The article focuses on a chapter of the biography of Angela Davis which, unless mistaken, has not yet received due attention: the training and intellectual experience with her German professors, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno. From the philosophical studies in Frankfurt in the 1960s to the more recent reflections on movements such as Black Lives Matter, there seems to be a continuity in the way she approaches contemporary social reality, a démarche that draws its strength from the original combination (...) of two traditions of radical critical thinking: Frankfurtian and Afro-American. (shrink)

O preconceito e a intolerância com as religiões de matriz africana foram construídos no contexto da colonização e atualizam-se cotidianamente por meio da colonialidade. O artigo objetiva analisar o que professores negros têm feito para superar essa realidade. Para tanto, foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com professores negros, militantes da causa negra, que atuam em escolas públicas. A análise mostrou que esses professores desenvolvem várias estratégias com vistas à desconstrução do preconceito e da intolerância.

Jacoby Adeshei Carter has done an invaluable service in editing this critical edition of Alain Leroy Locke’s series of six lectures in Haiti delivered “from April 9 to July 10, 1943, when he was the Inter-American Exchange Professor to Haiti under the joint auspices of the American Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations and the Haitian Ministry of Education”. African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures consists of two parts. The first part is Locke’s series of six lectures (...) entitled “The Negro’s Contribution to the Culture of the Americas.” The second part is Carter’s critical interpretative essay on Locke’s lectures entitled “‘Like Rum in the Punch’: The Quest for Cultural... (shrink)

Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we accept the general outline of Eric Williams’ thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but was as economically conditioned as Britain’s later empire building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave (...) trade only after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital necessary for industrial “take-off.” Britain had lost much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a plantation economy.3The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper involvement in Africa—the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven for freed slaves was just a start—but British abolitionists before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in the social sciences had combined to give the British public a widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a form of modern, secularized, “depoliticized speech” —discourse which treats its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960, Nancy Stepan writes:A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave.5It is this “fundamental question” which a genealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer. Patrick Brantlinger, professor of English at Indiana University, is the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 and Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay. (shrink)

A Black Intellectual's Odyssey describes aspects of Martin Kilson's intellectual journey in the social and institutional contexts that shaped his progression from a small African American community in a Pennsylvania milltown to his collegiate experiences at the oldest Negro college in the nation, and then to Harvard University, where he was both a student and a professor for some fifty years. Kilson's own writing is framed by pieces by three of his former Harvard undergraduate students: an introduction by (...) Cornel West; an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. (shrink)

What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South, degenerationists elaborated the "problem of (...) the Negro," imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration, homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has meant—and, to a considerable degree, continues to mean—being excluded from white society, white prerogatives, even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them. 1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction" . In his recent reassessment of the troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in isolation" . Lee Clark Mitchell, professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism . He is currently working on the formula western in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America beyond the Frontier.". (shrink)

Nesse artigo pretendemos identificar, descrever e caracterizar o contexto em que se inseriu uma pesquisa de doutorado, desenvolvida no programa de Pós-Graduação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, onde fizemos uma breve retrospectiva histórica da educação escolar indígena no município de São Gabriel da Cachoeira, região do Alto Rio Negro, no estado do Amazonas. Através de pesquisa de natureza básica, descritiva, quanto aos objetivos, bibliográfica quanto aos procedimentos, partimos da seguinte questão: como foi o processo inicial (...) de construção de uma educação escolar indígena nesta região? É preciso pensar a formação de professores indígenas a partir de suas concepções de mundo e de homem e das formas de organização social, política, cultural, econômica e religiosa desses povos, já que estamos inseridos nesse contexto. (shrink)

The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black,” cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because “Pantaloon in Black,” seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses, which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating “Pantaloon in Black” into (...) it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere.More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish’s idea that interpretations are produced by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class? is that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish’s idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school—bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What is, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet: what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale school, endures, or prevails?The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument of communication used by professor speaking to other professors. But in “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner has formed a text in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County. Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities is akin to an idealist’s dream of an integrated South. John Limon is assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science, on the history of the American novel in relation to the history of science and science philosophy. (shrink)

During an April 12, 1860, Senate debate, Senator Jefferson Davis spoke against a bill to fund Black education in Washington, D.C. Davis argued that the United States government was founded “by white men for white men” and “not for negroes.” According to Davis, the inequality of the white and black races was “stamped from the beginning.”Davis’s phrase forms the basis of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award–winning study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. (...) Kendi currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and as the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Stamped from the Beginning has won a large... (shrink)

Pensar é uma espécie de exercício responsável que não pode ser omitido neste momento que vivenciamos e partilhamos. Por isso, cultivar boas reflexões depende, por um lado, da capacidade técnico-acadêmica de pesquisadoras e pesquisadores e, por outro, da maneira como conduzem o seu horizonte filosófico diante de um quadro de perspectivas e desafios. Assim, a produção filosófica não precisa de milagres para compreender a natureza, como afirmará Espinosa, mas de uma aliança entre liberdade e razão.É neste sentido que o presente (...) número da Aurora contempla o dossiê “Atualidade da Filosofia de Espinosa: Matéria e potência”, organizado pelos professores Ricardo Espinosa Lolas e Eladio Craia.O Fluxo Contínuo, por sua vez, dispõe dos artigos “Fantasised alterity, inaudible voices. Notes for a critique of the coloniality of desire”, de Jorge Polo Blanco; “El Estado Intensivo de Gilles Deleuze”, de Julián Ferreyra; “Nietzsche e a mnemotécnica: do sofrimento à afirmação da vida pelo artista da dor”, de Adilson Felicio Feiler; “The role of sense of justice in Rawls’theory”, de Pablo Aguayo Westwood; “Paradigms in Action”, de Paulo Pirozelli e, por último, “É possível filosofar com Heidegger após as confissões nos Cadernos Negros?”, de Luiz Rohden.A Aurora também apresenta, ao final, as resenhas das obras “Aporías de la Democracia”, obra coordenada por Ricardo Espinoza Lolas e Jordi Riba, assinada por Angélica Montes Montoya, e “Hegel and Espinosa: Substance and Negativity”, de Gregor Moder, realizada por Eladio Craia e Arion Keller. (shrink)

Our present models and theories of African history and prehistory are profoundly influenced by the physical anthropologists’ perceptions of human reality in present-day Africa. Professor P. V. Tobias has suggested that the present-day people of Africa, excluding the recent arrivals from Europe and Asia, descended from a common proto-Negriform stock which gave birth first to the so-called “Khoisan” (I am using here the terminology of my source, not the historically justified Khoe and San, meaning the Hottentots and the Bushmen) (...) and later to the Negro genetic type. Of greater importance to archaeologists, who deal mainly with the so-called pre-history, is the fact that, genetically speaking, the difference between the “Khoisan” and the Negroids is smaller than the difference between these two African racial types and all other non-African types. This realisation tends to have one consequence: the pre-historic and even historic developments are generally perceived as explainable from within Africa, without any need for external clues or explanations. Archaeological finds are thus taken for evidence of a basically internal evolution and the finds of foreign glass beads, though very frequent and spread all over Africa, are seen as belonging to the same category as Persian, Chinese, or Arab ceramics and are explained as indication of a coastal trade. (shrink)

But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart and encouragement (...) to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography. · 1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.· 2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915. John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. (shrink)

Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is willing to read a (...) literature that might not be a rewriting of Hegel , and if the negative knowledge of recent theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western scholar’s claim to mastery of things African, albeit motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take into account the distance between themselves and African culture, and who read African literature only in function of their own cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains: “We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation—this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems.”2 1. See J. P. Makouta-M’Boukou, Introduction à l’étude du roman négro-africain de langue française , p. 9.2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , p. x. Christopher L. Miller, Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French . He is working at present on a study of francophone black African literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research grant. (shrink)

The character of Tom has the proportions of a mythic figure. His story has little of the melodrama of the secondary plot for his heroism in meeting the trials of slavery is manifested not in outward risks and adventures but in inner strength. In Simon Legree, Tom's final adversary, Stowe provides a perfect antithesis, an ultimate image of what slavery must do to the master who takes advantage of his position and uses his power without restraint; for Legree is an (...) ambitious Vermonter, not a Southern, an owner, not an overseer, and a product of the raw, final phase of slavery in the cotton plantations of the deep South. Legree bends every effort to brutalize Tom as though of necessity to prove that he and the South are right about Negroes and slavery, and Tom remains firm in his humanity and so disproves the sordid myth of his oppressor. It is Legree who is dehumanized by the institution of slavery. Tom emerges from the struggle as an example not simply of a black Christian slave, but of a heroic man in the face of intimidating and humiliating power. Moody E. Prior, emeritus professor of English and former dean of the graduate school of Northwestern University, is the author of The Language of Tragedy, Science and the Humanities, and The Drama of Power-Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays. See also: "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children" by Tommie Shelby in Vol. 38, No. 3. (shrink)

A saúde e a educação são campos que se esbarram no fazer cotidiano dos profissionais que atuam com seres humanos. A relação destes dois campos deve ser de equilíbrio e harmonia tanto no campo do trabalho de professores, como no trabalho de profissionais médicos, psicólogos, enfermeiros, enfim. O campo da pesquisa raramente consegue agregar com harmonia esta necessidade de interseccionalidade em saúde e educação. Diante desta realidade, o livro “Cenários da saúde da população negra no Brasil – diálogos e pesquisas” (...) possui esta qualidade e agrega pesquisa em saúde e reflexões para profissionais que atuam nas escolas, no SUS, no SUAS, nas associações e instituições comunitárias. O livro apresenta os sujeitos negros em suas vidas cotidianas com o olhar da pesquisa acadêmica que serve as necessidades do Brasil negro e indígena. (shrink)

O presente artigo toma como objeto de análise cadernos produzidos por Romana Bragatti, entre os anos de 1934 a 1936, estudante do Curso Complementar do Colégio São José, localizado em Caxias do Sul/RS. O estudo investiga esses suportes de escrita, suas materialidades e enunciados, na tentativa de compreender os usos dos artefatos e os discursos constitutivos da formação docente. Como respaldo teórico, são referenciados António Viñao Frago, Castillo Gómez e Jean Hébrard, autores que trabalham com a história da cultura escrita, (...) exploram aspectos gráficos, apontam para caminhos metodológicos e sinalizam possibilidades de produção historiográfica em torno desses dispositivos. Por meio desses aportes, a pesquisa busca contribuir com a análise desses artefatos da cultura escolar e expressar caminhos de investigação para quem se arrisca a desenvolver pesquisas inscritas nessas perspectivas. Como escrituras disciplinadas, cadernos escolares, em tese, não permitem a expressão da espontaneidade dos escreventes, entretanto, alguns registros produzidos pela aluna, aparentemente sutis, realçam transgressões sobre esse material e sobre o processo de escolarização que vivenciava, possibilitando perceber marcas da autora. Os assuntos que comparecem nesses cadernos versam sobre temas de “História Universal” e de “Pedagogia”, saberes considerados importantes para a formação das estudantes, apresentados descritivamente. Especialmente o Caderno de Pedagogia, para além da descrição, manifesta também um caráter explicativo/prescritivo, constituindo-se, supostamente, em referência de leitura, notadamente de orientação teórica e metodológica. Ao examiná-los, observa-se uma espécie de mimetização dos manuais escolares vigentes. Infere-se que as alunas copiavam textos desses manuais, que eram ditados ou exibidos no quadro-negro pelo professor, considerando o pouco acesso aos livros naquela temporalidade. Em relação ao Caderno de Pedagogia, o que mais se destaca são, por um lado, indicativos de códigos de conduta moral considerados adequados à professora, em conformidade ao processo de feminilização da docência naquele contexto. Por outro, percebem-se indícios de que a futura professora esteve em contato com o escolanovismo, que instituía a Pedagogia em bases científicas, enfatizando a importância da Psicologia Experimental. Palavras-chave : Cadernos escolares. Cultura escrita. Escola Nova. (shrink)

O presente artigo toma como objeto de análise cadernos produzidos por Romana Bragatti, entre os anos de 1934 a 1936, estudante do Curso Complementar do Colégio São José, localizado em Caxias do Sul/RS. O estudo investiga esses suportes de escrita, suas materialidades e enunciados, na tentativa de compreender os usos dos artefatos e os discursos constitutivos da formação docente. Como respaldo teórico, são referenciados António Viñao Frago, Castillo Gómez e Jean Hébrard, autores que trabalham com a história da cultura escrita, (...) exploram aspectos gráficos, apontam para caminhos metodológicos e sinalizam possibilidades de produção historiográfica em torno desses dispositivos. Por meio desses aportes, a pesquisa busca contribuir com a análise desses artefatos da cultura escolar e expressar caminhos de investigação para quem se arrisca a desenvolver pesquisas inscritas nessas perspectivas. Como escrituras disciplinadas, cadernos escolares, em tese, não permitem a expressão da espontaneidade dos escreventes, entretanto, alguns registros produzidos pela aluna, aparentemente sutis, realçam transgressões sobre esse material e sobre o processo de escolarização que vivenciava, possibilitando perceber marcas da autora. Os assuntos que comparecem nesses cadernos versam sobre temas de “História Universal” e de “Pedagogia”, saberes considerados importantes para a formação das estudantes, apresentados descritivamente. Especialmente o Caderno de Pedagogia, para além da descrição, manifesta também um caráter explicativo/prescritivo, constituindo-se, supostamente, em referência de leitura, notadamente de orientação teórica e metodológica. Ao examiná-los, observa-se uma espécie de mimetização dos manuais escolares vigentes. Infere-se que as alunas copiavam textos desses manuais, que eram ditados ou exibidos no quadro-negro pelo professor, considerando o pouco acesso aos livros naquela temporalidade. Em relação ao Caderno de Pedagogia, o que mais se destaca são, por um lado, indicativos de códigos de conduta moral considerados adequados à professora, em conformidade ao processo de feminilização da docência naquele contexto. Por outro, percebem-se indícios de que a futura professora esteve em contato com o escolanovismo, que instituía a Pedagogia em bases científicas, enfatizando a importância da Psicologia Experimental. Palavras-chave : Cadernos escolares. Cultura escrita. Escola Nova. (shrink)

O grupo de escritos chamados Cartas Católicas, junto à chamada Carta aos Hebreus apresenta-se como um testemunho extra-paulino do Cristianismo primitivo. De fato, é o conjunto dos textos narrativos (Evangelhos e Atos) e do Corpus Paulinum (conjunto dos escritos atribuídos a Paulo) que são mais marcantes na compreensão do Evento Jesus Cristo e sua vivência e compreensão no primeiro século. Com frequência, se esquece que o Cristianismo é um fenômeno histórico e social plural. Uma pequena introdução a este tempo histórico (...) e à sua temática é sempre oportuna para compreender as raízes da Igreja. (shrink)

Assessing the scientific status of theories of consciousness is often a difficult task. In this paper, I explore the dialectic between the Integrated Information Theory, e1003588, 2014; Tononi et al. Nat Rev Neurosci, 17, 450-61, 2016) and a recently proposed criticism of that theory: the ‘unfolding argument’. I show that the phenomenology-first approach in consciousness research can lead to valid scientific theories of consciousness. I do this by highlighting the two reasons why the unfolding argument fails: first, phenomenology-first theories are (...) grounded, not circular. Second, falsificationism does not provide an adequate demarcation criterion in philosophy of science. I conclude that this specific debate has significance for how, in general, consciousness researchers test and criticize theories of consciousness, and how dismissing the phenomenology-first methodology in favour of a third person-based methodology means endorsing a position in philosophy of mind that has already been challenged. (shrink)

Proposition 5.122 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has been the source of much puzzlement among interpreters, so much so that no fully satisfactory account is yet available. This is unfortunate, if only because the containment account of logical consequence has a venerable tradition behind it. Pasquale Frascolla’s interpretation of proposition 5.122 is based on a valid argument and one true premise. However, the argument explains sense containment only in an indirect way, leaving some crucial questions unanswered. Besides, Frascolla does not address the (...) issue of how to make sense containment notationally perspicuous, an essential theme in Wittgenstein’s reflections. In this paper, we elaborate on Frascolla’s account by looking at the issue through the Tractarian notion of logical space. Our analysis shows that, for containment to be fully appreciated, one should adopt a negative perspective on the notion of sense, in line with the exclusionary theory of conceptual content, as labelled by Ian Rumfitt. Besides this, we introduce and discuss two methods—one envisaged by Wittgenstein himself—for making sense containment notationally perspicuous. (shrink)