African and Africana Philosophies Flashcards
Colonization in Africa
Africa was one of the last regions to be colonized by E, history of enslavement in American make for a deeper level of prejudice and racism that conditioned representations of Africa (presented as being wild and untamed), decolonization began due to the Civil Rights Movement and African countries gaining their independence
History of Bantu Philosophy
originally written in French in 1945 by Placid Tempels (a missionary) who tried to show that there was inherent culture in the Congo that should be considered philosophy, he acknowledged that African thought was rational and equal to E thought,
The Negritude Movement
source of African thought during the 60s and 70s, composed of a group of black thinkers in Paris who coined the term, négritude
key figures of the Negritude Movement
Leopold Senghor (Senegalian, poet, philosopher, first president of Senegal), Aimé Césaire (Martinique, poet), and Léon Damas (French Guiana, poet, academic, and politician)
history of the Negritude Movement
movement took inspiration from the American black cultural work of the Harlem Renaissance and political work of the New Negro Movement, negritude was a term that was meant to sound like a provocation and claim ownership over racist language, founders saw the movement differently (some didn’t recognize it as philosophy); for Senghor, negritude provided certain answers to the key philosophical questions
life-force
what is really real about a thing is its life force, this means that the world around us isn’t made up of material objects, but of living things with a dynamism which is not taken into account by E rationality
the notion of rhythm
life-force is expressed by ideas from art, including music, many thinkers see jazz with the important swinging rhythm and the improvisatory space as illustrating this approach to reality, Senghor believed that rhythm is the architecture of being, the internal dynamic which conveys form, and pure expression of the life-force
rhythmic attitude
intuition is used to capture the idea of a more profound true feeling or direct connection via sympathy with smth, idea of rhythm expresses that you have to “swing” with smth to understand it, intuition can be used as a bridge to learn smth
3 periods in the development of Senghor’s negritude
- 30s/40s: he felt that their African ways of understanding weren’t compatible with French ways of understanding, negritude became each person’s search for a sense of personal identity that would sort out the incompatibilities
- end of his service during WWII-Senegalian independence: advocated for more other-directed causes, independence, and cultural pride, described negritude as an anti-racial racialism to aim at E racism and colonialism
- since Senegalian independence: used negritude with calm self-affirmation as an instrument of national and cultural growth, not only the awareness, defence, and development of African cultural values, but also welcomes the complementary values of E
life-force and intuition
ethics will be based upon the understanding and application of intuition of what feels right and empathy, it’s about enforcing harmony and preventing the disruption of flow of rhythm within and among individuals (and about fitting in with the rhythms produced by others)
Ubuntu
comes from a Zulu phrase which means that a person is a person thru other ppl (the self is embedded in social interaction), anthropocentric, theocentric, and cosmocentric, echoes the idea of the life force concept and Indig natural order and presence of God, each member of the community (and the community as a whole) must guarantee the promotion and protection of life by specifying ethics and morality, life is the highest principle of ethical conduct, all life is sacred and independent
