Full Description
Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical
Epistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role of
knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black "freedom"
and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation and
condemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globally
within the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity,
doing so in connection to the population's dehumanization and/or invisibilization
within various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collection
foregrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposed
subjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to,
and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemic
formations that have worked to "naturalize" this condition within the West's
various socio-human formations.
The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledge
formations and practices generated from within the discourse of "race," but
also doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses of
Western modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, and
counter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements,
and/or institutions - historic and contemporary - of the Black world. Through
these examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, or
explicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical - but
also emancipatory - epistemology. What emerges is a novel and more
comprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that can
aid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of "knowing"
and "being" much-needed within the context of ending the continued
overall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part of
ending the "global problematique" that confronts humankind as a whole.
Contents
1. Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: An Introduction
Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck
2. "Come on Kid, Let's Go Get the Thing": The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black/Human
Demetrius L. Eudell
3. Respectability and Representation: Black Freemasonry, Race, and Early Free Black Leadership
Chernoh Sesay Jr.
4. Ethno-Class Man and the Inscription of "the Criminal": On the Formation of Criminology in the U.S.
Jason R. Ambroise
5. Dehumanization, the Symbolic Gaze and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge
Jason E. Glenn
6. Performing Scientificity: Race, Science, and Politics in the United States and Germany after the Second World War
Holger Droessler
7. Imaginary Black Topographies: What are Monuments For?
Lubaina Himid
8. The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition
Sylvia Wynter
Bibliography
Index
