Definition
Black existentialism and black phenomenology broadly reference a collection of thinkers and writers who utilize a method of critical inquiry grounded in black experience and/or its limits.
Introduction
Black existentialism and black phenomenology broadly reference a collection of thinkers and writers who utilize a method of critical inquiry grounded in black experience and/or its limits. Some of these thinkers and writers are responding and incorporating the techniques and frameworks developed by European philosophers that are traditionally attributed to foregrounding phenomenology and existentialism as modes of philosophical investigation and reflection, for example, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone De Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt. While others are not necessarily philosophers by training, with some of their writings...
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Notes
- 1.
This may be good place to acknowledge that conversations surrounding Fanon and sexism have not gone overlooked. For a well-known resource see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 1998).
- 2.
George Yancy is a black existentialist who accepts its fundamental premises, but instead of focusing on black experience and its limits, analyzes whiteness as the under theorized and under appreciated norm of exclusion. See, George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
- 3.
It would be impossible to create an exhaustive list, but just to name a few more: R.A. Judy, David Marriot, Sharon Patricia Holland, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Axelle Karera, Jared Sexton, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Kevin Quashie, Patrice Douglass, and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson.
- 4.
This should be distinguished from the term ‘afropessimism’ popularized in the 1980’s to describe how sub-Saharan African countries were apparently incapable of economic and political stability because of an inherent cultural ‘backwardness’.
- 5.
Wilderson derives the concept of the slave as socially dead, i.e., structured by natal alienation, gratuitous violence, and general dishonor, and in opposition to the human through a reading of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
References
Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. 2014. X-The problem of the negro as a problem of thought. New York: Fordham University Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 2009. The second sex (trans: Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevallierr). New York: Vintage Books.
Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible man. New York: Vintage Books.
Fanon, Frantz. 2007. Black skin, white masks (trans: Richard Philcox). New York: Grove Press.
———. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth (trans: Richard Philcox). New York: Grove Press.
Gordon, Lewis R. 1997. In Existence in Black: An anthology of black existential philosophy, ed. Lewis R. Gordon. New York: Routledge.
———. 1995. Bad faith and antiblack racism. New York: Humanity Books.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2019. Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of social upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Morrison, Toni. 1970. The bluest eye. New York: Vintage Books.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the break: The aesthetics of the black tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2018. The universal machine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception (trans: Colin Smith). New York: Routledge
Sartre, Jean Paul. 2003. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (trans: Hazel Estella Barnes). New York: Routledge.
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 1998. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and feminisms. New York: Rowan & Littlefield.
Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological terror: Blackness, nihilism, and emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wilderson III Frank B. R. (Ed.) 2010. White, and black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. Antagonism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Yancy, George. 2017. Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Mubirumusoke, M. (2023). Black Existentialism and Phenomenology. In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_322-1
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