Africana philosophy is in the main a philosophy of the present. It is striking, however, that though the present suffuses and saturates the ideas, relationships, and contours of Africana philosophy, the overwhelming registers of the field, its idioms and grounding metaphors, turn on past and future states. The reasons why are worth exploring. This…[Read more]

The police cannot be reformed. What is immediately striking about popular strategies to respond to police violence—for example, the proposal to defund the police and those that advocate for community control of the police—is how inadequately they confront what looms as the most definitive feature of the police: namely, its role as a cou…[Read more]

This article assembles a bibliography of African philosophical and rhetorical intellectual traditions.

African American public intellectual life emerges in the dialectic between at least two major black intellectual traditions—prophetic and wisdom traditions. By situating black public intellectuals within the longue durée of critical contestation, I complicate our understanding of the deeper logics driving harsh exchanges in black pu…[Read more]

This essay argues that recent catastrophizings over freedom of speech are symptoms of a conjunctural crisis in the North Atlantic world. They index, in the main, a crisis of profitability and deindustrialization in the Global North, as seen for instance in the lumpenproletariatization of the working and professional classes; increasing domestic…[Read more]

I suggest in this essay that the responses to the coronavirus pandemic by the North Atlantic elite ought to be accounted in part to the circulation of nihilism as a structure of feeling under late capitalism. I then pose the question, how ought we think of meaning and meaning making under the shadow of ongoing extinction?

This chapter assembles theses — a distinctive genre of writing that articulates an intervention in a political, economic, or cultural practice — on the form and animating vision of intellectual practice.