‘Blackness’, the Body and Epistemological and Epistemic Traps: A Phenomenological Analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper has two objectives. The first objective is a decoupling of the African body from ‘blackness’—a discursive formation—that was attached to the body by the slave and the colonial regimes. The second aim is a critique of modern epistemic and epistemological regimes that give ‘blackness’ its modern currency. To achieve these goals, I use phenomenology, a philosophy of self-responsible beginning according to Edmund Husserl, to return to the African body before colonialism and slavery. Through phenomenology I can ‘bracket’ what the above regimes and their legacies have been conditioning the African to see and know about the body. The paper is therefore an attempt at a liberatory epistemology aimed at overcoming what Achille Mbembe has referred to as a ‘dungeon of appearance’. Since ‘blackness’ is continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) seen through discursive colonial eyes, phenomenology provides an epistemological freedom to observe the body in-time.

KEYWORDS:

• Blackness
• phenomenology
• epistemic decolonization
• social epistemology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I’m using some materials from my doctoral dissertation as sources.

2. See Brown’s, ([1969] 2018) song, Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.

3. In this paper, I am contesting the ontological status and epistemological rationale of ‘blackness’. I have therefore avoided color identities such as ‘white’ and ‘black’ in explanatory texts. For global references, instead, I use continental and diaspora Africans (CADA) for Africans and people of African descent. I will also use continental and diaspora Europeans (CADE) for Europeans and people of European descent. Locally, I use African-Canadian, European-Canadian, African-American, European-Canadian, etc. When ‘black’ and ‘blackness’ appear in the paper, they will be in quotations when they refer to human skin. ‘Black’ and ‘blackness’ when referring to colour itself will not be in quotations.

Episteme in this paper will refer to a general body of knowledge like Foucault’s savoir (Foucault 2010, 1). Epistemology will mean knowledge justificatory processes (scientific, philosophical, cultural, etc.). Epistemic and epistemological traps are CADA’s entrapment in colonial knowledge contradictions: normalization of offensive Eurocentric ideals as benign and necessary scholarly standards. Moral problematics are questionable issues – scholarly and social – associated with modern utility of ‘blackness’. These problematics are, for instance, how ‘blackness’ continue to subject CADA to prejudices, scholarly bad faith and postcolonial ambivalences (Bhabha 1994).

4. For an important introduction to phenomenology, see Zahavi 2019b, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kuir ë Garang

Kuir ë Garang (PhD) is a South Sudanese Canadian researcher, educator and writer. He recently defended his doctoral dissertation, ‘Blackness’ and Its Ethical and Social Implications: Discursive Impositions, Colonial Entrapments, and the Attendant Phenomenological Questions, at the School of Social Work at York University, Toronto. His research interests are social justice issues including political, social and epistemic exclusion and marginalization. His current research focuses on the use of philosophy, especially Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, to address how African-Canadian youth are marginalized in Canadian institutions. His main interest in issues of marginality (in Canada and in Africa) is how subtle epistemic and epistemological biases go unnoticed within formal methodological standards. He is currently working with Dr. Uzo Anucha as a research associate on Anti-Black racism within the youth sector in Ontario, Canada. He will start a postdoctoral fellowship with Youth Research and Evaluation Exchange (YouthREX) under Dr. Anucha from January 2024.