Africana Critical Theory

by Reiland Rabaka

Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral.

Building on and going far beyond W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century and Du Bois's Dialectics, Reiland Rabaka's Africana Critical Theory innovatively identifies and analyzes continental and diasporan African contributions to classical and contemporary critical theory. This book represents a climatic critical theoretical clincher that cogently demonstrates how Du Bois's rarely discussed dialectical thought, interdisciplinarity, intellectual history-making radical political activism, and world-historical multiple liberation movement leadership helped to inaugurate a distinct Africana tradition of critical theory.

"W.E.B. Du Bois and Philosophy in a Time of Crisis"

The W.E.B. Du Bois Symposium occurred at Temple University on Feb. 24-25, 2012, in Phila, Pa.. This event was organized by Dr. Anthony Monteiro with the support of the African-American Studies Department.

Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come

By Lewis Gordon, Truthout 

In early spring 1994, I paid a visit to Los Angeles, where I was greeted in the airport at the arrival gate - that was still possible in those days - by my friend Mina Choi, who was a former babysitter to my eldest son when I was in graduate school. Having completed her studies at Yale, Mina was pursuing her writing career in Los Angeles. We embraced each other in a hearty hello, a mundane act expected of good friends, which, however, led to a halt and uncomfortable silence among our fellow travelers, their family and friends. Such was the response to a meeting of Northeast Asia and African America nearly two years after the 1992 Riots/Uprisings.[1] Although Rodney King famously pleaded, "Can we all get along?" there clearly continued to be much doubt.

Fanon in recent African political thought

by Lewis Gordon, Penser aujourd'hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon Éditions en ligne, CSPRP - Université Paris 7, Février 2008

First, I would like to thank Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Valérie Lowit, and the other organizers for their hard work in putting this meeting together. A local meeting is difficult enough. To have taken on such a task on an international scale is Promethean. I would also like to thank Mireille Fanon-Mendes for her international work on human rights. Her father, in whose honor this meeting was organized, would be very proud to know how well she embodies his spirit. And finally, I would like to thank the audience. In the United States, there are scholars who are fond of saying that Fanon has no influence in France, that he is relatively unknown in French intellectual circles. The several hundred people who attended various sessions over the two days of this conference prove otherwise.

Achille Mbembe Delivers the 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture

The Souls of Black Folk

The Forethought

1. Of Our Spiritual Strivings
2. Of the Dawn of Freedom
3. Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others
4. Of the Meaning of Progress
5. Of the Wings of Atalanta
6. Of the Training of Black Men
7. Of the Black Belt
8. Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
9. Of the Sons of Master and Man
10. Of the Faith of the Fathers
11. Of the Passing of the First-Born
12. Of Alexander Crummell
13. Of the Coming of John
14. The Sorrow Songs

The After-Thought

A Short History of the ‘Critical’ in Critical Race Theory

Lewis Gordon, People of Color Organize

Critical Race Theory is strongly associated with Critical Legal Studies—an approach to American jurisprudence advanced by a group of progressive, often liberal and sometimes Marxist jurists in the 1980s and the present decade. The Critical Legal Studies group, of whom the most prominent associates are Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Derrick Bell, are most peculiarly marked by their utilization of developments in postmodern poststructural scholarship, especially the focus on “subaltern” or “marginalized” communities and the use of alternative methodology in the expression of theoretical work, most notably their use of “narratives” and other literary techniques.

Problematic People & Epistemic Decolonization: Towards the Post-Colonial in Africana Thought

by Lewis Gordon, Chapter Six in Postcolonialism and Political Theory (ed. Nalini Persram)

The relationship between the West and the rest in political thought has been one of the constructions of the world in which the latter have been located outside and thus, literally, without a place on which to stand. Hidden parenthetical adjectives of “European,” “western,” and “white” have been the hallmarks of such reflection on political reality and the anthropology that informs it. For the outsiders, explicit adjectival techniques of appearance thus became the rule of the day, as witnessed by, for instance, “African,” “Asian,” or “Native,” among others, as markers of their subaltern status in the supposedly wider disciplines. The role of these subcategories is, however, not a static one, and as historical circumstances shift, there have been ironic reversals in their various roles. In the case of (western and white) liberal political theory, for instance, the commitment to objectivity by way of the advancement of a supposedly value-neutral moral and political agent stood as the universal in an age in which such a formulation did not face its own cultural specificity.