“Black” Philosophy, “African” Philosophy, “Africana” Philosophy: Transnational Deconstructive and Reconstructive Renovations in “Philosophy”

Abstract

The legitimating recognition within professionalized academic philosophy in the West that there are communities of philosophically significant discourses oriented by the concerns of thoughtful persons, African and of African descent, has been hard won within the span of the last half-century after more than four centuries of philosophically sustained denials that such persons were even human, let alone capable of philosophizing. Those communities of discourses, the agendas shaping them, the productions of articulate thought emergent from them, are now generally referred to collectively as constituting the subfield of “Africana Philosophy.” In this chapter, Outlaw offers a synoptic overview of some of the developments constituting communities of discourse on the African continent (i.e., “African Philosophy”) and within the African Diaspora constituted, initially, by several 100 years of European settler-colonialism and Europe-perpetrated dispersive relocations of millions of children, women, and men from the continent for enslavement in the Caribbean and the Americas, hence “Afro-Caribbean” and “African American” communities of philosophical discourses “born of struggles.”