Postmodern Racial Dialectics: Philosophy Beyond the Pale

Description

Postmodern Racial Dialectics is a collection of ten essays on African American philosophy. Addressing issues as disparate as why there are no graduate programs in philosophy at the more than one hundred traditionally black colleges and universities in the U.S.—to conceptions of Black utopianism — to the nature of postmodern revolutions, these essays are beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between changing ways that the races talk to one another. The book is postmodern in that it is beyond modernity’s linear logic. Postmodern Racial Dialectics is also a political entreaty for African Americans to be wary of conventional ways of thinking, and to begin thinking transgressively beyond narrowly prescribed conceptions from both sides of the color line. Richard A. Jones taught philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He served as Co-Coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association and was an associate editor of the Radical Philosophy Review. Jones is also the author of The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race. Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction 1 2 Philosophy for Us by Us: Philosophy FUBU 19 3 The Value of Academic Philosophy for Black Folks 37 4 Diseases of the Imagination 59 5 The Politics of Black Utopia 71 6 Prolegomena to Any Future Moral Philosophy 109 7 Horrorism in the Theater of Cruelty 147 8 The Technology of Immortality, the Soul, and Human Identity 179 9 Racial Authenticity 199 10 Postmodern Revolutions 229 Index 253