Negritude sounds to me like an uplifting of the black experience, so people can appreciate where they come from since colonialism has taken so much from Africa. African Diaspora at the time were thought to hate themselves, and most people considered them second-class citizens at the time. So art and philosophical movements to embrace Africanism could have been great, had this movement been allowed to develop. The idea does sound good to me.. in fact, I would love to learn about it from the Artistic side of this movement, and if women artists were allowed to flourish.
Paulette Nadal and her sisters role in the Negritude movement has been deminished in this film. Although the term Negritude did not exist before 1935 Nardal's work and the discussions at her salon the Clamart Salon prior to the movement had already been encouraging black solidarity globally. Black leaders, writers, artist, activist and interllectuals from all over the diaspora were already discussing racism and how to deal with it. The discussions that tookplace at the salon also inspied the three founders of the Negritude movement.
i enjoy your videos. is there any way you can edit and equalize your audio? Its pretty poor and hard to hear on some of your videos. Im a psychologist and would like to use some of your videos for teaching material.
Something can be an objective qua universal (as in non-subjective qua non-relative) fact without being a *necessary* fact rather than merely a *contingent* one. That is, it can be a fact that black people have historically had many experiences in common, experiences which it is important to acknowledge, and a history that continues down through today, without it being the case that such experiences are *essential* to what it means to be black, that all black people have always had and will (or should) always have. Post-racialism is the good future we should be aiming for, but a post-racial future isn't just a "everyone is basically white now (whatever their skin color)" future. It's one where the artificial cultural boundaries between race have been deconstructed. The people of a truly post-racial future should look back at the historical experience of black people as a part of *their* past, should see the oppressed black people of the past as part of their "us", regardless of their biological heritage. A post-racial world can't be one where the view of the past is "we used to oppress black people, then we stopped", because that Others black people and is told from a white perspective; it has to be one where the view is "some of us used to oppress others of us on the basis of these artificial racial categories". And while that Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis view is the right way to go about that, that can't actually *happen* if the antithesis is immediately dismissed. In order to get to the kind of synthesis I just sketched out above, everyone, white people too, needs to be as aware of and familiar with these historical (and ongoing) black experiences, just as much as e.g. black kids in American schools are made aware of European history. I don't know enough to say if Sartre really did dismiss it in a substantial way, but framing it in such a Hegelian context doesn't have to be a dismissal, and a real dismissal actively undermines such a Hegelian dialectic.
Interesting view. I would say that, whether or not Sartre's actual view was to be dismissive, his work was taken as dismissive of negritude as a stepping stone. I think a legitimate and nuanced criticism would be the one you level here that yes negritude is a stepping stone on the way to a post-racial synthesis, but that such a step can't be skipped or brushed aside as Sartre seems to do. We can't reach the eventual synthesis without a real period of antithesis. Senghor would likely push back and claim that a post racial synthesis is possible, because the black experience is an inherently unique one. As a skeptic, I doubtful of Hegel and Heidegger's whole frameworks, though as an analytic philosopher I am admittedly still learning about it :).
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I'm glad you like my criticism. :) I think I would disagree with Senghor's essentialism, but given that there's plenty of essentialism on the white-supremacist side too, I see the existence of that counter-essentialist view as pragmatically useful for discursive purposes in building support for a thoroughly anti-essentialist view: basically, there's needs to be that antithesis to create the widespread dialectical tension that drives adoption of the synthesis; even if some people can see the synthesis coming and (rightly) would rather jump straight there, society as a whole with all its irrational elements (probably) can't get there without one irrational element (white-centric essentialism) being mirrored by another (black-centric essentialism). I'm an analytic philosopher myself, and actually not very familiar with Hegel at all besides the broad strokes of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis". I tend to use it either as a heuristic for discursive pragmatics as above, or more often, reinterpreted in more analytic terms as a process of dissolving false dichotomies created by conflating similar concepts under the same name: You'll have one party argue "P, and P entails not-Q, therefore not-Q" for the thesis, and another party turn that modus ponens into a modus tollens by arguing "yes P entails not-Q, but Q, therefore not P" for the antithesis. The synthesis comes when it's cleared up that there's actually two different things that P and Q each might mean, that don't have to go together, and the thing that one party really cares about is P1, while the thing the other party cares about is Q2, so while P1 does entail not-Q1, that's not in contradiction to Q2, which likewise entails not-P2. I was actually employing this in my previous post, where I mentioned objectivism-qua-universalism vs subjectivism-qua-relativism. In my view those are a true dichotomy, and there's also a true dichotomy of objectivism-qua-transcendentalism vs subjectivism-qua-phenomenalism, but those aren't the SAME dichotomy; you can have objectivism-qua-universalism AND subjectivism-qua-phenomenalism, so long as you reject both subjectivism-qua-relativism AND objectivism-qua-transcendentalism. I've found that there are just TONS of these all over philosophy. Fideism vs skepticism has one, reductivism vs emergentism has one, optimism vs pessimism has one, and on and on. I'm of the view that almost the entirety of the potential for philosophical progress lies in differentiating the different senses of each side of the false dichotomies, so you can affirm both sides at the same time without contradiction, because you're affirming subtly different senses of each side.
We usually avoid them here, but unfortunately there are quite a few folks that have strong opinions and use fallacious and insulting comments in an attempt to justify them. I do my best to chase them off, and try to promote rigorous philosophical debate, but as Bo Burnham says "Welcome to the Internet".
It is a direct quote from Cesaire which it seems to me he intended to be offensive. Here's the SEP: "In the case of Césaire that feeling was expressed in his detestation of Martinique which, as he confessed in an interview with French author Françoise Vergès, he was happy to leave after high school: he hated the “colored petit-bourgeois” of the island because of their “fundamental tendency to ape Europe” (Césaire 2005, 19). "
It should be a stepping stone, because we have to think in the non-black people in african countries. If this kind of philosophy is the only goal, they eventually (probably) will value more (because the are majority) blackness than any other "race"
I as an African man I don't want any reparations nor want to be patronized. I just want to be left alone and my land safe from the hands of the preying governments, modern society and corporations. What had been done is done. Let what is still left alone. Civilization and all these crazy ideologies are destroying what I love and I can't do anything about it.. just ranting Great vid as always
@web nerd 70% of my tribe was executed by the French Colonization in the 50's. You don't know what my tribe and family been through. What we lost and what we suffered and still suffering. They have issues in the land they're living in they deal with it. Don't drag us into it
@web nerd in my comment I said "I" not "We" I'm talking about myself. And it is pretty obvious. I just don't like movements that try to push their agenda unto others. No matter what the movement is.
@web nerd Nandoxus is right, you are wrong. If Negritude is "philosophy", it's a pathetic one indeed. CRT and reparations would destroy the U.S. It would subvert the individual to groups, and make discourse impossible, thus destroying liberal democracy.
Isn't it somewhat ironic that all these movements for 'black people' focus on ridding themselves of colonialist and racist influences, while at the same time basing themselves on racialized characteristics, the concept of race and being racist themselves? Because arguably the worst thing that Europe has brought to Africa(and the rest of the world) over the past centuries, is the construct of race. That however seems to be something that is at the core of most of these movements. So on one hand they want to rid themselves of something, but on the other it's at the core of their beliefs. How are you going to rid yourself of something, if you build your beliefs on that same core idea? Sartres views on things make more sense to me. Because the only way this really makes sense as a movement towards their states goals, is if it's an in-between or first step. I however question if this is even a step forward to begin with. To me this seems more like a step sideways. Because if you build structures for yourself which positively influence your group based on race, it will be hard to get rid of these core ideas later and it will also emphasizes that race is important (which is exactly what we're trying to get rid of). These are basically the exact same issues a lot of western countries are struggling with. So instead of repeating mistakes, why not try and go about things in a different way? That at least sounds way more constructive to me.
I will say that the views of black philosophers are far from a monolith (despite what one might take from Senghor's claims). Arguably one of the greatest living philosophers, Kwame Anthony Appiah (who is black) is a racial eliminitivist (i.e. he claims that we should eliminate the concept of race altogether) ua-cam.com/video/ZMcfZEvqLYY/v-deo.html. Here's the SEP: "Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial eliminativism, which recommends discarding the concept of race entirely." And, as we saw in the video on Panafricanism, black people in the diaspora are more likely to endorse an explicitly race-based type of Panafricanism, while those on the continent are more likely to view it as a regional goal completely separate from racial concepts (ua-cam.com/video/baj90IDhglo/v-deo.html). The point is that you are not picking out individuals who are internally inconsistent (claiming that both the concept of race is bad, and that it is good), but rather two sides of a debate that exist within the African and black communities.
Why do you think I have bias here? My research is based on a range of strong sources. I have spent years of my life living in Africa. If you have a reason to dispute any particular claim, please offer it. But if you are just here to object without reason, feel free to do it somewhere else.
Negritude sounds to me like an uplifting of the black experience, so people can appreciate where they come from since colonialism has taken so much from Africa. African Diaspora at the time were thought to hate themselves, and most people considered them second-class citizens at the time. So art and philosophical movements to embrace Africanism could have been great, had this movement been allowed to develop. The idea does sound good to me.. in fact, I would love to learn about it from the Artistic side of this movement, and if women artists were allowed to flourish.
That's for sure ♥️💯
Paulette Nadal and her sisters role in the Negritude movement has been deminished in this film. Although the term Negritude did not exist before 1935 Nardal's work and the discussions at her salon the Clamart Salon prior to the movement had already been encouraging black solidarity globally. Black leaders, writers, artist, activist and interllectuals from all over the diaspora were already discussing racism and how to deal with it. The discussions that tookplace at the salon also inspied the three founders of the Negritude movement.
Thanks. This is a refresher for my ANTH 3100 essay tomorrow!
i enjoy your videos. is there any way you can edit and equalize your audio? Its pretty poor and hard to hear on some of your videos. Im a psychologist and would like to use some of your videos for teaching material.
Hey there, where can we get a list of your refences and sources?
Can someone please share the source of the "kiss of death" impact of Sartre's critique? Where /when is this cited? Thanks!
Such a clear explanation. Great video!
Something can be an objective qua universal (as in non-subjective qua non-relative) fact without being a *necessary* fact rather than merely a *contingent* one. That is, it can be a fact that black people have historically had many experiences in common, experiences which it is important to acknowledge, and a history that continues down through today, without it being the case that such experiences are *essential* to what it means to be black, that all black people have always had and will (or should) always have. Post-racialism is the good future we should be aiming for, but a post-racial future isn't just a "everyone is basically white now (whatever their skin color)" future. It's one where the artificial cultural boundaries between race have been deconstructed.
The people of a truly post-racial future should look back at the historical experience of black people as a part of *their* past, should see the oppressed black people of the past as part of their "us", regardless of their biological heritage. A post-racial world can't be one where the view of the past is "we used to oppress black people, then we stopped", because that Others black people and is told from a white perspective; it has to be one where the view is "some of us used to oppress others of us on the basis of these artificial racial categories".
And while that Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis view is the right way to go about that, that can't actually *happen* if the antithesis is immediately dismissed. In order to get to the kind of synthesis I just sketched out above, everyone, white people too, needs to be as aware of and familiar with these historical (and ongoing) black experiences, just as much as e.g. black kids in American schools are made aware of European history. I don't know enough to say if Sartre really did dismiss it in a substantial way, but framing it in such a Hegelian context doesn't have to be a dismissal, and a real dismissal actively undermines such a Hegelian dialectic.
Interesting view. I would say that, whether or not Sartre's actual view was to be dismissive, his work was taken as dismissive of negritude as a stepping stone. I think a legitimate and nuanced criticism would be the one you level here that yes negritude is a stepping stone on the way to a post-racial synthesis, but that such a step can't be skipped or brushed aside as Sartre seems to do. We can't reach the eventual synthesis without a real period of antithesis. Senghor would likely push back and claim that a post racial synthesis is possible, because the black experience is an inherently unique one. As a skeptic, I doubtful of Hegel and Heidegger's whole frameworks, though as an analytic philosopher I am admittedly still learning about it :).
@@CarneadesOfCyrene I'm glad you like my criticism. :) I think I would disagree with Senghor's essentialism, but given that there's plenty of essentialism on the white-supremacist side too, I see the existence of that counter-essentialist view as pragmatically useful for discursive purposes in building support for a thoroughly anti-essentialist view: basically, there's needs to be that antithesis to create the widespread dialectical tension that drives adoption of the synthesis; even if some people can see the synthesis coming and (rightly) would rather jump straight there, society as a whole with all its irrational elements (probably) can't get there without one irrational element (white-centric essentialism) being mirrored by another (black-centric essentialism).
I'm an analytic philosopher myself, and actually not very familiar with Hegel at all besides the broad strokes of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis". I tend to use it either as a heuristic for discursive pragmatics as above, or more often, reinterpreted in more analytic terms as a process of dissolving false dichotomies created by conflating similar concepts under the same name:
You'll have one party argue "P, and P entails not-Q, therefore not-Q" for the thesis, and another party turn that modus ponens into a modus tollens by arguing "yes P entails not-Q, but Q, therefore not P" for the antithesis. The synthesis comes when it's cleared up that there's actually two different things that P and Q each might mean, that don't have to go together, and the thing that one party really cares about is P1, while the thing the other party cares about is Q2, so while P1 does entail not-Q1, that's not in contradiction to Q2, which likewise entails not-P2.
I was actually employing this in my previous post, where I mentioned objectivism-qua-universalism vs subjectivism-qua-relativism. In my view those are a true dichotomy, and there's also a true dichotomy of objectivism-qua-transcendentalism vs subjectivism-qua-phenomenalism, but those aren't the SAME dichotomy; you can have objectivism-qua-universalism AND subjectivism-qua-phenomenalism, so long as you reject both subjectivism-qua-relativism AND objectivism-qua-transcendentalism.
I've found that there are just TONS of these all over philosophy. Fideism vs skepticism has one, reductivism vs emergentism has one, optimism vs pessimism has one, and on and on. I'm of the view that almost the entirety of the potential for philosophical progress lies in differentiating the different senses of each side of the false dichotomies, so you can affirm both sides at the same time without contradiction, because you're affirming subtly different senses of each side.
@@Pfhorrest I think this is how I perceive it too... although you've definitely thought about it in more detail than I have :)
What's with the odd comments? Not even genuinely engaging with the content, putting words in people's mouths. Is this gonna be a theme?
We usually avoid them here, but unfortunately there are quite a few folks that have strong opinions and use fallacious and insulting comments in an attempt to justify them. I do my best to chase them off, and try to promote rigorous philosophical debate, but as Bo Burnham says "Welcome to the Internet".
Amazing video
0:56 I find the use of the word "ape" to be offensive.
It is a direct quote from Cesaire which it seems to me he intended to be offensive. Here's the SEP: "In the case of Césaire that feeling was expressed in his detestation of Martinique which, as he confessed in an interview with French author Françoise Vergès, he was happy to leave after high school: he hated the “colored petit-bourgeois” of the island because of their “fundamental tendency to ape Europe” (Césaire 2005, 19). "
You. Are. An. Ape.
We are primates.
It should be a stepping stone, because we have to think in the non-black people in african countries. If this kind of philosophy is the only goal, they eventually (probably) will value more (because the are majority) blackness than any other "race"
That was Sartre's case. That this acknowledgement was a necessary step in the process, but that a post-racial future should be the goal.
I as an African man I don't want any reparations nor want to be patronized. I just want to be left alone and my land safe from the hands of the preying governments, modern society and corporations. What had been done is done. Let what is still left alone. Civilization and all these crazy ideologies are destroying what I love and I can't do anything about it.. just ranting
Great vid as always
@web nerd 70% of my tribe was executed by the French Colonization in the 50's. You don't know what my tribe and family been through. What we lost and what we suffered and still suffering. They have issues in the land they're living in they deal with it. Don't drag us into it
@web nerd in my comment I said "I" not "We" I'm talking about myself. And it is pretty obvious. I just don't like movements that try to push their agenda unto others. No matter what the movement is.
@web nerd and why are u being passive aggressive tho.
@web nerd Nandoxus is right, you are wrong. If Negritude is "philosophy", it's a pathetic one indeed. CRT and reparations would destroy the U.S. It would subvert the individual to groups, and make discourse impossible, thus destroying liberal democracy.
I had a bad year in 1979. I want my government check ;)
Define
Isn't it somewhat ironic that all these movements for 'black people' focus on ridding themselves of colonialist and racist influences, while at the same time basing themselves on racialized characteristics, the concept of race and being racist themselves? Because arguably the worst thing that Europe has brought to Africa(and the rest of the world) over the past centuries, is the construct of race. That however seems to be something that is at the core of most of these movements. So on one hand they want to rid themselves of something, but on the other it's at the core of their beliefs. How are you going to rid yourself of something, if you build your beliefs on that same core idea?
Sartres views on things make more sense to me. Because the only way this really makes sense as a movement towards their states goals, is if it's an in-between or first step. I however question if this is even a step forward to begin with. To me this seems more like a step sideways. Because if you build structures for yourself which positively influence your group based on race, it will be hard to get rid of these core ideas later and it will also emphasizes that race is important (which is exactly what we're trying to get rid of). These are basically the exact same issues a lot of western countries are struggling with.
So instead of repeating mistakes, why not try and go about things in a different way? That at least sounds way more constructive to me.
I will say that the views of black philosophers are far from a monolith (despite what one might take from Senghor's claims). Arguably one of the greatest living philosophers, Kwame Anthony Appiah (who is black) is a racial eliminitivist (i.e. he claims that we should eliminate the concept of race altogether) ua-cam.com/video/ZMcfZEvqLYY/v-deo.html. Here's the SEP: "Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial eliminativism, which recommends discarding the concept of race entirely." And, as we saw in the video on Panafricanism, black people in the diaspora are more likely to endorse an explicitly race-based type of Panafricanism, while those on the continent are more likely to view it as a regional goal completely separate from racial concepts (ua-cam.com/video/baj90IDhglo/v-deo.html).
The point is that you are not picking out individuals who are internally inconsistent (claiming that both the concept of race is bad, and that it is good), but rather two sides of a debate that exist within the African and black communities.
It's unfortunate
Nice attempt but don't talk about African philosophy with such bias please
Why do you think I have bias here? My research is based on a range of strong sources. I have spent years of my life living in Africa. If you have a reason to dispute any particular claim, please offer it. But if you are just here to object without reason, feel free to do it somewhere else.