poor, as a category to stimulate an ethical response, need more than
submission and tears from their leadership. Meditation on and cultivation of
maturity, of how to negotiate, live, and transform a world of contradictions,
paradoxes, uncertainty, and unfairness, may be the proverbial wisdom well
sought.
Notes
1. On
this matter, see, e.g, Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality,
Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2000) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Another Knowledge
is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (London, UK: Verso, 2008). Cf.
also, Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Esquisse d’une critique monstrueuse de la raison
postcoloniale,’ Tumultes, numéro 37 (October 2011): 165–183 and Jane Anna
Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014).
2 See,
e.g., Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor,
and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996). This community of scholars includes
Linda Martín Alcoff, Paget Henry, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta,
and Walter Mignolo, works by all of whom, among others, I discuss in An
Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008). Cf. also Walter Mignolo’s recent, The Darker Side of Western Modernity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). To this epistemic challenge, I would
also add the problem of the decolonisation of normative life. On this matter,
see Mabogo More, ‘South Africa under and after Apartheid’ in Kwasi Wiredu, ed.,
A companion to African Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 148–157.
A variety of expanded definitions are offered in Drucilla Cornell and Noyoko
Muvangua, eds, Law in the Ubuntu of South Africa (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2012). Cf. also Leonhard Praeg, ed., Thinking Africa: A Report on Ubuntu
(Scottsville, SA: UKZN Press, 2014).
3.
See, e.g., Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans.
Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 76.
4.
For discussion of the historical process and the
historians and theorists who demonstrate it, see Lewis R. Gordon, An
Introduction to Africana Philosophy, chapters 1 and 2.
5.
E.g., see, Liz Sonneborn’s discussion of the Medieval
Islamic empires in the first two chapters of Averroes (Ibn Rushd): Muslim
Scholar, Philosopher, and Physician of the Twelfth Century (New York: The Rosen
Publishing
92
Company,
2005). Cf. also M. R. Greer, W. D. Mignolo, and M. Quilligan, eds, Rereading
the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the
Renaissance Empires (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
6.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of History,
trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956).
7.
See The Academy of St. Louis, Transactions of the
Academy of Science of St. Louis, vol. 1, 1856–1860 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp
and Company, 1860), p. 534.
8.
For more discussion, see, e.g., Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Not
Always Enslaved, Yet Not Quite Free: Philosophical Challenges from the
Underside of the New World’, Philosophia 36.2 (2007): 151–166; ‘When I Was
There, It Was Not: On Secretions Once Lost in the Night,’ Performance Research
2, no. 3 (September 2007): 8–15; and ‘Décoloniser le savoir à la suite de
Frantz Fanon,’ Tumultes, numéro 31 (2008): 103–123.
9.
See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays
and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). For discussion, see Lewis
R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New
York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4, ‘What Does It Mean to be a Problem?’
10.
Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris,
Éditions du Seuil, 1952).
11.
Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard
F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971).
12.
For more detailed discussion, see Lewis R. Gordon,
Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 2006).
13.
See Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, chapter 1.
14. See Achille
Mbembe, De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique
contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 2000).
15.
See that organisation’s website:
http:// wwwcaribbeanphilosophicalassociation.org/
16. For
more discussion on this way of reading melancholia, see Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial
Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), Nathalie Etoke’s
Melancholia Africana: L’indispensable dépassement de la condition noire (Paris:
Éditions du Cygne, 2010), and Lewis R. Gordon, ‘When Reason Is in a Bad Mood: A
Fanonian Philosophical Portrait,’ in Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber, eds,
Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Dordrecht: Springer
Press, 2011), pp. 185–198.
17. Frantz
Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).
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