In Ethics of Liberation, Enrique Dussel claims that American pragmatist philosophy “could not discover the phenomenon of Eurocentrism, because it interpreted the United States as the full Western fulfillment of Europe. . . . It did not take as its departure point the periphery, the dominated, the excluded, the poor, women, the races discriminated against.”1Decolonizing American Philosophy partially confirms, partially refutes, Dussel's charge. None of the contributors to this volume ever says quite so plainly, but its argument could be stated thus: that the idea of America at large in U.S. cultural discourse is predicated on the more or less forgetful repression of the majority of Americans, especially indigenous and Black, throughout the Americas, throughout the modern era, starting with Columbus's “discovery.” Thus, how many Americans think about America—American philosophy in an informal but still real sense—involves a “colonized and colonizing” metaphilosophy (4). To improve American philosophy, it must be decolonized. That requires resistance to, and creative reconstruction of, colonial structures in the idea of America. Then we might achieve a better America. The work must be conducted in light of repressed groups and their lives and thoughts. There are, however, also strands of American philosophy in the more formal sense—the volume takes Pragmatism as the most notable strand—that, while still needing decolonization, offer valuable tools to do the work.The notion of “decolonial philosophy” originated in encounters among a group composed primarily of Latin American academics at work in North American and European academic institutions in the early 2000s. Some key claims of the group are: that modernity originates with the Spanish and Portuguese discovery and colonization of the Americas; that a crucial intellectual structure that legitimates and sustains the resulting modern world order, through and beyond the end of colonial rule, is Eurocentric racism; and that decolonizing philosophy is one aspect of a struggle on behalf of other possible worlds—worlds in which racialized exclusion from the goods that make life human could end. Not all the authors in this volume reveal specific influences from the decolonial group, but it helps to interpret them as accepting to some extent these claims.Part One, “The Terms of Decolonization,” contains three essays. In “Culture, Acquisitiveness, and Decolonial Philosophy,” Lee A. McBride III describes European-U.S. colonialism as more than a political-economic matter of territorial expansion and wealth extraction, but also a cultural project or scheme, grounded in a dichotomy between “the West” and “the rest.” In this scheme, a modern Western way of being human is abstracted as the universal telos of “Man.” The rest, accordingly, are other, and less, than Man. Their colonization was a confirmation of this, and yet may, by its “civilizing” effects, lead them to Manhood. Decolonization, then, is at least in part a critical philosophical project to undo the cultural scheme of colonialism. McBride identifies three missteps to avoid: confusing decolonization with a romantic return to a premodern past (instead of advance into a nonmodern set of possibilities), confusing it with recovery of a “pure” cultural identity (instead of advance into hybrid/mestizo capabilities), and confusing it with discursive deconstruction only (instead of attending to all the conceivable practical effects of colonialism/decolonization—which for McBride means especially confronting global capitalism).Kyle Whyte and Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner give added emphasis to McBride's last point in “Without Land, Decolonizing American Philosophy is Impossible.” They stress that decolonization cannot take place if land as indigenous peoples conceive and relate to it is ignored. Indigenous peoples generally define themselves and land in intimate relationship. American philosophy, both informal and formal, recognizes this fact weakly, if at all. Consequently, professional American philosophers are hard-pressed to see how their work and lives both presuppose colonization (how many colleges and universities stand on stolen land?) and are subject to philosophical resistance and reconstruction performed by indigenous peoples. White and Meissner doubt American philosophy can ever be decolonized.In “Decolonizing the West,” John Drabinski argues that Western colonialism amounts to a “total project,” a “necropolitics,” of whiteness: if it could, it would complete itself through annihilation of the (non-white) colonized. However, enslaved Black folk and their descendants in America (for example), are not simply abject colonial subalterns. They are a decolonizing counter-community from which better ideas may arise and have arisen. Mustering support from Douglass, Du Bois, Locke, Murray and more, Drabinski contends: “Reality itself is changed by the sound of black suffering—namely, the reality of and for African Americans. That change—a metaphysical intervention and eruption—is an expression of resistance in the form of performance, pleasure, and community making” (74–75). This sense-making tradition constitutes a different American philosophy, insistent that America cannot be understood well apart from the violent creation of whiteness, but more importantly, its black transcendence.Part Two, “Decolonizing the American Canon,” includes four chapters. Eduardo Mendieta's “Enlightened Readers” proposes to clarify a stance of “Enlightened reading,” through an examination of the different ways Thomas Jefferson and Immanuel Kant drew on the travel writing of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, two members of a scientific expedition to the Spanish American colonies in the eighteenth century. Jefferson's reading shows a greater hermeneutical generosity toward the indigenous peoples Juan and Ulloa describe, an attitude to emulate, and so undermine colonial prejudice.In “Writing Loss,” Corey McCall compares Emerson's and Du Bois's reflections on the deaths of their respective children, Waldo and Burghardt, contending that these are windows into rival ideas of America: a more Emersonian idea reflected in a politics of triumphal self-reliance (which McCall asserts is more representative of an ideology of whiteness), and a more Du Boisian idea reflected in a politics of loss as the “burden that must be borne if we are to remake the world . . . ” (a politics more representative of the experience of being African American) (126).Andrea J. Pitts's chapter on “Latina Feminist Engagements with US Pragmatism” describes how three Latina feminist philosophers, Jacqueline M. Martinez, Paula M.L. Moya, and Linda Martín Alcoff, draw on and modify thoughts of Peirce, Putnam, and Rorty, respectively. Phillip McReynolds's chapter recommends a reconstructive encounter between John Dewey's critique of the fact-value split and the critical theories of racialized colonialism of Sylvia Wynter and Aime Césaire. Such an encounter would redress the former's weaknesses concerning race, while clarifying key ideas in the latter.Part Three, “Expanding the American Canon,” amplifies some voices rarely heeded in American philosophy, both formal and informal. In “The Social Ontology of Care among Filipina Dependency Workers,” Celia Bardwell-Jones explores the “transnational relationships that intricately make up the American social fabric” (178). Huge numbers of Filipina women work as caregivers to other people's children in the U.S. They are participants in a “global care chain” of reciprocal dependence. Yet, the dependence of their employers upon them is grossly under-valued in their pay and working conditions. Bardwell-Jones suggests that Jane Addams's work at Hull House offers a paradigm for revaluing dependence and of welcoming, rather than denying, responsibilities toward those on whom we depend.In “Creolization and Playful Sabotage at the Brink of Politics,” Kris Sealey considers the “subversive power in Carnival poetics” figured in Caribbean writer Earl Lovelace's novel, The Dragon Can't Dance (219). Sealey describes creolization as “that Antillean American capacity to refashion fragments of a colonial past for the sake of self-determination in a present and future that is both impure and decolonial, and that conditions liberatory existence in the face of colonial hegemony/oppression” (208). As Sealey says, creolization resonates with Pragmatic emphases on “performing (inventing) a life worthy of living” (223). Emerging in a colonial situation of everyday violence in which formal politics excludes the great mass of the public, creolization sabotages para-political conventions (which the colonized may play upon), to open up liberative possibilities. This “Carnival poetics” pushes Pragmatists to focus on practices of resistance.Perhaps the most effective chapter is Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica's introduction to the theme of race in writings of the early twentieth-century Peruvian intellectual, José Carlos Mariátegui. In “Decolonizing Mariátegui as a Prelude to Decolonizing Latin American Philosophy,” Gallegos-Ordorica shows how Mariátegui's thought combines Marxist and Indigenist influences to sharply criticize the legitimation of social and economic inequities in terms of a supposedly natural racial hierarchy. Still, Mariátegui was not altogether rid of naïve belief in the supposed science of race, especially if re-expressed in terms of “civilizations.” Mariátegui's thought can advance decolonizing American philosophy, if his critical insights are followed more consistently (245). Anthony Sean Neal's “Distal versus Proximal: Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited as a Proximal Epistemology” approaches Thurman's hermeneutics as a pragmatically oriented method for decolonizing all manner of cultural traditions, including philosophy.I have tried my best to distil the authors’ intentions. Sadly, in chapter after chapter, the import of those intentions goes little realized. The authors mark out important lines of inquiry, and might have contented themselves with that. Instead, almost all claim to do much more, while describing sources so thinly that their assertions lack adequate argumentation, and cannot be reasonably assessed. As a sympathetic reader, I hoped for much more from this book than it delivers.