Black Knowledges/Black Struggles ─ Essays in Critical Epistemology

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology explores the central, but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for human emancipation. This collection examines the systemic connection that exists between the empirical subordination of "Black" peoples globally and the conceptual negation that subordinates or renders this population invisible within the epistemes of the West. The collection recognizes that as peoples of "Black" African and Afro-mixed descent mobilize against their dehumanized status within Western modernity, they are involved in a struggle that is both contemporary and of long standing, one where local and national battles have a global dimension. The essays in this collection foreground the extent to which liberation from imposed subordination necessarily entails critiques of, challenges to, and counter-formulations against the epistemic formations that work to "naturalize" subordination. The essays in the collection engage primarily with knowledge formations and empirical practices generated from within the discourse of "race," but also in its relation to other socio-human discourses of Western modernity. These essays also analyze the critiques, challenges, and counter-knowledge/epistemic formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements, and/or institutions of the "Black" world. Through these examinations, the collection's authors implicitly point towards, and sometimes explicitly take part in, the formulation of a new kind of critical - but also emancipatory - epistemology. What emerges is a more comprehensive view of what it means to be human, an epistemic construction that can serve as an instrument of liberation rather than subordination.

Jason Ambroise is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey. His research fields include the history of "race" and its interconnection to other socio-human discourses of Western modernity; the history of the human sciences; and the history of biology/socio-biology. His teaching fields include nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history, the history of science, and Black Studies. Previously published essays are titled "Rethinking 'Race': Biocentrism and the Origins of Our Time" (2004) and "Biocentrism, Neo-Ptolemaicism, and E.O. Wilson's Consilience: A Contemporary Example of 'Saving the Phenomenon' of Man, in the Name of the Human" (2006). He is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled Instituting Order: On the Formation of Criminology in the U.S.

Sabine Broeck teaches American Studies, Gender Studies and Black Diaspora Studies at the University of Bremen. Her research critiques the coloniality and anti-blackness of transatlantic modernity as a social formation and culture of (post)-enslavement. She is President of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), as well as director of the University of Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS); also, she is the convener and professorial mentor of the Black Knowledges Research Group at the University of Bremen, see http://www.bbs.uni-bremen.de/. Her two previous monographs are Der entkolonisierte Koerper (1988) and White Amnesia-Black Memory? American Women's Writing and History (1999). She is currently at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Gender and Anti-Blackness contracted with SUNY Press.