Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

In this essay I examine the contributions of the pragmatist tradition to the philosophy of ethnicity. From the pragmatist philosophies of Dewey and Locke I derive a reconstructive model for the clarification and improvement of the life experiences of ethnic groups. Addressing various problems and objections, I argue that this Deweyan and Lockean reconstructive model rejects any sharp separation between race and ethnicity and avoids the pitfalls of the biologist race paradigm and the culturalist ethnicity paradigm. I explore some of (...) the social and political implications of this reconstructive model through a discussion of José Martí's inspiring account of Hispanic identity. (shrink)

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.

Critical engagement involving philosophers trained in continental and analytic traditions often takes its purpose to be a reconciliation of tensions arising from differences in style, or method. Critical engagement in Africana philosophy, however, is rarely focused on method, style, or orientation because philosophic research in this field, regardless of orientation, has had to accommodate its empirical grounding in disciplines outside of philosophy. I focus primarily on the comparative dimensions of three important strands of this research: (1) a history of ideas, (...) (2) a problem-orientation, and (3) a sub-area specialization, to indicate why a need to reconcile tensions between continental and analytic orientations has very little currency in Africana philosophy. Socio-economic problems faced by African-descended people require multiple perspectives to accommodate the wide variety of diasporic social contexts for a given proposal. I employ a selection of cases to illustrate how Africana philosophy benefits from an interplay of many intersecting factors and that, as an interdisciplinary area of research with a commitment to the incorporation of multiple perspectives, it fosters cross-pollination and hybridization of continental and analytic traditions. (shrink)

The liberation of Africa and its peoples from centuries of racially discriminatory colonial rule and domination has far-reaching implications for educational thought and practice. The transformation of educational discourse in Africa requires a philosophical framework that respects diversity, acknowledges lived experience and challenges the hegemony of Western forms of universal knowledge. In this article I reflect critically on whether African philosophy, as a system of African knowledge(s), can provide a useful philosophical framework for the construction of empowering knowledge that will (...) enable communities in Africa to participate in their own educational development. (shrink)

Intersectionality has attracted substantial scholarly attention in the 1990s. Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another. I explore how the traditional family ideal functions as a privileged exemplar of intersectionality in the United States. Each of its six dimensions demonstrates specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organization, racial ideas and practices, and constructions of U.S. national identity.

This paper is a response to Mark Halstead's communitarian argument for a curriculum which includes education for cultural attachment. In particular it explores the difficulty of combining education for cultural attachment with education for democratic citizenship and cross-cultural understanding wherever the cultural attachment excludes the culture of liberalism. Halstead bases his proposals on a view of minority communities as separate and distinct cultural entities each determining the way of life of its members. This paper concludes by offering a different view (...) of culture and identity, one which suggests a curriculum for going beyond culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the extent to which Marcien Towa (1931-2014) can be considered the Father of Cameroonian Critical Theory. In this regard, I compare what can be called his social philosophy with the project of a critical theory of society, as outlined by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). I specifically consider Marcien Towa’s idea of philosophy, which I confront with Horkheimer’s project from the perspectives offered by their sociopolitical premises, conceptual references, and progressive goals. On each of these aspects, I (...) discover sufficient correspondences that allow me to argue that Towa and Horkheimer, who barely knew each other, formulated a somewhat similar claim, namely to provide a critical theory of society, whose aim is not only to understand society but more importantly to change it. (shrink)

This paper describes some epistemic cultural considerations which shape the uses of psychology. I argue the study of mind is bound by the metaphysical background of the given locale and era in which it is practiced. The epistemic setting in which psychology takes place will shape what is worth observing, how it is to be studied, how the data is to be interpreted, and the nature of the ultimate explanatory units. To demonstrate conceptual epistemic constraints, I discuss metaphor use in (...) psychology. In addition, epistemic constraints shape the praxes that arise from structural study of the mind. In order to illustrate this cultural constraint, I discuss Soviet Psychology and provide a contrast between practical uses of psychoanalysis in India, Egypt, and rural Ghana. In response to these conceptual and practical epistemic limitations, psychology could adapt methods drawn from history and anthropology. (shrink)

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism. I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we (...) have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open-mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value-change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think. (shrink)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is known for his principled criticism of colonialism, advocacy of the importance of indigenous languages, and concern with the role of culture and literature in forming the foundation of a truly national sensibility.Globalecticsadds interpretations of Fanon, Hegel, and the Marxian legacy. It provides an opportunity to assess Ngũgĩ’s analysis of colonialism and national liberation.

One debate that metaphysicians of race have been consumed with since the 1990s is what we can call the US race debate, which is the debate about what the nature and reality of race is according to the dominant ways that ‘race’ and race terms are used to classify people in contemporary American English. In 2014, I contributed a defence of biological racial realism in the US race debate that utilized new results about human genetic clustering from population genetics. In (...) this paper, I will show that all US race theories have been wrong, including my own. This is because, as I will argue, the correct US race theory has a radically pluralist form. This is an instance of a metametaphysical position that I call radical racial pluralism. After defending radical racial pluralism in the US race debate, I explore valuable implications of the view for philosophers of race. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the concept of African communitarianism and reflect on its potential value for ecojustice education as a localised response to the wider ecological crises that i...

Solidarity is a significant but poorly understood feature of political life. It is typically conceived, in “associative and teleological” terms, as working together for common political aims. But this conception misses the fact that solidarity requires individuals to will collective ends despite incompletely shared interests. Careful consideration of these elements reveals four “dynamics of solidarity”: its characteristic duties, the durability of commitments made in solidarity, the deference it involves, and its effects over time on agents’ habits and capacities. In this (...) article I describe these dynamics, first contrasting solidarity-given duties with duties of beneficence, justice, and loyalty. These contrasts lay bare the distinctive durability of solidarity, which differs from both the liberal’s commitment to justice and the loyalist’s commitment to the group. I then discuss deference, a feature of solidarity that has implications for individual engagement in political life more generally. Finally, I discuss the effects of solidarity on agents’ intellectual and physical capacities. I conclude by drawing out implications of these dynamics, challenging Tommie Shelby’s influential conception and justification of black solidarity and buttressing Philip Soper’s rejection of the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

Sense of Community and its Sustenance in Africa There is no gainsaying the fact that Africa is inundated with many problems which have made the development and the attainment of social order, conceived in normative terms, daunting tasks. It is also a fact that there are many causes of this scenario such as political marginalization, ethnic chauvinism, economic mismanagement, religious bigotry and corruption in its various facets. However, in this disquisition we identify the lack of the development, internalization and application (...) of the sense of community, loosely tagged community consciousness, as a major factor that has aggravated the African crisis and which if addressed can reverse the order of things positively. It is the contention of this paper that fundamentally in the case of Africa, as shown in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria, there has been a blind pursuit of private or individual interests to the detriment of the public sphere or public good. Ironically too, when leaders put up repressive laws in the pretense to pursue the public good, the underlying motive has always been the pursuit of selfish private whims and caprices. We noted that in contemporary Africa a major way towards a desired level of social order and development consists in engendering the required sense of community (a situation in which there is mutual co-operation, interdependence and fellow-feeling) on which other developments can be predicated. Although, the quest and realization of the sense of community is not a grand solution to our myriad of problems in Africa, at least it forms the basis on which we can start to address our problems in Africa in a meaningful way. (shrink)

Some of the literature about teaching issues of race and racism in classrooms has addressed matters of audience. Zeus Leonardo, for example, has argued that teachers should use the language of white domination, rather than white privilege, when teaching about race and racism because the former language presupposes a minority audience, while the latter addresses an imaginary or presupposed white one. However, there seems to be little discussion in the literature about teaching these issues to an audience that is in (...) fact predominantly minority. Leonardo assumes that minority students need little convincing about the reality of white domination, but students of color are not a monolithic group. The paper addresses some specific challenges the author has faced teaching theories of white domination to a predominantly minority student audience in New York City. Leonardo is right that audience matters, but audience turns out to matter in ways that defy common assumptions. (shrink)

Sceptics of an Africanisation of education have often lambasted its proponents for re-inventing something that has very little, if any, role to play in contemporary African society. The contributors to this issue hold a different view and, through the papers included in this issue, arguments are proffered in defence of an Africanisation of education on the African continent, particularly through the notion of ubuntu.Since the 1960s, Africana philosophy as an instance of Africanisation has emerged as a ‘gathering’ notion for philosophical (...) endeavours practised by professional philosophers and intellectuals, either of African descent, including those living in the diaspora, or those of non-African descent but who are devoted to matters pertaining to African and African-descended individuals and communities (Outlaw, 2004, p. 90). These philosophical endeavours mostly relate to a ‘critical analysis and reflective evaluation of the evidence and reasoning’ that constitute the beliefs, customs, values, traditions, oral literature (parables, proverbs, poetry, songs and myth), languages and histories of African and African-descended peoples (Hallen, 2004, p. 105). The articles presented at this symposium analytically explore ideas and practices central to Africana philosophy, their underlying rationales, and how these forms of philosophical inquiry can potentially engender defensible educative relationships. (shrink)

Ethnomathematics is a relatively new discipline that investigates mathematical knowl edge in small-scale, indigenous cultures. This essay locates ethnomathematics as one of five distinct subfields within a general anthropology of mathematics and describes interactions between cultural and epistemological features that have created these divisions. It reviews the political and pedagogical issues in which ethnomathematics research and practice is immersed and examines the possibilities for both conflict and collaboration with the goals, theories, and methods of social constructivism.