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8 The African Diaspora and Philosophy Olúfémi Táíwò What could be difficult about writing on the subject of African diaspora and philosophy? The African diaspora1 has increasingly become the object of scholarly exertions. What is more, given my awareness that the United States is one of the fastest growing markets for the subdiscipline of African philosophy, and the closing decades of the last century saw the emergence of a few titles from respectable publishers on the theme of diasporic Africans’ exertions in philosophy, especially those by African Americans, there can be no doubt that the conjunction of philosophy and the diaspora has considerable significance attached to it. Add to these the growing expansion of divisions within universities and colleges devoted to differing degrees of concentration in African American, Africalogical, Pan-­African, Global African, Diasporic, and the ever-­ present Black Studies , and one would be hard put to justify any pessimism regarding some discursus on the diaspora and philosophy. However, to my chagrin, the more I reflected on the theme,2 the clearer it became that I may have been too sanguine in my initial reaction. There has been considerable output in philosophical works respecting the diaspora, and I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that there has been little or no exploration of the conundrums that are thrown up by a discipline-­ focused discussion of philosophy and the diaspora. This could have been a more daunting task but for the suggestion that the current engagement is “devoted to meta-­ level conceptual examinations of the practice of African diaspora studies within and at the intersections of the disciplines.”3 Any invitation to indulge in a “meta-­ level conceptual examination” of any subject matter must gladden a philosopher’s heart. After all, whatever divergences philosophers may share regarding the contours, boundaries , and content of their discipline, they usually are convergent on some of its basic characteristics: (1) that philosophy asks questions and (2) it does so at the most general level with the ultimate aim of unearthing the logos of being, sans differentiation. The “sans differentiation” is what sets 173 174 Olúfémi Táíwò philosophy’s way of proceeding apart from all the other disciplines. While this claim usually rubs other disciplines the wrong way, we must see beyond its appropriation by some arrogant practitioners to discern its kernel of truth: it is not an accident that when a discipline turns its searchlight on its own craft we do not call the outcome by the name of the discipline concerned. We say simply in those situations that we are doing “the philosophy of the discipline” concerned. It would seem easy enough to dilate on our theme. But, in reality, it is not. Why this is so I will point out in some detail in a moment. For now, let me focus on the easy part of the task. The concept of “the African diaspora” is very problematic in philosophy , and this is quite unlike the situation in other disciplines. Ordinarily , one understands the concept to conclude those inhabitants of the world outside of Africa whose origins can be or are traced to the African continent. It wouldn’t matter where they are found in the world; what matters is that at some point in the distant past, their forebears emigrated from Africa—voluntarily and involuntarily—and became part of an African-­ descended community in exile. Meanwhile, in exile, even as they retain some memory—dim or acute, pleasant or unpleasant, conscious or unconscious—of their African origins, African-­ descended peoples have gone on to create new cultural matrices in their new non-­African abodes. The African presence in such abodes from trace to substantive legitimizes any talk of “the African diaspora.” Absent this common genealogy I am not sure that there can be any talk of a diaspora in the first place. But there has to be much more than this to constitute and typify the diaspora . I take it that any talk of diaspora scholarship refers, in part at least, to scholarship about the African inflection in this diaspora as opposed to other diasporas in our world. For a very long time the idea of this diaspora was easily understood. It referred in the main to the communities created and nurtured by generations of African peoples descended from those forebears who were forcefully removed from various parts of the African continent and brought as slaves to the New World of the Western Hemisphere. Although...

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