In the coming months and years, the left faces a historic juncture. On the one hand, racist violence is on the rise across the West, and the political class seems intent on mobilising both overt and subtle racism. On the other hand, strategies of anti-racist organising, which have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, have reached a theoretical impasse. I argue that now, more than ever, a serious project of historical and intellectual retrieval is necessary. This article interrogates the (...) theoretical limitations of ‘anti-blackness’ as an analysis of racialised oppression. Through the thought of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, I argue that theories of ‘anti-blackness’, specifically those rooted in Afro-pessimism, are predicated on a theoretical shift away from relational social theory to identitarian essentialism which obscures, rather than illuminates, the processes of racialisation which undergird racial oppression. (shrink)

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.1"In the antiblack world there is but one race, and that race is black. Thus, to be racialized is to be pushed 'down,' toward blackness, and to be deracialized (...) is to be pushed 'up' toward whiteness." This does not mean, of course, that there are only blacks and whites in some anthropological sense. It does not mean that political reality with regard to race simply reduces to two positions... (shrink)

This essay provides an immanent critique of the Afropessimist-Black feminist impasse through a close reading of Iyko Day's "Afro-Feminism Before Afropessimism." Delineating how the assumption of an antagonism between Afropessimism and Black feminism necessarily flattens both while relationally constructing the two in a spectacularized field of enmity, this essay reads the demand for their non-coincidence as a staged violence refracting antiblack gendered fantasies. Through this antagonism, both Afropessimism and Black feminism are deployed from without to extend the interlocutory projects (...) of civil society's antiblack discourse. And so, this essay argues, the inability to reckon with the conjuncture of Black feminist Afropessimism reveals how Black thought is scaled through the academy precisely by way of its disappearance in a gendered schema that both forecloses and fixes, indeed forecloses by way of fixing, the Black female imago. (shrink)

Afro-pessimism poses one of the most profound challenges to contemporary political theory. By conceptualizing Blackness as social death, it argues that anti-Blackness is not a contingent injustice but the ontological ground of modernity. If Blackness names structural non-being, then universality—the category of the Human—appears intrinsically anti-Black. This article engages Afro-pessimism as a serious theoretical interlocutor in order to test the claim that antagonism grounds a negative universality. It argues, first, that Afro-pessimism correctly identifies anti-Blackness (...) as the paradigmatic modern inscription of universality’s constitutive antagonism. However, it contends that Afro-pessimism risks converting structural centrality into ontological exception by positing Blackness as metaphysical singularity. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Rancière’s account of the “part of no-part,” Žižek’s theory of antagonistic universality, McGowan’s account of shared limitation, and Kapoor and Zalloua’s theory of immanent antagonism, the article proposes that antagonism is universal but its social embodiment is racially stratified. Lack is structural; yet its symbolic management and libidinal displacement are historically organized through anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. Anti-Blackness thus reveals the traumatic kernel of universality without exhausting its logic. Such a negative conception of universality preserves the singularity of anti-Black violence while reopening the possibility of solidarity grounded not in analogy or identity but in shared structural division. (shrink)

This article examines how Black social life might be thought beyond the dialectical and ontological frameworks that have historically bound it to social death. Beginning with the critical tradition’s inability to apprehend Black life as improvisation rather than negation, it explores how the tension between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism turns on the question of refusal: whether the fugitive, improvisational practices of Black existence are confined by anti-blackness or exceed it. Drawing on Fred Moten’s concept of paraontology, the article (...) argues that improvisation constitutes a modality of refusal that neither ruptures nor submits to social death but moves within its fissures, curating a space between Afro-pessimism and Black optimism. As Black noise, improvisation disrupts the linear time of modernity and the ontological grammar that couples blackness with negation, reconceiving refusal as an anti-dialectical practice that deforms the structures that seek to define it and sounds the untimely temporality of Black social life. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the ongoing studies revolving around the fields of Afro-Pessimism and Non-Philosophy. It is focused mostly on a short essay that Francois Laruelle wrote in 1989 called "The Concept of Generalized Analysis or 'Non-Analysis" that eventually became part of a larger work called Theorie des Etrangers, while also drawing on the latter for support. The focus is set not in terms of exegesis or commentary but in tandem with the work of Frank Wilderson (...) III to borrow from both of their works and formulate a move from the "White restrained Unconscious" to the " generalized Unconscious". In the first section I articulate Laruelle and Wilderson's critiques of the common-sense image of the Unconscious. And in the second section I make the move from the White restrained Unconscious to the generalized Unconscious by arguing that the former is embedded within a metaphysical sovereignty of desires that excludes desires. The "White restrained Unconscious" is constituted by what Laruelle calls a "half loss" or a loss which loses itself. For this reason the generalized Unconscious cannot appear within it, for it is an absolute loss, or what Laruelle calls the Joui-sans-Jouissance. The White generalized Unconsicous blocks loss out by a transference mechanism. The opening up of the White restrained Unconscious to the generalized Unconscious which is its Identity in the last instance can only be done by "ending the World". Using Jared Sexton's notion of the "social life of social death" I show that this desire to end the world allows for a seeing from perspective of the "One" which is the subject position of the Non-Analyst and allows for a dualysis of the desires of the White restrained Unconscious. (shrink)

Apocalypticism has been widely denounced as a framework that devalues the world and its history, funding moral dualism. While this is certainly true of many forms of apocalypticism, it is not an accurate understanding of ancient apocalyptic texts. This article establishes a framework of theological virtue ethics drawn particularly from Herbert McCabe, in which human rationality and Christian morality are understood as political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental. From within this framework, Anathea Portier-Young’s work is considered, relating early Jewish apocalyptic (...) to trauma theory and describing how these texts narrated socio-political catastrophe in order to open up possibilities of resistance and hope. These considerations point us towards a constructive understanding of apocalyptic imagination and praxis within a political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental framework. Contemporary employments of Afro-pessimism in Black theology, particularly in J. Kameron Carter, then interrogate the proposed apocalyptic imagination, asking whether Christian apocalyptic praxis can cultivate hope in the face of the catastrophe of modern racism. (shrink)

This article examines the critical work of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction novel Dawn, which follows Lilith Ayapo, a black American woman who is rescued by an alien species after a nuclear war destroys nearly all life on Earth. Lilith awakens 250 years later and learns that the aliens have tasked her with reviving other humans and repopulating the planet. In reframing Reagan-era debates about security and survival, Butler captured the spirit of ‘pessimistic futurism’, a unique way of thinking and writing (...) black female sexuality, reproduction and survival. Suturing concepts central to both Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism, pessimistic futurism carefully considers how black female subjectivity and labour create the coming world. By linking human survival to Lilith’s own ability to adapt to the new and dangerous world, Butler offers scholars of black studies a vital interpretive framework for thinking about the points of contact between pessimism and futurism. Specifically, Butler presents a form of futurism brought back to Earth, grounded in the sensibility of the black female experience. (shrink)

Este artigo tem o intuito de investigar o quanto a “dessemelhança” e o “excedente” são termos permitem percebermos elementos impensados nos discursos filosóficos e educacionais. Principalmente pelos discursos se fundamentarem em princípios modernos acerca da formação humana e da instauração da subjetividade. Com isso, organizamos as análises em três circuitos: delimitar a noção de “excedente ineliminável” para Achille Mbembe (2018), depois uma conversa entre a arte da fuga em Dénètem Touan Bona (2021) e Beatriz Nascimento (2021), por fim, a partir (...) de Conceição Evaristo (2018) e Frank Wilderson III (2021) apresentar como se constitui vitalidades radicais. Tais circuitos intentam potencializar as variadas formas de estar na humanidade. Palavras-chave: Modernidade; Filosofia da Educação; Decolonial; Afro-Pessimismo. “Ineliminable surplus”: radical vitalities as principle of dissemtry Abstract: This article aims to investigate how “dissimilarity” and “surplus” are terms that allow us to perceive unthought-of elements in philosophical and educational discourses. These discourses are mainly based on modern principles regarding human formation and the establishment of subjectivity. We organize the analyses into three circuits: firstly, delineating the notion of “ineliminable surplus” for Achille Mbembe (2018), then a conversation between the art of escape in Dénètem Touan Bona (2021) and Beatriz Nascimento (2021), and finally, presenting how radical vitalities are constituted from the perspectives of Conceição Evaristo (2018) and Frank Wilderson III (2021). These circuits aim to enhance the various forms of being within humanity. Keywords: Modernity; Philosophy of Education; Decolonial; Afro-Pessimism. “Excedente ineliminable”: vitalidades radicales como principio de disimetría Resumen: Este artículo tiene el propósito de investigar cómo la “disonancia” y el “excedente” son términos que nos permiten percibir elementos no pensados en los discursos filosóficos y educativos. Estos discursos se basan principalmente en principios modernos sobre la formación humana y el establecimiento de la subjetividad. Organizamos los análisis en tres circuitos: primero, delineando la noción de “Excedente ineliminable” para Achille Mbembe (2018), luego una conversación entre el arte de la fuga en Dénètem Touan Bona (2021) y Beatriz Nascimento (2021), y finalmente, presentando cómo se constituyen las vitalidades radicales desde las perspectivas de Conceição Evaristo (2018) y Frank Wilderson III (2021). Estos circuitos tienen como objetivo potenciar las diversas formas de estar en la humanidad. Palabras clave: Modernidad; Filosofía de la Educación; Decolonial; Afro-Pesimismo. Data de registro: 06/12/2024 Data de aceite: 03/12/2025. (shrink)

Slovenes of African descent find themselves in a calculus of biopower. This points to the precariousness of life (or flesh), which is deemed as less “worthy.” We are at a historical moment in which Afro-pessimism offers a “realistic” glimpse into the past and future of Blackness in the White supremacist contexts of the West, due almost solely to the enormity of systemic violence that Black flesh has endured. In light of this very real political urgency, there is a (...) very real need for security, which in the short term might best be accomplished through concepts such as identity and authenticity. However, Afro-Slovene acts of living reject in passing the priorities that “progress” evokes through the standardization of Euro-normalizing biopolitical orders and slip the categories used to confine them to a limited form of existence. This analysis focuses on the Afro-Slovene insistence on living otherwise as a form of resistance to the tyranny of linear progressive subjectivities, without shedding responsibility for the need to confront race and racism head on. (shrink)

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function (...) of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including (...) Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era. (shrink)

David Theo Goldberg engages Achille Mbembe in a wide-ranging conversation on the key lines of analysis of Mbembe’s book, The Critique of Black Reason. The discussion ranges across a broad swath of key themes: the constitutive feature of racisms in the making of modernity and modern capitalism as conceived through the global black experience; the African and French archives in constituting, resisting, and refashioning ‘black reason’ and its multiple registers; the centrality of slavery to this constitution and resistance; thinghood and (...) humanity; liberalism as the basis for racial pessimism. The discussion closes with Mbembe’s plea for a shared being and an exchange about repair and reparation. (shrink)

In this article I consider the kind of temporality that radical practices of refusal can be said to open in resistance to the enduring afterlives of slavery. To do so, I study what I call two abyssal figurations of refusal in Édouard Glissant's work, namely, the ‘silent walker’ in his 1990 Poetics of Relation and the ‘nameless woman’ in his 1981 novel The Overseer's Cabin. In both cases, I argue, Glissant envisions refusal as an ambivalent performance that — bearing a (...) constitutive relation to what he calls ‘the abyss’ of racial slavery — transversally exceeds both the Black optimist and Afro-pessimist readings of refusal that retain currency in contemporary Black studies. What is echoed in the two figurations I study is the ambivalent sense in which the refusing performances of blackness simultaneously divert and remain held by the temporal structures of anti-Black coloniality that they strain against or refuse. (shrink)

The final chapter of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth includes several psychiatric case histories that speak to the indelible effects of the deathly atmospherics of colonialism on the psychology of the colonized. Though Fanon reveals that these case histories are drawn from his own clinical practice in Algeria, he almost entirely refuses to contextualize their inclusion in the text, and even warns that his presentation intentionally ‘avoid[s] any semiological, nosological, or therapeutic discussion’. In this article, I read Fanon’s (...) case histories in Wretched in terms of Christina Sharpe’s notion of Black redaction, which she adumbrates in her In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as a critical strategy for ‘imagining otherwise’ that seeks to counter the generalized anti-Black atmosphere that still governs the world in the wake of transatlantic slavery. My argument is that in presenting the case histories of Wretched in refusal of dominant psychiatric discourses, Fanon engages a Black redactive strategy that aims to imagine the psychological effects of colonization otherwise than through the pathologizing colonial frames by which racialized and colonized lives are systematically rendered invisible. Further, I contend that reading Fanon’s case histories in such Black redactive terms enables us to recognize that his clinically inflected political thought is not premised on a valuation of pathology, as has been argued by his Black optimist (Fred Moten) and Afro-pessimist (Jared Sexton) readers alike. In fact, as I conclude by arguing in response to these readings, at play in Fanon’s Black redactive strategy in Wretched is not a valuation of pathology, but the matter of its transvaluation. (shrink)

The release of Kanye West’s Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his hit song entitled “New Slaves,” which introduced a pessimistic terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Critical Race Theory’s realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to (...) the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West’s performance of “New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live was only amplified by the “Not For Sale” insignia.. (shrink)

This article produces a Black feminist analysis of trauma narratives in the mythologising of ‘transracial’ identities, and reflects on the implications of theorising such claims through a lens of Black metaphysics. The article starts with an analysis of the trauma narratives, finding they evoke two contrasting conceptualisations of the relationship between Blackness and trauma: first, that which articulates Blackness only through pain and suffering, then that which constructs Blackness as an oasis from trauma, invisibilising Black suffering. I argue that the (...) seeming conflict in these two simultaneously produced imaginaries reveals an underlying logic that understands Blackness as constitutionally estranged from the ontological grounds of whiteness. From here, I read the transracial/trauma myths via two distinct traditions of Black metaphysics – one informed by afro-pessimism, and the other by Black feminist anti-identitarian critique – which develops into a reflexive analysis that questions how my own political motivations produced a theoretical interpretation at odds with my commitment to a Black feminist project. The final argument of the article is for a Black feminist position that can better respond to the problematics of transracialism. (shrink)

In this volume, Elizabeth Phillips brings together scholarly essays on eschatology, ethics, and politics, as well as a selection of sermons preached in the chapels of the University of Cambridge arising from that scholarly work. These essays and sermons explore themes ranging from ethnography to Anabaptism and Christian Zionism to Afro-pessimism. Drawing on a wide range of authors from Flannery O'Conner and Herbert McCabe to James Cone and M. Shawn Copeland, this collection provides insight into the fields of (...) Christian ethics and political theology, as well as ethnography and homiletics. Phillips challenges theologians to interdisciplinarity in their work, and to keep historical and traditional sources in conversation with contemporary sources from critical and liberative perspectives. She challenges Christians to engage in apocalyptic practices which name and resist the false pretenses of the political status quo. And she challenges preachers to call their congregations to moral and political faithfulness, opening up possibilities beyond both the squeamish evasion of politics in some preaching traditions and the didactic political partisanship of others."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Have we reached what Alexander Galloway dismissively refers to as ‘peak Deleuze’? In this essay, I argue that the arrival at end times – with the sense of mass extinction and philosophy's exhaustion – is indeed a moment of ‘peak Deleuze’, but that this gesture of exhaustion is already implicit in A Thousand Plateaus. Recognising the limits and seduction of a text is never as easy as it seems; every attempt to break up with Deleuze and Guattari, though necessary, is (...) fraught with a whole series of difficulties that were already visible in A Thousand Plateaus's own relation to its outside. (shrink)

In The Man‐Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, Tommy J. Curry called for the creation of a new field, Black Male Studies, which would engage a genre study of Black male death and dying. A variety of scholars have answered this call, cultivating new research on Black and other racialized males that defies the conventions and assumptions of predominant approaches to the study of Black males. Although both Curry's The Man‐Not and the nascent field of Black (...) Male Studies have been subject to much backlash on social media, only three scholarly critiques of Black Male Studies have been published. This analysis examines the criticisms of The Man‐Not as articulated by Olúfemi Táíwò, Freeden Blume Oeur and Saida Grundy, and Patrice D. Douglass, finding that none of these critics engage the conceptual and empirical foundations of Black Male Studies. In lieu of methodological criticism, these scholars resort to rhetorical, personal, and moral appeals that evade the primary issues at stake. In some instances, these critics deliberately misrepresent Curry's claims in The Man‐Not. Having come to the end of the first decade of Black Male Studies, critics have yet to offer a genuine critique of the field. (shrink)

This essay surveys Henry David Thoreau’s extensive commentary on slavery and freedom in the 1840s and 50s, tracking the ways he toggles between the literal (i.e., the institutions of racial chattel and capital’s value-form resisted by civil disobedience and reconfigured by civil war) and the figurative (i.e., the existential and spiritual slavery evaded by the individual and collective attainment of ‘real values’), and how his natural philosophy at once illuminates and obscures the true stakes of his abolitionism and that of (...) his fellow Transcendentalists. It notes that there is much to be said for and much yet to be done on the burgeoning intersectional critique of Transcendentalism, one that highlights both its strengths and limitations—or, at times, its outright problems—regarding race, nation, class, gender, sexuality et al. So too for the literature celebrating Thoreau ‘as much for his politics as his aesthetics,’ avowing how his ‘reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles.’ The focus here is adjacent and complementary: to consider the prospects of a Black Transcendentalism that is coeval with and prior to Thoreau's articulation of the principles of ‘Elevation’ and ‘Emancipation.’ Beyond that, it speculates about something like the blackness of Thoreau’s own evolving relation to the political-intellectual movement of Transcendentalism itself. (shrink)

This essay surveys Henry David Thoreau’s extensive commentary on slavery and freedom in the 1840s and 50s, tracking the ways he toggles between the literal (i.e., the institutions of racial chattel and capital’s value-form resisted by civil disobedience and reconfigured by civil war) and the figurative (i.e., the existential and spiritual slavery evaded by the individual and collective attainment of ‘real values’), and how his natural philosophy at once illuminates and obscures the true stakes of his abolitionism and that of (...) his fellow Transcendentalists. It notes that there is much to be said for and much yet to be done on the burgeoning intersectional critique of Transcendentalism, one that highlights both its strengths and limitations—or, at times, its outright problems—regarding race, nation, class, gender, sexuality et al. So too for the literature celebrating Thoreau ‘as much for his politics as his aesthetics,’ avowing how his ‘reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles.’ The focus here is adjacent and complementary: to consider the prospects of a Black Transcendentalism that is coeval with and prior to Thoreau's articulation of the principles of ‘Elevation’ and ‘Emancipation.’ Beyond that, it speculates about something like the blackness of Thoreau’s own evolving relation to the political-intellectual movement of Transcendentalism itself. (shrink)

This article considers today’s ‘post-digital’ political publishing through the material forms of an experimental book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Anonymously published and devoid of all editorial text, the book is comprised entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets, tweets posted by black Baltimore youth during the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie Gray. It is a crisis-ridden book, bearing the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellion of Baltimore 2015 into the horizon of publishing. Drawing on critical (...) theories of books and digital media, and bringing Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to bear on issues of publishing, the article appraises seven aspects of this book’s materiality: its epistolary structure and rupture with the book-as-closure; its undoing of the commodity form of books; the ‘poor image’ of its visual scene; its recourse to facial redaction and voiding of narrative progression; and its destabilization of readers’ empathy. (shrink)

Paget introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy in this ground-breaking work. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature, he traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe.

Bénédicte Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes blackness and animality to measure the value of life.

The book describes a new form of communitarian politics on the African continent, that is able to take seriously both individual entitlements and communitarian obligations. This is achieved by proposing a thin version of communitarianism that realizes the organic relationship between individuals and the community.

In this article, I consider whether there are values intrinsic to development theory and practice that are dubious in light of a characteristically African ethic. In particular, I focus on what a certain philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan value of communion entails for appraising development, drawing two major conclusions. One is that a majority of the criticisms that have been made of development by those sympathetic to African values are weak; I argue that, given the value of communion, development should (...) not be rejected because it is essentially, say, overly materialistic and scientistic, or insufficiently spiritual and local. The second conclusion, however, is that three criticisms of development are strong from the perspective of Afro-communalism and are particularly powerful when set in that context. I argue that development theory and practice are characteristically anthropocentric, individualist and technocratic, and that a reading of the sub-Saharan value of communion provides a unitary foundation for rejecting these features and for grounding an alternative, more relational approach to social progress and to what justice demands from the West in relation to Africa. (shrink)

Carrying out research on brains is important for medical advances in various diseases. However, such research ought not be carried out on human brains because the benefits do not outweigh the potential risks. A possible alternative is the use of brain surrogates. Nevertheless, some scholars who uphold a threshold account of moral status suggest the possibility that, with technological advances in the near future, more advanced brain surrogates will have very similar features to humans. This may suffice for these having (...) the same moral status as humans, and as a result, the situation may have implications for brain research, indeed, leading to the implication that this ought also not to be carried out upon brain surrogates. In this article, we present a relational approach to moral status which upholds that brain surrogates do not have the same moral status as human beings. Hence, brain research ought not be rejected on the grounds of equality of moral status between humans and brain surrogates. (shrink)

This article proposes a polythetic definition of religion using Afro-Brazilian religions as prototypes: not as the correct definition, but as a thought experiment to enable theorizing beyond Christian biases that have shaped the study of religion. By using a stable-property-cluster approach to definition—addressing weaknesses in both monothetic-essentialist and family-resemblance approaches—the resulting framework emphasizes hybridity, ritual, healing, and fluid theologies/spiritologies. This shifts the focus from institutionalized, text-based, and hegemonically networked religious forms. The definition is proposed as a theoretical intervention that (...) foregrounds the epistemological crossroads (encruzilhadas) at which scholars—in dialogue with their interlocutors—construct and deploy disciplinary categories. (shrink)

Encounters and interactions between Asians and Africans without the visible presence of whiteness have become increasingly common in contemporary visual culture, and yet such representations still seem to be trapped in prevalent racial stereotypes. This paper takes a close look at the cultural phenomena of Afro-Asian transracialism, namely when those racialized as Black embody or become those racialized as Asian and _vice versa_, and explores how racialized imageries and racist ideas continue to circulate across different visual products and digital (...) realms such as sci-fi stories, social media memes, Nollywood films, and AI-generated clips. Drawing from existing theoretical concepts like techno-Blackness and techno-Orientalism, I propose transracial dissonance as the prominent affect that categorizes the reception of these Afro-Asian images on social media. I argue that this transracial dissonance involves dialectics of pleasure and pain that are counterproductive to empathy and solidarity, as both the pleasure of possessing/embodying the non-white Other and the pain of seeing such possession/embodiment are based on a negative logic of racial stereotyping and cultural separation. To counter such negative _modus operandi_ of racial flows, the paper ends with a hopeful note on resonance between the Chinese idea of _tǐ_ (体) and the African concept of _ubuntu_ as a potential entry point for achieving intersubjective empathy and Afro-Asian solidarity. (shrink)

Afro-alemães são pessoas negras que tem um dos progenitores alemão e o outro negro de qualquer parte do mundo. Historicamente os que se identificam como afro alemães são desconectados da cultura alemã, há uma forte crença no país onde uma escolha silenciosa é feita: Ou você é alemão, ou negro. Uma vez negro, você não é alemão. A partir de duas poesias da poeta afro-alemã May Ayim, apresento uma reflexão sob a perspectiva histórica sobre motivos que levam (...) à elaboração e reelaboração de identidades e afirmação dos afro-alemães num contexto local e global. (shrink)

Afro-American social thought lost its critical thrust in the 1970s, when the American state incorporated the organizing principles of civil rights/black power politics. Since that time the protest activism grounding black social thought has floundered in a contradiction. On the one hand, protest requires an alienated outsider evoking the specter of disruptive mobilization. On the other hand, racial politics has assumed the character of negotiated agreements among elites whose legitimacy derives from official positions within the corporate-state nexus, but neither (...) what is negotiated nor the negotiators themselves are amenable to mass mobilization. The former generally are not mass issues (e.g., magnitude of minority set-asides in contract letting), and the latter, structured in the environment of officialdom and rational administration, shrink from popular participation. (shrink)

Bernard Matolino argues that the communal foundation of classical African communitarianism should be discarded if communitarian theories would be of any use to modern African political theory. He sets out to propose a theory of communitarianism that not only suits modern African realities but would also be useful to any people including non-Africans. I argue that what he ends up doing is proposing cosmopolitanism, calling into question the “Afro” designation of the title of his theory. I also argue that (...) his position on the relationship between the individual and the community is technically not communitarianism of any sort, calling into question the “communitarian” appellation in his theory. His attempt to divorce communitarianism from communalism is unsuccessful, making communitarianism as unsuitable as a theory of world relations as Matolino claims it is unsuitable for contemporary multiethnic African societies. (shrink)

This article draws our attention to the centrality of the normative idea of personhood in elucidating a robust Afro-communitarianism. To do so, it visits the debate between the so-called moderate and radical communitarians to argue that the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual is not an implausible position. It argues that this assertion, given a nuanced moral interpretation, can offer a promising African perspective on how to secure a life of dignity withoutnecessarily appealing to rights but (...) to the normative idea of personhood. It submits that the idea of personhood entails a morality of duties that prioritizes the well-being of all. It is this prioritization of the well-being of all as the proper moral-political goal of Afro-communitarianism that moral-theoretically captures the essence of the assertion that a community takes priority over an individual. (shrink)

Commentary on José Eduardo Porcher's Afro-Brazilian Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Este estudio analizó las causas del desarraigo cultural de la población afrodescendiente en Costa Rica mediante un enfoque cronológico que abordó dimensiones sociales, culturales, educativas y económicas. Se examinó el papel de la educación como un sistema que, históricamente, condicionó la integración, el desarrollo y la preservación de la conciencia cultural del criollo limonense, limitando y subordinando su contribución a la identidad costarricense. El análisis reveló que las políticas oficiales promovieron un “apartheid lingüístico”, relegando al criollo limonense y su lengua (...) a una categoría secundaria en el imaginario sociopolítico nacional. Esta exclusión deterioró su herencia cultural y afectó su posicionamiento en la sociedad costarricense, generando un limbo sociocultural que impidió el fortalecimiento de sus raíces, la valoración de sus aportes y su integración a la identidad nacional. El estudio detalló la relación entre estas políticas y el deterioro del criollo limonense, identificando su impacto en la educación y la percepción de la lengua como vehículo de identidad. Basándose en el análisis del Programa Estado de la Nación y en Lemus (2018), se propusieron estrategias para revalorizar la lengua y la cultura afrodescendiente en el sistema educativo costarricense y fomentar su reconocimiento en la identidad nacional. (shrink)

Dans les religions afro-brésiliennes, le contact avec les divinités s’établit par le biais de la transe. L’article, qui se fonde sur les travaux de Roger Bastide et Pierre Verger, identifie qui sont les personnes aptes à entrer en transe pour communiquer avec les dieux. On étudie ensuite comment elles préparent leur corps à recevoir leur dieu, et comment elles l’entretiennent de façon à ce que la transe puisse se répéter au cours de la vie religieuse d’une communauté. Ces personnes (...) jouissent d’un statut social particulier au sein de la communauté, car d’une part elles ont commerce avec les dieux, et d’autre part ce commerce leur donne pouvoir à orienter la vie de la communauté. Il y a donc interaction entre le corps de l’individu et le corps social qui l’entoure et qui adhère à la croyance. L’anthropologie moderne a redonné un statut à la fois aux « possédés » et aux cultes afro-brésiliens, alors que les premiers scientifiques qui les ont étudiés ne voyaient en la transe que la manifestation d’une folie. (shrink)

The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes and compares African American cool culture and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute and characterizes them as expressions set against oppressive homogenizations of a technocratic world. The Cool-Kawaii sheds light on the history and development of both cultures in three main ways: First, both emerge from similar historical conditions; second, both are in search of human dignity and liberation, and finally, both kawaii and African American cool (...) establish a new kind of modernity able to transcend both traditionalism and anti-traditionalist modernity. (shrink)