Diversity Reading List

Abstract: In this paper, first and foremost, I aim to issue a caution. Specifically, I caution that when addressing and identifying forms of epistemic oppression one needs to endeavor not to perpetuate epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression, here, refers to epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce de? ciencies in social knowledge. An epistemic exclusion, in this analysis, is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate in a given epistemic community. Epistemic agency will concern the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources. A compromise to epistemic agency, when unwarranted, damages not only individual knowers but also the state of social knowledge and shared epistemic resources.

Abstract: On December 3, 2014, in a piece entitled 'White America's Scary Delusion: Why Its Sense of Black Humanity Is So Skewed,' Brittney Cooper criticizes attempts to deem Black rage at state-sanctioned violence against Black people 'unreasonable.' In this paper, I outline a problem with epistemology that Cooper highlights in order to explore whether beliefs can wrong. My overall claim is there are difficult-to-defeat arguments concerning the 'legitimacy' of police slayings against Black people that are indicative of problems with epistemology because of the epistemic power they accumulate toward resilient oblivion, which can have the effect of normalizing oppressive conditions. That is to say, if one takes the value of lessening oppression as a key feature of normative, epistemological conduct, then it can generate demands on epistemological orientations that, in turn, generate wrongs for beliefs and, more specifically, beliefs as wrongs.

Abstract: Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one's contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term 'epistemic oppression' may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one's ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. In this paper, I claim that a major point of distinction between reducible and irreducible epistemic oppression is the major source of difficulty one faces in addressing each kind of oppression, i.e. epistemic power or features of epistemological systems. Distinguishing between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression can offer a better understanding of what is at stake in deploying the term and when such deployment is apt.

Abstract:
Although feminist authors and publications abound in other disciplines on the continent, professional African philosophy is overwhelmingly male dominated, with a conspicuous absence of feminist and gender themes. To redress the situation, du Toit and Coetzee consider the choice between applying globally dominant feminist frameworks to issues and debates in the African context or outright immersion in the masculine field of African philosophy in order to open up spaces for feminist questions in dialogue with indigenous worldviews and philosophical positions. In this chapter the authors focus on the second option, in line with recent calls to more authentically contextualize philosophical practice on the continent. The chapter examines the themes of sexual agency and motherhood. Grounded in this way, African feminist philosophy emerges as a potentially powerful source of critique and partner in dialogue with the more established strands of feminist thought.

Abstract:
This article represents a response to ‘the problem of women and African philosophy’, which refers mainly to the absence of strong women’s and feminist voices within the discipline of African philosophy. I investigate the possibility that African women are not so much excluded from the institutionalized discipline of philosophy, as preferring fiction as a genre for intellectual expression. This hypothesis can be supported by some feminists who read the absolute prioritisation of abstraction and generalization over the concrete and the particular as a masculine and western oppressive strategy. Attention to the concrete and the unique which is made possible by literature more readily than by philosophy, could thus operate as a form of political resistance in certain contexts. If fiction is currently the preferred form of intellectual expression of African women, it is crucial that the community of professional philosophers in a context like South Africa should come to terms with the relevance of such a preference for philosophy’s self-conception, and it should work to make these intellectual contributions philosophically fruitful. In the process, we may entertain the hope that philosophy itself will move closer to its root or source as ‘love of wisdom’.

Abstract: This article outlines the issues addressed by feminist philosophy of art, critically surveys major developments in the field, and concludes by considering directions in which the field is moving.

Abstract:
The points this chapter labors to make are straight and simple. First, the documented reflections of women in contemporary African philosophy, of individuals such as Sophie Oluwole, Anke Graness, Wangari Maathai, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ebunoluwa Oduwole, Betty Wambui, Gail Presbey, and Louise du Toit, are impossible to deny or to ignore; the heritage they (and other female thinkers on the African condition, too numerous to do justice to here) have bequeathed to African philosophy and the world deserves the recognition denied it for so long, and current African philosophical historiography must remediate this epistemic injustice. Furthermore, I maintain that concepts are crucial in philosophical discourse, and this work has thrown up fresh concepts and keywords such as ‘his-story’, ‘her-story’, ‘her-storycide’, ‘her-storicity’, and ‘Afro-herstoricism’. These concepts are pregnant with implications, consequences, and creative possibilities for African philosophy and her place in the philosophical world. These concepts encapsulate the idea that women’s lives, experiences, deeds, contributions, voices, perceptions, representations, struggles, problems, expectations and participation in human affairs have been too long neglected or undervalued in standard historical narratives, and that serious cognizance must be taken of the creative works that women have produced in the development of knowledge and how these have affected the philosophic temper. Contemporary African philosophy cannot run away from honoring its ‘debts and duties’ to women in African philosophy.

Abstract:
Amidst signs of declining social capital, the typical workplace is a hotbed of sociability and cooperation. And in a still-segregated society, the workplace is where adults are most likely to interact across color lines. The convergence of close interaction and some racial diversity makes the workplace a crucial institution within a diverse democratic society. Paradoxically, the involuntariness of workplace associations—the compulsion of economic necessity, of managerial authority, and of law—helps to facilitate constructive interaction among diverse co-workers. Where racial diversity is a fact of organizational life (and the law can help to make it so), then employers and workers have their own powerful reasons—psychological and economic—to make those relationships constructive, even amicable. I contend here that it is where we are compelled to get along, and not where we choose to do so, that we can best advance the project of racial integration.

Abstract: In her excellent "Feminist Art History and De Facto Significance," for example, aesthetician Susan L. Feagin explains how her initial skepticism about Continental approaches-especially those drawing on Foucault, Marx, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and "even Derrida and poststructuralist literary theory" - gave way to an appreciation of how these approaches encourage, in a way analytic aesthetics does not, "the trenchant analyses and acute observations that have emerged from feminist art historians" (305). And, indeed, although she goes on to suggest how traditional aesthetics might accommodate feminist and other politically informed analyses, she cautions that "it is too easy to miss the most innovative aspects of another's view if one tries to understand it only in terms of one's own theoretical perspective" (305).(from review by Sally Markowitz, Hypatia Vol. 11, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 169-172)

Abstract: In this essay, Feigenbaum examines heterosexism as it functions politically and interpersonally in her own experience. She loosely traces her analysis along the current political climate of the bans on same-sex marriages, using this discussion to introduce and illustrate how heterosexual dominance functions. The author aims throughout to clarify what heterosexism looks like "in action," and she moves toward providing steps to recognize, name, interrupt, and counter heterosexist privilege.