Black Knowledges/Black Struggles

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in CriticalEpistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role ofknowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black “freedom”and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation andcondemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globallywithin the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity,doing so in connection to the population’s dehumanization and/or invisibilizationwithin various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collectionforegrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposedsubjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to,and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemicformations that have worked to “naturalize” this condition within the West’svarious socio-human formations.

The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledgeformations and practices generated from within the discourse of “race,” butalso doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses ofWestern modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, andcounter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements,and/or institutions – historic and contemporary – of the Black world. Throughthese examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, orexplicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical – butalso emancipatory – epistemology. What emerges is a novel and morecomprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that canaid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of “knowing”and “being” much-needed within the context of ending the continuedoverall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part ofending the “global problematique” that confronts humankind as a whole.