It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness,--an
American, a Negro; two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder. The history of the American Negro
is the history of this strife—this longing
to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his
double self into a better and truer self.
- W.E.B. Du Bois
But anyone destitute of a theory about the meaning,
structure and direction of modern society is a
lost victim in a world he cannot understand or
control.
- Richard Wright
This course examines the African American contribution
to philosophic discourse. African American philosophy
is here understood as a sub-division of Africana
philosophy, the primary meaning of which is the
decoupling of reason from its identification with
the Euro-American tradition and in so doing shifting
its conceptual geographical space to admit a more
universal perspective. In the light of the above
quote from W.E.B Du Bois, we will systematically
interrogate what it means to be an African American,
and in the light of the quote from Richard Wright,
we will interrogate it in the context of modernity
in general and American modernity in particular.
Some of the topics cultural relativism, memory,
modernity and the role of the arts generally in
the development of people’s self-consciousness.
