Rufus Burnett
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
“Unsettling Blues: A Decolonial Reading of the Blues Episteme” reads the phenomenon of American Blues with Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of Eurocentric ontology, “the doctrine of Man,” in its Christian ...
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“Unsettling Blues: A Decolonial Reading of the Blues Episteme” reads the phenomenon of American Blues with Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of Eurocentric ontology, “the doctrine of Man,” in its Christian and secular modes. In particular, the chapter uses Wynter’s insights to highlight the persistence of the blues episteme in the music of Mississippi born rap artist Justin Scott (also known as Big K.R.I.T.). By locating Scott within the decolonial legacy of the blues episteme, the chapter reveals an embodied and spatially situated example of how everyday people use knowledge and art to unsettle the doctrine that is “Man.” The chapter concludes that the blues episteme provides non-adaptive alternatives to the coloniality of certain African American Christian ontologies, which adapt to the Eurocentric doctrine of, “Man.” In all, the article suggests that “blues peoples,” those peoples that live out the blues episteme, produce cosmological and political options for being that prefigure and point towards decolonial visions of the human.Less
“Unsettling Blues: A Decolonial Reading of the Blues Episteme” reads the phenomenon of American Blues with Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of Eurocentric ontology, “the doctrine of Man,” in its Christian and secular modes. In particular, the chapter uses Wynter’s insights to highlight the persistence of the blues episteme in the music of Mississippi born rap artist Justin Scott (also known as Big K.R.I.T.). By locating Scott within the decolonial legacy of the blues episteme, the chapter reveals an embodied and spatially situated example of how everyday people use knowledge and art to unsettle the doctrine that is “Man.” The chapter concludes that the blues episteme provides non-adaptive alternatives to the coloniality of certain African American Christian ontologies, which adapt to the Eurocentric doctrine of, “Man.” In all, the article suggests that “blues peoples,” those peoples that live out the blues episteme, produce cosmological and political options for being that prefigure and point towards decolonial visions of the human.
Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the ...
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This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the way Sylvia Wynter has taken up this project and how essays in this volume engage Wynter’s work. It then turns to the function of religious cosmologies within projects of unsettling Man, while introducing essays in the volume that engage instances of how this project has been lived out in relation to religious cosmologies. Finally, it introduces the intersection between biopolitics and the project of unsettling Man in the service of introduction three essays that start from the effects of exclusion and oppression on concrete human bodies that have, through this oppressive logic, been reduced to bare flesh: bodies that are being deprived of a place in “the world”—that is, of meaning, of representation.Less
This chapter introduces readers to the struggle of decoloniality in relation to being—that is, in relation to how the human person is constructed in colonial modernity. It begins with outlining the way Sylvia Wynter has taken up this project and how essays in this volume engage Wynter’s work. It then turns to the function of religious cosmologies within projects of unsettling Man, while introducing essays in the volume that engage instances of how this project has been lived out in relation to religious cosmologies. Finally, it introduces the intersection between biopolitics and the project of unsettling Man in the service of introduction three essays that start from the effects of exclusion and oppression on concrete human bodies that have, through this oppressive logic, been reduced to bare flesh: bodies that are being deprived of a place in “the world”—that is, of meaning, of representation.
Mayra Rivera
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being ...
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Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being human—one that is culturally specific, relational and dynamic. This constructive dimension of her work is especially evident in her novel, The Hills of Hebron, for the literary genre is consonant with her argument that communities invent genres of being human from their local histories, the specificities of landscape, religious visions, and creative practices. This essay examines the contribution of the novel to Wynter’s broader project of deconstructing the doctrine of Man.Less
Sylvia Wynter’s work seeks to expose Man as an arbitrary conception inherently linked to racism and too often mistaken for the human as such. She also offers a more capacious model for being human—one that is culturally specific, relational and dynamic. This constructive dimension of her work is especially evident in her novel, The Hills of Hebron, for the literary genre is consonant with her argument that communities invent genres of being human from their local histories, the specificities of landscape, religious visions, and creative practices. This essay examines the contribution of the novel to Wynter’s broader project of deconstructing the doctrine of Man.
John Patrick Walsh
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786941633
- eISBN:
- 9781789629200
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941633.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
The chapter treats a set of writers, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Gary Victor, and Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, whose fictions imagine experiences of migration and refuge in the wake of political and natural ...
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The chapter treats a set of writers, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Gary Victor, and Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, whose fictions imagine experiences of migration and refuge in the wake of political and natural disaster. Their texts are meditations on the stakes of social and political institutions that support life in common in an age of ecological reckoning. The first part of the chapter returns to key questions of the Anthropocene, raised in the introduction, in order to demonstrate the ways that Caribbean thinkers have long anticipated scientific debates about the links between political violence and the future of the planet. Literary eco-archives contribute to these debates with stories about social worlds migrating and colliding. The chapter argues that Dalembert’s Ballade d’un amour inachevé, Victor’s Maudite éducation and its sequel L’Escalier de mes désillusions, and Pierre-Dahomey’s Rapatriés cast doubt on the future of a shared humanity with portraits of Haitian lives that foreground an ethics of vulnerability amidst widespread inequality. Through poetic representations of time and space, each writer ponders the ephemeral beauty of the present, always in flux between past and present, and each imagines the frailty of human lives in increasingly inhospitable climes.Less
The chapter treats a set of writers, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Gary Victor, and Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, whose fictions imagine experiences of migration and refuge in the wake of political and natural disaster. Their texts are meditations on the stakes of social and political institutions that support life in common in an age of ecological reckoning. The first part of the chapter returns to key questions of the Anthropocene, raised in the introduction, in order to demonstrate the ways that Caribbean thinkers have long anticipated scientific debates about the links between political violence and the future of the planet. Literary eco-archives contribute to these debates with stories about social worlds migrating and colliding. The chapter argues that Dalembert’s Ballade d’un amour inachevé, Victor’s Maudite éducation and its sequel L’Escalier de mes désillusions, and Pierre-Dahomey’s Rapatriés cast doubt on the future of a shared humanity with portraits of Haitian lives that foreground an ethics of vulnerability amidst widespread inequality. Through poetic representations of time and space, each writer ponders the ephemeral beauty of the present, always in flux between past and present, and each imagines the frailty of human lives in increasingly inhospitable climes.
Shona N. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677757
- eISBN:
- 9781452948232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677757.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations ...
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This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.Less
This chapter presents a theoretical framework of Creole indigeneity, arguing that the concept is a way of recovering the excess or remainder of history and identity that shapes both social formations in the postcolonial state and Caribbean intellectual production. It lays the groundwork for the discussion of the topic of the rescripting of indigeneity as a socio-discursive and politico-economic phenomenon. Two arguments seem to represent Creole belonging, both of which engaged regimes of labor that necessarily displace Indigenous Peoples: first in terms of not or no longer being African proposed by Sylvia Wynter, and second, in terms of a relationship to the New World that is an indigenous one, a notion by Richard Burton. It brings focus on how and where in the critical literature being and becoming Creole is elaborated as an indigenizing process.
Joseph Drexler-Dreis (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave ...
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Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.Less
Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.
Justin Adams Burton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190235451
- eISBN:
- 9780190235499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190235451.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, History, American, History, Western
Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present ...
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Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.Less
Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.
Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings ...
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Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings together essays that interrogate the problem of modern/colonial definitions of the human person and that take up the struggle to decolonize these descriptive statements. As the problem of coloniality transcends disciplinary constructions, so do the contributions in this book. They engage work from various fields, including ethnic studies, religious studies, theology, queer theory, philosophy, and literary studies. The essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man were catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person. Wynter asks this question within a larger project of unsettling and countering these definitions. Contributors to this collection follow in this move—sometimes in direct reference to Wynter’s work and sometimes primarily focusing on the work of others—of asking how Western modernity has naturalized itself through a discourse on the human. This analytical work taken up by contributors is at the service of unsettling and countering this naturalization.Less
Beyond the Doctrine of Man responds to the question of how individuals and communities can live and have lived beyond the way the human person is defined in colonial modernity. This volume brings together essays that interrogate the problem of modern/colonial definitions of the human person and that take up the struggle to decolonize these descriptive statements. As the problem of coloniality transcends disciplinary constructions, so do the contributions in this book. They engage work from various fields, including ethnic studies, religious studies, theology, queer theory, philosophy, and literary studies. The essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man were catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person. Wynter asks this question within a larger project of unsettling and countering these definitions. Contributors to this collection follow in this move—sometimes in direct reference to Wynter’s work and sometimes primarily focusing on the work of others—of asking how Western modernity has naturalized itself through a discourse on the human. This analytical work taken up by contributors is at the service of unsettling and countering this naturalization.
William Ghosh
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- December 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198861102
- eISBN:
- 9780191893070
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198861102.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took ...
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This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.Less
This chapter is about the novel form in the West Indies in the 1960s. The novel, in this period, was a key site in which debates about decolonization, originality, and cultural sovereignty took place. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was central to this debate. It responds to a history of West Indian novels and novel theory, and became an influential text in novels, criticism, and social theory in the region. Work by George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and Sylvia Wynter is discussed in detail. By tracing the changing reception of A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean through the 1960s, we can also trace changing ideas and priorities in Caribbean social thought.
Peter Coviello
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226474168
- eISBN:
- 9780226474472
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226474472.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms ...
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This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms for the pursuit of post-secular critique, it argues that the salient distinction, under conditions of secularism, is not between religion and the non-religious but, more fundamentally, between good religion and bad belief; that this disciplinary distinction comes to be operationalized as a gendering, racializing biopolitics; and that we can best grasp secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.Less
This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms for the pursuit of post-secular critique, it argues that the salient distinction, under conditions of secularism, is not between religion and the non-religious but, more fundamentally, between good religion and bad belief; that this disciplinary distinction comes to be operationalized as a gendering, racializing biopolitics; and that we can best grasp secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.
Justin Adams Burton
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190235451
- eISBN:
- 9780190235499
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190235451.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American, History, Western
Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being ...
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Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, L.H. Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm. While each chapter is written so that it can be sectioned off from the rest and read with a focus on the discrete argument contained in it, the chapters are not meant to be individual case studies. Rather, each builds on the previous one so that the book should best function if it is read in sequence, as a journey that lands us in a posthuman vestibule where we can party more freely and hear the music more clearly if we’ve traveled through the rest of the book to get there.Less
Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, L.H. Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm. While each chapter is written so that it can be sectioned off from the rest and read with a focus on the discrete argument contained in it, the chapters are not meant to be individual case studies. Rather, each builds on the previous one so that the book should best function if it is read in sequence, as a journey that lands us in a posthuman vestibule where we can party more freely and hear the music more clearly if we’ve traveled through the rest of the book to get there.
William Ghosh
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- December 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198861102
- eISBN:
- 9780191893070
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198861102.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, ...
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This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.Less
This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.
Patrice Haynes
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286898
- eISBN:
- 9780823288731
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286898.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This chapter explores the anthropocentrism of African indigenous religions, with a focus on the religious traditions of the Yoruba peoples (south-west Nigeria). In doing so it hopes to disclose an ...
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This chapter explores the anthropocentrism of African indigenous religions, with a focus on the religious traditions of the Yoruba peoples (south-west Nigeria). In doing so it hopes to disclose an alternative vision of the human to that of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man,” the figure at the heart of colonial modernity. While the humanistic orientation of African indigenous religion could be understood in a Feuerbachian sense, this chapter argues that such an approach fails to address the Eurocentric assumptions in Feuerbach’s anthropological analysis of religion. Drawing on ritual studies and recent efforts to rehabilitate the idea of “animism,” the chapter goes on to sketch what it calls an “animist humanism.” The aim here is to articulate a religious anthropocentrism that indicates how thinking with African indigenous religions might enable us to think beyond the doctrine of Man.Less
This chapter explores the anthropocentrism of African indigenous religions, with a focus on the religious traditions of the Yoruba peoples (south-west Nigeria). In doing so it hopes to disclose an alternative vision of the human to that of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man,” the figure at the heart of colonial modernity. While the humanistic orientation of African indigenous religion could be understood in a Feuerbachian sense, this chapter argues that such an approach fails to address the Eurocentric assumptions in Feuerbach’s anthropological analysis of religion. Drawing on ritual studies and recent efforts to rehabilitate the idea of “animism,” the chapter goes on to sketch what it calls an “animist humanism.” The aim here is to articulate a religious anthropocentrism that indicates how thinking with African indigenous religions might enable us to think beyond the doctrine of Man.
Shannon Winnubst
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- October 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190072919
- eISBN:
- 9780190072957
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190072919.003.0014
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter introduces the fraught concept of race through the mythical and historical girl named Venus, who suffers the abduction of the transatlantic slave trade. Quite different from the ...
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This chapter introduces the fraught concept of race through the mythical and historical girl named Venus, who suffers the abduction of the transatlantic slave trade. Quite different from the abduction of Persephone that introduces this volume of essays, the story of Venus has never been fully told and digested by Western philosophy. The abduction of this girl, Venus, ontologically changes the meaning of “human.” Consequently, the chapter argues that, if philosophy is to wrangle with this unthought historical event, it must reconceptualize three fundamental categories: ontology, race, and blackness. The chapter, ultimately argues that the concept of “race” aids and abets the perpetuation of anti-blackness.Less
This chapter introduces the fraught concept of race through the mythical and historical girl named Venus, who suffers the abduction of the transatlantic slave trade. Quite different from the abduction of Persephone that introduces this volume of essays, the story of Venus has never been fully told and digested by Western philosophy. The abduction of this girl, Venus, ontologically changes the meaning of “human.” Consequently, the chapter argues that, if philosophy is to wrangle with this unthought historical event, it must reconceptualize three fundamental categories: ontology, race, and blackness. The chapter, ultimately argues that the concept of “race” aids and abets the perpetuation of anti-blackness.