In this compelling and engaging work, Tsenay Serequeberhan discusses recent attempts to define African philosophy and the practice of hermeneutics for articulating a philosophy that is distinctively African. Pressing into service insights derived from Marx, Nietzsche, Levinas, Fanon, and others, Serequeberhan analyzes the question of how we relate to our past (i.e., our heritage) and the open possibilities of our future. He carefully examines the variety of approaches to African philosophy and argues for a historically engaged and existentially attuned paradigm shift. The result is an approach that explores the contemporary situation of African and African-American existence in view of emancipatory struggles that have established the confines of the present.
Author(s): Tsenay Serequeberhan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 132
City: Lanham
Our Heritage
Contents
Preface: Existence and Heritage
Introduction: Africans and African Americans in the Present
1 Heritage and Its Transmission: A Reading of Frantz Fanon
2 Identity and Race in the Black Experience: Reflections on W.E. B. Du Bois
3 Master and Slave: African American Slave Narratives and G. W. F. Hegel’s Dialectic of Recognition
4 Africa and Identity: Kwame Anthony Appiah and the Politics of Philosophy
5 African Philosophy? Looking behind the Question
6 The Heritage of the Idea: Violence, Counterviolence, and the Negated
Conclusion: The Postcolonial Sensibility
Notes
Index
About the Author
