Black Intellectual Tradition

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 Henryorganized 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.
[ This essay by philosopher Lewis Gordon, was published in Encyclopedia of American Studies edited by Miles Orvell in 2009. ]
Category:Intelligence
Category:Race