Blackhood as a category in contemporary discourses on Black Studies: An existentialist philosophical defence
Transformation in Higher Education
Field | Value | |
Title | Blackhood as a category in contemporary discourses on Black Studies: An existentialist philosophical defence | |
Creator | Lamola, M. John | |
Description | Background: An era and academic milieu that clamour at post-racialist and globalist theoretical frameworks juxtaposed with evidence of growing anti-black dehumanizing racism, and the persistence of psycho-social alienation of black learners in multi-racial educational institutions.Aim: To engage in a critical philosophical–phenomenological and political review of the experience of being-black-in-the-world as a factor that justifies the establishment and maintenance of Black Studies programmes. The article seeks to contribute to the debate on the vagaries accompanying the institutionalisation of culturo-epistemic exclusive spaces for socially suppressed selfhoods in a postmodern academy.Setting: Racialised social environments as affecting Higher Education, with post-apartheid South Africa as a case.Methods: Existential Philosophy, Black Consciousness and Paulo Freire’s philosophy of education.Results: The category of blackness as derived from a Fanonian existential phenomenology and Steve Biko’s perspective, contrasted against Achille Mbembe’s semiological–hermeneutic and cosmopolitan treatment of blackness, is an existential–ontological reality that should function as a cardinal category in educational planning, justifying specialised learning and knowledge-exchange spaces for the re-humanisation of black existence.Conclusion: The experience of black existential reality, conceived from blackhood as an external recognition and an internally self-negotiated consciousness within the social immanence of whiteness, justifies the institutionalisation of learning spaces and programmes that are aimed at nurturing antiracist black self-realisation, namely Black Studies. | |
Publisher | AOSIS Publishing | |
Date | 2018-12-03 | |
Identifier | 10.4102/the.v3i0.55 | |
Source | Transformation in Higher Education; Vol 3 (2018); 5 pages 2519-5638 2415-0991 | |
Language | eng | |
Relation |
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:
https://thejournal.org.za/index.php/thejournal/article/view/55/164
https://thejournal.org.za/index.php/thejournal/article/view/55/163
https://thejournal.org.za/index.php/thejournal/article/view/55/165
https://thejournal.org.za/index.php/thejournal/article/view/55/162
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