On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire
On the Monstrous Threat of Reasoned Black Desire
This chapter explores the anxieties, threats, twists, and turns of what it means to conjoin the concepts “reason” and “black,” and their implications not only for Africana philosophy but also Africana and Black studies. Among the difficulties the author explores are Africana studies as a form of desire for reasonability in a world of unreasonable reason, the theodicean tendencies of colonial systems of knowledge in which contradictions and infelicities are presumed to be external anomalies, and the failure of addressing these problems leading to what the author calls “disciplinary decadence,” a form of colonization of knowledge that turns away from reality and marginalizes some groups of people into the category of problem people. The article offers a solution that the author calls a “teleological suspensions of disciplinarity” and concludes with a diagnosis of black melancholia as a challenge to the desire or yearning for freedom at the heart of black thought.
Keywords: Africana philosophy, disciplinary decadence, epistemic closure, epistemic colonization, epistemic dependency, Fanon, Frantz, melancholia, race, teleological suspension, theodicy
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