Lewis Gordon
Rather than a single black intellectual tradition, there are
more properly black intellectual traditions. These are intellectual movements
that have developed in the modern world out of the formation of black people,
who in turn were formed from a diverse set of ethnic groups. Some emerged from
the many African ethnicities brought under the rubric of "black."
Others are from varieties of black-designated groups in southern Asia and the
Pacific. The most dominant representatives have become the "black
Atlantic" traditions, although in ancient times through the Middle Ages,
there were black Mediterranean and other black traditions along the eastern
coasts of Africa, as attested to by the Islamic thought of the Moors (such as
Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun) on one hand, and the Abyssinians (Zera Yacob and
Walda Heywat) on the other. This article will focus on the black Atlantic
traditions.
Pre-Twentieth Century Origins
The traditions that emerged in the Atlantic since the
eighteenth century devoted much energy to themes of liberation from enslavement
and colonialism and interrogating what it means to be human. A smaller line,
whose intellectual descendants include contemporary black professional
philosophers, focused on the reasoning involved in the prior two themes. That
line also challenged the tendency to treat "black" and
"intellectual" as incompatible combinations in the modern world. A
unique feature of modern slavery was its accompanying racialism and racism.
Those additions challenged the humanity of African and other designated black peoples.
The intellectual response was an interrogation of the standards of human
recognition and identification and the justificatory practices of freedom, a
consideration shared with nearly all western traditions of the modern age. In
his book Caliban's Reason (2000), Paget Henry organized these traditions
through the lens of poeticism and historicism. The former addresses the three
themes by examining the semiological practices that form the black self and
argue for the transformation of those signs and symbols, especially through the
resources of literature and poetry, for the proverbial liberation of the mind.
The latter focuses on changing material conditions and history. The dichotomy
is not, however, a neat one since fusions of poeticism and historicism are more
often the case with each intellectual line.
Several lines of black thought, which form the black
intellectual traditions, emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
with influences to the present. The first brings together the three thematics
of freedom, anthropology, and critical evaluations of justificatory practices
through resources of philosophical, religious, scientific, and political
thought. In this first line, there is a set of writers who do not lay claim to
black specificity, although many such intellectuals recognize themselves as
African, "Negro," or black. Exemplars include Anton Wilhelm Amo (also
known as Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer), who taught as a professor of philosophy
at the universities of Halle and Jena in the eighteenth century; Benjamin
Banneker, the famed freed-black scientist of the same period; and Ottobah
Cougano, a former slave whose main work has received philosophical attention
over the past decade. And then there are those who work with an abiding concern
for the construction of black or, in their time, Negro thought. Those include
David Walker, Martin Delaney, Alexander Crummell, Anténor Firmin, and Marcus
Garvey in the nineteenth century through early twentieth. A second line is
primarily autobiographical, with writings that became known as the slave
narratives. Cougano is included here, along with Olaudah Equiano, Harriet
Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. The grammar of these
narratives has affected black autobiographical reflection in the black
intellectual traditions across the Diaspora, as attested by the narratives of
Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois in North America, Sol Plaatje in
Southern Africa, and Aimé Césaire in the Caribbean. The autobiographical
writings of these authors (among others) have had an enormous impact on the
study of literature in the American academy, especially since the 1980s.
Political Context of Black Intellectual Traditions
Black intellectual traditions have been embedded in the
politics of the modern world and prior to the 1980s have been rooted in such
nonacademic institutions as churches, mosques, and synagogues; political
parties and unions. Alternative organizations and movements have been the
forums in which their ideas were typically developed. The consequence is that
black intellectual traditions have been generally organized under the rubrics
of: (1) black nationalism, with internationalist and localist variations, (2)
black liberalism, (3) black left-wing radicalism, and (4) black conservatism.
These are not neat designations because these various traditions overlap with
each other. For instance, there have been black conservatives who were
nationalists and those who were not; there were black liberals who were
antinationalists and those who were otherwise. There are, however, some clearly
identifiable genealogical patterns.
(1) Black nationalism. The work of David Walker, Martin
Delany, Alexander Crummell, Anténor Firmin, and Marcus Garvey, for instance,
were foundational for black movements such as Pan-Africanism (1900 onward), the
Harlem Renaissance (1920s), Negritude (1930s), Black Power (late 1950s into the
1960s), the Black Arts Movement (1960s), Black Theology (from 1950s but linked
to Black Power in the 1960s onward), (to some extent) the Black Consciousness
movement of South Africa and Britain (1970s), and Afrocentrism and
Afrocentricity (1980s). The main tenets of the variety of traditions that grew
out of black nationalism are (a) the necessity of black solidarity for the
liberation of black people, (b) the distinctness of black or African peoples
either racially, culturally, historically, psychologically, or politically, and
(c) the importance of forming and maintaining uniquely black institutions.
(2) Liberal line. The exemplar of the liberal line was
Frederick Douglass, although we should bear in mind that his liberalism,
because of its foundations in abolitionism, was "radical" in the
nineteenth century. Although Benjamin Banneker preceded him in the liberal
tradition, Douglass's oratory skills and prolific writings on political matters
made him the towering figure of black liberal republicanism before the
twentieth century. Subsequent exemplars include the young W. E. B. Du Bois,
Charles Houston (architect of the legal strategy against American apartheid),
Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr. (who, like Douglass, also inspired a
more radical left-wing line), and Derrick Bell (one of the major proponents of
the critical legal-studies movement). The black liberal tradition focuses on
black inclusion in world affairs. Its main aim is equality, sometimes to the
point of espousing colorblind policies. The more left-oriented black liberal
tradition adds considerations for disadvantaged groups, which places that
tradition in debates over such social remedies as affirmative action and
reparations.
(3) Radical line. Black left-wing radicalism has been the
only kind of radical black tradition. Although some critics, such as Paul
Gilroy in his book Against Race (2000), have described some black nationalist
movements as "fascist," there has never been a black right-wing
radical movement. The left-wing movements have, however, suffered a splintered
history because of the role black nationalism has played as a counter-hegemonic
response to antiblack racist states. That Marxism's critique of capitalism focused
on the same states led to inevitable convergence and conflict with that
tradition. The convergence was against racism, which Marxists saw as
exploitation. The divide was on Marxist universalism. Marxism called for black
intellectuals to appear universally as part of or in solidarity with the
working class. Black nationalists were suspicious of an antiblack racist
working class. The radical black nationalists and the Marxists, however, argued
for the necessity of revolutionary change for black liberation.
The genealogy of the Marxist line was inspired by Marx
himself and the various divisions that followed. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue
was a major nineteenth-century figure and, as with the other traditions, there
are overlaps with others, as Cedric Robinson shows in his monumental study
Black Marxism (1983). Thus, figures of the pan-African, Harlem Renaissance,
Negritude, Black Power, Black Theology, and Black Consciousness, such as Claude
McKay, Paul Robeson, (early) Richard Wright, Claudette Jones, Aimé Césaire,
Kwame Nkrumah, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Oliver Cox, Eric
Williams, Walter Rodney, Steve Biko, Huey Newton, Manning Marable, Angela
Davis, and (early) Cornel West are exemplars of the Afro-Marxist tradition. A
crucial feature of this tradition, as with the others, is that it exceeds mere
application of the organizing tenet, which is, in this case, Marxism.
(4) Conservative line. The tradition of black conservatism
shares some of the challenges to categorization. There are black conservatives
who share much with other conservative movements, and there is the distinction
between black cultural conservatives and other kinds. Black nationalists, for
example, often have culturally conservative views while espousing independence
for black nations. The standard genealogy regards Booker T. Washington,
however, as the father of black conservatism, although similar ideas could be
found in the thought of some blacks in Europe from the eighteenth century, such
as Jacobus Capitein. As with all subsequent conservatives, Washington's thought
focused on self-reliance and prioritized the material acquisition of wealth.
Power, for such conservatives, is achieved by economic means, which is one of
the points of convergence with some forms of black nationalism. Cornel West, in
his book Prophesy, Deliverance! (1982), identified another feature of black
conservatism. That tradition also focuses on the notion of black
exceptionalism, which argues (1) that there are exceptional blacks who lack the
pathologies of most blacks or (2) that black people, as a group, are
exceptional in the modern age. The first claim is more dominant. The latter has
roots as well in Alexander Crummell, whose philosophy of civilization defended
blacks as an adaptable race that could create a synthesis of the best of
Anglo-Christian civilization. The picture, then, is one not so much of a black
conservative tradition so much as conservatism across black traditions with a
few high-profile exemplars of black conservatism. Since the 1960s, those
individuals have been almost entirely linked to conservative think-tanks such
as the Hoover Institute and the Manhattan Institute. They include Thomas
Sowell, Glenn Loury, Condoleezza Rice, and, more recently, John McWhorter. A
difficulty with classifying this tradition, however, is that, as with other
conservative movements, proponents sometimes refer to themselves as
"classical liberals" or "libertarians." Thus, there could
be many individuals listed in one category who may also belong to the other.
William Julius Wilson, a major sociologist in neoliberal circles because of his
books The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged
(1987), and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the most influential literary scholar
within the same political matrix because of his advocacy of intellectual
entrepreneurship, have offered much for neoconservatives as well, and they are
read as more conservative than they may wish to be read by the black Left.
Contemporary Black Intellectual Traditions
Turning to contemporary black thought, we can identify six
major traditions, each of which has in some ways crossed the political lines
outlined above: (1) black feminism, (2) black religious thought, (2) black
pragmatism, (3) black existentialism, (4) black postmodernism,
poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and cultural and queer studies, (5)
Afrocentrism, Afrocentricity, and Africology, and (6) Africana thought. As with
the other formulations, there is much overlap among these traditions and
between even seemingly opposing ones.
Black Feminism
Black feminism has roots in the nineteenth century in the
thought of Maria Stewart, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper,
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, and the many women in the Black
Women's Club Movement. This tradition has representatives that range from
liberal to radical Left, and it includes cultural conservatives such as
Stewart, who argued that black women should exemplify Victorian virtues of
grace and purity. The twentieth century had a broad range of writings and
movements that could be characterized as black feminist. They include Marxists
such as Suzanne Césaire, Claudette Jones, and Angela Davis, and creative
writers and musicians such as Toni Cade Bambara, editor of The Black Woman
(1970), Alice Walker, and Abbey Lincoln. Among the former, Davis argued for the
importance of studying the plight of black women for the understanding of
American capitalism and freedom struggles.
Research on this group grew significantly in the academy in
the 1980s, which resulted in the emergence of an array of black feminist
writers across the poeticist and historicist lines. They include literary
scholars such as Barbara Christian, Michelle Wallace, Gloria Watkins/bell
hooks, whose 1981 text "Ain't I a Woman?": Feminism from Margin to
Center, was extraordinarily influential in the development of postmodern
feminist scholarship, Hazel Carby, and Johnnella Butler; social scientists such
as Patricia Hill Collins and Joy Ann James; theologians such as Jacquelyn Grant
and Delores Williams.
The main concerns of black feminism range from equality for
black women to the privileging of black women's perspectives, experiences, and
political location in all aspects of social life. Its development has posed
challenges to the foundations of many fields in the humanities, social
sciences, and life sciences by bringing intersecting considerations of gender
and race to bear on methodological assumptions and data. These ideas are
brought to the fore in Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought (1990).
Writing primarily from the perspective of postmodern epistemology, Collins
offered a portrait of black feminist thought as organically linked to black
female struggles for justice and freedom.
Black Religious Thought
Black religious thought, as with the others, is a diverse
tradition. At first primarily of a protest kind, as with David Walker, Maria
Stewart, and Nat Turner, it expanded through the thematics of identity,
liberation, and critical reflection on thought as found in the writings of
Alexander Crummell in the late nineteenth century, through to Marcus Garvey,
Howard Thurman and then on to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Cone,
William R. Jones, Deotis Roberts, Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, M. Shawn
Copeland, Dwight Hopkins, Josiah Young, and Cornel West. Garvey's impact on
religion has a lasting legacy in Ethiopianism in the United States and the
Rastafari movement in Jamaica, which, through the music of Bob Marley and other
reggae artists such as Peter Tosh and Burning Spear/Winston Rodney, continues
to offer countercultural symbols of black liberation and a theology of
redemption. To these should be added the ethical and political writings of
African religious writers such as John Mbiti, Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, and
Elias Bongmba.
The black religious intellectual tradition has a practical
and theoretical end. The practical end has focused on offering leadership that
fuses religious-ethical and political concerns. These include the many
clergymen and women in black religious institutions over the past three
centuries. These institutions included black churches, synagogues, mosques, and
even Freemason lodges, especially the mechanics lodges, and their impact on
avowedly secular organizations such as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and even the Communist-supported
International Labor Defense (ILD), through the rallying force of spirituals and
black gospel music on one hand and the organizational structures and oratory
techniques on the other. The crowning moment of that tradition in the United
States was the Civil Rights Movement; in South Africa, it was the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. The greatest ministerial exemplar of the former was
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bishop Tutu for the latter. In the political arena,
the two correlates are Barack Obama in the United States and Nelson Mandela in
South Africa.
Black religious theoretical focus has been primarily on the
theodicean question of black suffering (from colonialism, slavery, and
institutional racism/apartheid) and on the relevance of religion to projects of
historical transformation. In terms of the former, the work that has had the
most impact on theological studies is James Cone's Black Theology and Black
Power (1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and God of the Oppressed
(1975), where, through his interpretation of the Christ-figure as an exemplar
of suffering, Cone offers a hermeneutical reading of a black Christ (in a tradition
that goes back to other black writers from the early twentieth century). The
theodicean critique of this work is advanced by, among others, William R.
Jones's Is God a White Racist?: A Prolegomenon to Black Theology (1973), where
the author argues that black liberation requires secular humanistic agency
because theories calling for divine intervention in history and providential
readings are equally supported by opposite conclusions. Cone's writings have,
however, had an impact on seminaries and on the secular study of religion in
the American academy, and his students, such as Dwight Hopkins and Josiah Young
III, have brought such ideas in dialogue with theologians and religious
practitioners across the Atlantic.
The Black Pragmatist Tradition
The next major shift is Cornel West's Prophesy, Deliverance!
(1982), which inaugurated prophetic pragmatic thought and offered an approach
to the study of religion that shifted focus from scriptural interpretation and
the symbolism of the divine to social criticism. That work also had an impact
on the black pragmatist tradition, which has since then been read retroactively
through prophetic pragmatism. West's work has also affected the study of
classical pragmatist John Dewey and the cultivation of an American conception
of black politics. The influence of this tradition is particularly strong at
such institutions as Princeton University and Harvard University and the
Democratic Socialists of America.
The pragmatist line also includes scholars such as Leonard
Harris—whose interpretation of pragmatism includes Alain Locke, the famed
philosopher and literary critic of the Harlem Renaissance—and a host of
contemporary black public intellectuals such as Michael Eric Dyson and Eddie
Glaude, Jr.
Black Existential Traditions
Black existentialism also overlaps with the other traditions,
although it is particularly pronounced among the poeticists until the emergence
of poststructuralism. The genealogical line formally begins with Richard
Wright's novels and essays (although theoretical foundations rest in the
thought of earlier social and political writers such as Frederick Douglass and
W. E. B. Du Bois), and includes writings by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Aimé
Césaire, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, (the early) Toni Morrison, Jamaica
Kincaid, and Monifa Love, although an existential reading could be made of the
writings of earlier authors such as James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and
Zora Neale Hurston; as well as more explicitly theoretical work by Frantz
Fanon, Steve Biko, Noel Manganyi, William R. Jones, Cornel West, Tsenay
Serequeberhan, P. Mabogo More, Paget Henry, Danielle Davis, and Lewis Gordon.
(In addition to Biko, Manganyi and More offer perspectives from South Africa;
Serequeberhan from Eritrea; and Davis from Australia.) There is a strong blues
dimension of black existential thought, where the blues is understood as
addressing problems of suffering while affirming the value of life. This understanding
of the blues as an existential form pertains as well to jazz, one of its
progeny. The influence that jazz, especially Be-Bop, had on existentialism of
all kinds was significant. Among the many influential composers and
instrumentalists in this regard were Charley Parker, Miles Davis, John
Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor; and
singers such as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Dinah Washington.
The black existentialist traditions have influenced several
other traditions. For instance, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) have had an impact across the humanities
and social sciences. Brought together with W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), these texts explore how racism and colonialism affected the
methodologies of the human sciences in their construction of problem people.
From Du Bois, there is also the phenomenological problematizing of black
existence in terms of double consciousness, where black phenomena are first
understood in terms of a white normative perspective and then that point of
view is also brought under interrogation. The eventual reflection that emerges
is the realization of the contradictions lived by problem people in a society
espousing universal accessibility. Imposed double standards and the concomitant
consciousness of such permeate the critical reflections in the many black
intellectual traditions. Dimensions of the black existential traditions are
explored in Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy
(1997), edited by Lewis Gordon and in Existentia Africana (2000) by the same
author. Black existentialism, as outlined in those texts, deals with problems
of meaning and its formation under antiblack conditions, the construction of
human standards and dynamics of recognition, problems of agency and social
change, conditions of freedom, and problems of justification and method.
Black Postmodernism
The postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, cultural
studies, and queer studies traditions (the use of "traditions" being
an oxymoron in the eyes of many of their proponents) rose with the new literary
studies and the influence of New Left French thought in the western academy.
Their focus is on criticism, the politics of texts, antiessentialism,
anticentrism, valorization of peripheries, and the rejection of unified and
global theories. Their main influence has been the French structuralist and
poststructuralist movements, such as those articulated by such authors as Louis
Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, although many
proponents espouse Marxist origins. In Britain, for instance, the main
genealogical line is from Stuart Hall, former director of the Center for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and the mentor of Hazel
Carby, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, and Isaac Julien. Hall's writings were a
fusion of the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and the structural Marxism of
Althusser with a focus on social criticism and, later on, psychoanalytical
themes. In North America and the Caribbean, proponents include Houston Baker,
Jr., Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bell hooks/Gloria Watkins, Patricia Hill Collins,
(the later) Angela Davis, and Sylvia Wynter.
Although many influential books and articles have been
written by this predominantly literary group of scholars, the sociologist Paul
Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) has continued to enjoy an extraordinary
influence. The text offers a critique of the nation as the founding trope in
the study of diasporic peoples and a future-oriented conception of reason and
literacy that challenges the tendencies to reduce black subjects to
pre-literate oral cultures on the one hand and overly textualized and
present-centered subjects on the other.
Correlated with the rise of black postmodern cultural studies
was also the emergence of rap and hip hop. Although mostly thought of as a
musical development of protest entertainment from black and Latino youth of the
inner cities of the northeastern United States, its influence has spanned the
globe as the epitome of black diasporic youth culture. In addition to the
aesthetic challenges posed by hip hop, which ranged from emphases on technology
and, at times, even anti-musicianship, and an anti-establishment fashion
sensibility that even valorizes gangsterism, hip hop counts as a black
intellectual tradition with genealogical links to the Black Aesthetics movement
of the 1960s. Social criticism in hip hop often addresses racism through focus
on the economy, prison system and double standards of law enforcement, and the
political hypocrisy of national leaders. As with the other traditions,
diversity ranges from politically progressive to reactionary positions. Hip hop
is often criticized as misogynistic, hypermaterialistic, predominantly
capitalist, and violent, while at the same time being the leitmotif of the
postmodern moment. Analyses by Tricia Rose and Houston Baker, Jr., point to the
difference between earlier forms of hip hop that focused on the formation of
the self and social criticism, as found in artists such as The Sugar Hill Gang,
Grandmaster Flash, and KRS-One and later forms, which, although begun as
protest, welcomed commodification.
Afrocentrism, Afrocentric, and Africological Traditions
Afrocentrism, Afrocentricity, and Africology, rooted in the
black nationalist traditions, offer a primarily historicist account of black
agency in history through the advancement of notions of centeredness. This
tradition also makes an appeal to Afro-classicism, where proponents consider
ancient civilizations of Africa as foundational and has argued for an
understanding of African American (and related) Studies as an independent
discipline. Critics have waged severe attacks on this tradition, accusing its
proponents of cultivating myths instead of scholarship on the one hand or being
too western in their methodology on the other. In response, supporters have
pointed to the double standards imposed upon them versus other intellectual
movements: there is a long (and continued) history of mythic work in many other
intellectual traditions and the academy supports methodologically conservative
scholars.
The genealogical ancestry of this tradition is from the
proto-black nationalist thought of the nineteenth century, especially that of
Martin Delany and Edward Blyden, and, from the twentieth century, Cheikh Anta
Diop's work on classical black civilizations and Harold Cruse's The Crisis of
the Black Intellectual (1967), but its three main proponents are Maulana Karenga,
Molefi Asante, and Ama Mazama. The latter three authors are extraordinarily
prolific, but the reader should consult Asante's The Afrocentric Idea (1987)
and for an overview An Afrocentric Manifesto (2007).
The Africana Philosophical Traditions
Finally, there is the recent development of Africana
philosophical thought, and within it the various lines of African philosophy,
African-American philosophy, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. Although the term
"Africana" preceded its development in philosophy in the 1980s, the
term acquired normative force in the thought of Lucius T. Outlaw's On Race and
Philosophy (1996) and others as a way of referring to the black Diaspora of
African origins. Because Australian First Peoples are also black peoples but
with a more distant African narrative instead of the one of dispersal in the
modern world, the Africana designation refers more specifically to African
thought.
Sylvia Wynter, in her essay "On How We Mistook the Map
for the Territory, and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of
Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project," has criticized
the Africana movement, including the African-American ethnic variations offered
by the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as a reformation of the more politically
charged and potent Black designation. The Africana tradition includes writers,
however, who see it as a subset of black and vice versa. In other words, for
some, Africana thought includes black thought, but not exclusively such. And
similarly, black thought includes some Africana thought, but not all. There is,
for instance, a movement of Africana intellectuals who regard Africana and
black as creolized or mixed categories, and who argue that the black
intellectual tradition has always been a mixed one, not only in racialized but
also in cultural terms. Thus, Afro-Native American, Afro-Latino, and
Afro-Asiatic traditions, or, as some such as Claudia Milian and Nelson
Maldonado-Torres have argued, other levels of mixture such as borders and
double consciousness, temporal displacement and post-(geo)continental concerns
are part of the Africana designation.
Africana philosophy, where Africana thought receives much
attention, is the most recent of all the other black intellectual traditions in
the western academy. Although scholarship in the field points to philosophical
work of more than a millennium in some instances and more than two millennia in
others, its main contribution has been its focus on the third thematic of
metacritique and justificatory practices as outlined earlier, without
sacrificing philosophical, anthropological, and liberatory concerns.
The text that brought the professional African philosophical
tradition to attention was John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy
(1969), which brought ethnophilosophical examinations of east African
conceptions of time under philosophical scrutiny. The text received severe
criticism by many scholars, but the result was a body of literature ranging
from Paulin Hountondji's Sur la "philosophie africaine" (1976)
[available in English as African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983)] and Kwame
Gyekye's An Essay on African Philosophical Thought (1987) to D. A. Masolo's African Philosophy in Search of Identity (1994), where
problematics in African philosophy ranging from studies of sage or traditional
thought to analytical treatments of philosophical contemporary philosophical
problems in the African context are explored.
African-American philosophy has been touched upon in various
ways throughout this article, but additions should include the anthology
Philosophy Born of Struggle (1983), edited by Leonard Harris, and for the
Afro-Caribbean tradition, Paget Henry's Caliban's Reason (2000).
