African Philosophy vs. Philosophy of Africa: Continental Identities and Traveling Names for Self

Diaspora 7:3 1998 African Philosophy vs. Philosophy of Africa: Continental Identities and Traveling Names for Self1 David Chioni Moore Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota Africa, you were once just a name to me But now you lie before me with somber green challenge To that loud faith for freedom (life more abundant) Which we once professed shouting Into the silent listening microphone Or on an alien platform to a sea Of white perplexed faces troubled With secret Imperial guilt; shouting Ofyou with a vision euphemistic As you always appear To your lonely sons on distant shores. —Abioseh Nicol, from "The Meaning of Africa," 1963 Quelque chose comme le jargon des nègres: voilà peut-être la langue de l'avenir. [Something like the jargon of the negroes: that may well be the language of the future.] —Ernest Renan, 18782 I. Introduction In various times and places, peoples have wandered the world maintaining older names they hold as theirs. In a broad sense they are exiles, and collectively they form diasporas. At other times it is the names that wander, eventually finding, being found by, and even partly creating peoples. At still other times, both names and peoples, even place-names and divergent groups of people, separately travel, are set in motion, shift, meet, collide, jam, join, switch, separate, and recombine until some happenstance consolidation is seen as natural. Such is the case for Africa, as both name and place. This complex, non-internal naming process is neither unusual nor wrong—indeed, it is the rule for nearly all the world's geographies and identities. But it can prove vexing. Thus, in the following pages, I will try to clarify Africa's identity, that conjoining of a name, a place, and a people, by examining two Philosophies associated with it: the contested existing field ofAfrican Philosophy, 321 Diaspora 7:3 1998 and the as-yet unnamed discursive practice I call Philosophy of Africa. Though I will restrict myself to African(ist) questions, I believe that the principles developed here will be useful to a range of other world identities—those of, for example, "Asia," "Native America," "Latino/a," "the Caribbean," "Crimean Tatar," and more— especially in the current postcolonial, transnational, and diasporic age. In the sub-specialized parlance of North American philosophy today, one rarely finds the word "Philosophy" alone, pure and simple—"I do Philosophy"; rather, "Philosophy" almost always has words before or after it. Among Philosophy's verbal antecedents one finds, for example, Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and French Philosophy, and in the case ofits verbal succedents, one finds, for example, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Law. The two word positions differ in that when a descriptor precedes Philosophy, that descriptor, such as the Continent, France, or the Analytic method, is taken to exist: it is the unstated ground from which the study begins. Thus, in the socalled fields ofAnglo-American or Continental Philosophy, the existence of Anglo-America or of the Continent is not what's in doubt. What is often termed French philosophy, similarly, may engage questions of essence, substance, meaning, and truth in an apparently French way, but it is not troubled by the concept "France."3 By contrast, when a descriptor follows "Philosophy," in the realms of what may be called the "Philosophies of "—that is, the philosophies of Language, of Art, or of Law—it is precisely the boundaries ofthe succeeding terms (ofLanguage, Art, and Law) that are subject to critique. It is against the background of this distinction between Philosophy 's unquestioned verbal antecedents and its unstable verbal succedents that it makes sense, for African onomastics (that is, the science of Africa-as-name) to compare African Philosophy with a "Philosophy ofAfrica." "African Philosophy," heteroglot as it may be, presumes that Africa exists, while the hypothetical mission of "Philosophy of Africa" would be to interrogate that very concept. And, since it is always best to begin with what one knows and then to move to what one does not know, in this essay I shall first briefly review the contemporary history of African philosophy and its central question: whether African philosophy exists. Subsequently, I will investigate what I...