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APA Newsletters Volume 02, Number 1 Fall 2002 NEWSLETTER ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE LETTER FROM THE NEW EDITORS, JOHN MCCLENDON & GEORGE YANCY ARTICLES JOHN H. MCCLENDON III “Black and White contra Left and Right? The Dialectics of Ideological Critique in African American Studies” GEORGE YANCY “Black Women’s Experiences, Philosophy of Religion and Womanist Theology: An Introduction through Jacquelyn Grant’s Hermaneutics of Location” BOOK REVIEWS Mark David Wood: Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism REVIEWED BY JOHN H. MCCLENDON III George Yancy, Ed.: Cornel West: A Critical Reader REVIEWED BY ARNOLD L. FARR © 2002 by The American Philosophical Association ISSN: 1067-9464 APA NEWSLETTER ON Philosophy and the Black Experience John McClendon & George Yancy, Co-Editors Fall 2002 Volume 02, Number 1 George Yancy’s recent groundbreaking work, Cornel West: A ETTER ROM THE EW DITORS Critical Reader. Farr particularly highlights the revolutionary L F N E historical importance of Yancy’s book. For submissions to the APA newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, book reviews should be sent to George We would like to say that it is an honor to assume, as new Yancy at Duquesne University Philosophy Department, 600 editors, the helm of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15282; and he can be e-mailed Black Experience. Editors Leonard Harris and Jesse Taylor have at [email protected]. Articles for submission can done a consistent job of providing us with articles and reviews be sent to John H. McClendon, Associate Professor of African that reflect the importance of philosophy vis-a-vis the Black American and American Cultural Studies, Bates College, 223 experience. We thank them for their commendable efforts. Pettengill Hall, Lewiston, ME 04240 or e-mailed to Recognizing the significance of this very important [email protected]. We welcome any suggestions with philosophical venue for critical reflection and philosophical regard to improving the quality of the newsletter. The deadline exploration, we hope to provide informative and insightful for submissions for the spring is January 7, 2003. articles and reviews that speak to and speak from the Black experience. We do not conceptualize the Black experience monolithically; indeed, “the Black experience” is a diverse, complex, and variegated phenomenon. As such, we hope to provide a variety of articles and reviews that reflect the view ARTICLES that “the Black experience” is to be understood as dynamic and multi-dimensional. We believe that such an approach enhances the normative framework of Africana philosophy. We strongly encourage potential authors and book reviewers Black and White contra Left and Right? to submit their work for possible publication. We also The Dialectics of Ideological Critique in encourage any suggestions that you think might help toward creating a more discursively and dialogically diversified African American Studies Newsletter. Having said this, we are happy to introduce our John H. McClendon, III, Ph.D. first issue with an article by John McClendon. McClendon’s article “Black and White contra Left and Right?: The Dialectics Associate Professor of African American and American of Ideological Critique in African American Studies” examines Cultural Studies, Bates College the role of ideological critique by reviewing race and class analysis in African American Studies. McClendon accents how The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ideological critique is in essence a form of external critique. ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material George Yancy follows with an article that provides an force of society, is at the same time its ruling introduction to womanist philosophy of religion/theology. The intellectual force. The class which has the means of article opens some new avenues for reading womanist material production at its disposal, has control at the Christology. Working primarily within the context of womanist same time over the means of mental production, so Jacquelyn Grant’s work, White Women’s Christ and Black that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those Women’s Jesus, and to the extent that womanist scholarship who lack the means of mental production are subject still requires attention from a reading public, the article to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal deepens our understanding of Grant’s work and reframes the expression of the dominant material relationships, the discussion of her work in terms of postmodern theology, and dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; also teases out the meaning of her work for the problem of hence of the relationships which make the one class whiteness vis-a-vis a hermeneutics of location that emphasizes the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. the importance of Black women’s experiences. McClendon Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, also provides a review essay of Mark David Wood’s new book, The German Ideology Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism. McClendon’s review investigates Wood’s thesis that West in Theoretical and Methodological Considerations: his intellectual formation moves from a progressive (Marxist) Dialectics and African American Intellectual Culture posture to a more conservative philosophical perspective. This is an essay that is philosophical in its method and political McClendon explains that West, in his initial efforts to outline in its objectives. Philosophically, I employ a dialectical his relationship to Marxism, assumes what is an anti-Marxist materialist analysis to explicate the nature and function of position. Finally, Arnold Farr provides an insightful review of ideological critiques in African American Studies (AAS). I give — APA Newsletter, Fall 2002, Volume 02, Number 1 — specific attention to how social constructionism or What transpired in this transition from Hegelian dialectic conventionalist epistemologies of race (CER) along with racial/ to contemporary philosophy in its analytic from was the racialist ideology consistently obscures the nature of the transformation of bourgeois philosophy as capitalist ideology. material contradictions underscoring race, racism and white This transformation represented bourgeois philosophy’s supremacy. transition from its modernist and progressive focus on reason I argue that CER along with racial/racialist ideologies (in contradistinction to scholasticism’s fideism) to its decline primarily fail as philosophical/ideological interventions due to into the period of contemporary philosophy’s linguistic their roots in philosophical idealism. The theoretical analysis. The age of reason reflected the rise of capitalism over weaknesses connected to philosophical idealism render CER feudalism, while analytic philosophy corresponds with and racial/racialist ideologies inherently incapable, bourgeois society’s declination into the era of imperialism. respectively, of providing a scientifically grounded In contrast, African American intellectual culture was epistemology for ideological critique and a viable ideological deeply influenced by the Hegelian dialectical tradition. Hill, critique of white supremacy. The aporia of the former himself, was a dialectician and recognized that Hegel’s place emanates from its subjectivist epistemology and the latter’s in modern (read bourgeois) philosophy represented its zenith. theoretical impotence is because of its misapprehension of James, in turn, openly dismisses the linguistic turn as an the fact that white supremacy is a form of bourgeois ideology. unnecessary metaphilosophical presumption. For James, These theoretical weaknesses, I claim, stem from the fact that philosophical tasks are not essentially and intrinsically rooted conventionalism is a form of bourgeois philosophy and racial/ in language, whether the method employed is of syntactical, racialist ideologies are themselves no more than species of semantic or pragmatic derivation. James opinions, “[T]oday bourgeois ideology. Hence, I conclude that conventionalism the great stream of European philosophy has various evil- and racial/racialist ideologies in AAS are politically rightist in smelling stagnant pools or little streams that babble as character, i.e., conserve bourgeois society. aimlessly and far less usefully than Tennyson’s Brook. One of I should add that, in more general terms, my notion of the stagnant schools...begins from the premise that all previous critique falls within the philosophical tradition of German philosophies misconceived language, and they have set out dialectical criticism. With his three Critiques, Kant initiates this to make language more precise.” James graphically describes conception of critique on an idealist basis (Morton 1993). Hegel this state of affairs as “The End of a Philosophy”(James 1958, offers a seminal and even more advanced contribution to this 65). dialectical practice, albeit while remaining within the confines My assessment of Cornel West’s argument to the effect of idealism. It is, of course, Karl Marx’s materialist conception that Du Bois was a pragmatist draws on the importance of this of history and dialectics, which represents the apogee of dialectical tradition in AAIC and how pragmatism parallels dialectical critique, viz. we have the advent of a scientific mode analytic philosophy’s dismissal of Hegel and dialectics of analysis for social relations and history. And it should not (McClendon 2001). As dialecticians, Hill and James

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