Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical
Epistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role of
knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black "freedom"
and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation and
condemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globally
within the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity,
doing so in connection to the population's dehumanization and/or invisibilization
within various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collection
foregrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposed
subjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to,
and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemic
formations that have worked to "naturalize" this condition within the West's
various socio-human formations.
The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledge
formations and practices generated from within the discourse of "race," but
also doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses of
Western modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, and
counter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements,
and/or institutions - historic and contemporary - of the Black world. Through
these examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, or
explicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical - but
also emancipatory - epistemology. What emerges is a novel and more
comprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that can
aid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of "knowing"
and "being" much-needed within the context of ending the continued
overall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part of
ending the "global problematique" that confronts humankind as a whole.
