Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe (2016) Statues also die : limits and legacies. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 24 (1). pp. 45-67. doi:10.5195/jffp.2016.757 ISSN 2155-1162 .

Preview

PDF WRAP_Fraiture_757-1859-2-PB.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (697Kb) | Preview

Request Changes to record.

Abstract

“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage. The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > French Studies
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Philosophy, African, Philosophy -- Africa, Ethnophilosophy
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh
ISSN:	2155-1162
Official Date:	2016
Dates:	Date Event 2016 Published 12 October 2016 Available
Volume:	24
Number:	1
Page Range:	pp. 45-67
DOI:	10.5195/jffp.2016.757
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)
Date of first compliant deposit:	20 February 2017
Date of first compliant Open Access:	20 February 2017

Request changes or add full text files to a record

Repository staff actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads