by Lewis Gordon and Thomas Meagher
This issue reprints a recent memorial article on the passing of Samir Amin, written by Lewis R. Gordon for New Frame, and a conversation with Amin recorded by Thomas Meagher this past June in Dakar, Senegal.
Samir Amin: Shifting the Geography of Reason
by Lewis R. Gordon
Samir Amin was this year’s winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. The ceremony in which he received his plaque took place at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal.
Upon receiving his award, Amin gave a rousing reflection on the global political challenges of today with a reminder that revolution is not an event achieved overnight. It is a long-term, committed struggle.
It was fitting that Amir was honored this way at a university named after one of the great African revolutionaries of the twentieth century. It was also poignant because despite his being an African of Egyptian and French ancestry, his heart was also located in Senegal, where he devoted a good portion of his life to the Third World Forum he co-founded there.
That the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s motto is “Shifting the Geography of Reason” is also a testament to Amir’s influence. His critique of Eurocentrism inspired many intellectuals across the Global South. The Caribbean Philosophical Association was not founded as a mirror of intellectual practices in the Imperial North. Its aims were not only to value ideas from the Global South or the underside of Euromodernity but also to value being valued by that world.
Samir Amin valued being valued by a world whose goals transcended Euromodernity. He shared the stage that evening with the famed Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the Senegalese economist and musician Felwine Sarr, and the Brazilian novelist and essayist Conceição Evaristo.
There was no way for any of us to know we were sharing a prized moment in the last month and a half of the life of this great intellectual. Samir Amin passed away on August 12th, to the dismay of so many across the globe. Many obituaries refer to him as Egyptian and Marxist, but as we saw in our brief time with him, he was an African whose homes were Egypt, France, and Senegal, and, as an intellectual, the world. He was much beloved.
In his Caribbean Philosophical Association conference presentation “Samir Amin and the Future of Caribbean Philosophy,” the Antiguan sociologist, philosopher, and political economist Paget Henry voiced, on the behalf of all of us, his appreciation for Amin’s groundbreaking work on the importance of Third World, now Global Southern peoples taking charge of the path of history. The historical need not be, as the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and many Eurocentric thinkers avowed, European.
Unlike other Marxist-oriented thinkers, many of whom hoped for a linear unfolding dialectic of world events, Amin understood, in a long tradition of African thinkers, the centrality of the contingent and the uncertain. It is not foretold that the only way to transform the future and produce conditions of freedom require becoming people of color in white masks. Amin’s articulation of dynamics of dependency not only in economic arrangements of colonialism and neocolonialism but also at its cultural foundations was no less than a demand for future generations to build creative alternatives for a viable future.
The plaque Amin received extended this observation as follows:
L’ASSOCIATION CARIBÉENNE DE PHILOSOPHIE
décerne le 2018 Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award
à
SAMIR AMIN
pour votre excellent travail en économie politique
et en théorie pour être un chercheur de premier plan mondial, un constructeur d’institutions et un penseur radical engagé envers la dignité humaine, la liberté et la transformation révolutionnaire du savoir
In English: “To Samir Amin for your excellent work in political theory and political economy as a world-leading researcher, institutional builder, and radical thinker committed to human dignity, freedom, and the revolutionary transformation of knowledge.”
Samir Amin was born on 3 September 1931 in Cairo, Egypt. His parents were medical doctors who no doubt instilled in him an unabated commitment to healing the world or, in the least, facilitating a healthy one. He achieved his graduate training in political science, statistics, and economics in Paris, France. He was a militant throughout his years of study during which he became a member of the French Communist Party. His doctoral thesis, elements of which he later expanded and developed, inaugurated an influential line of critical studies of “underdevelopment,” in which he was subsequently joined by such luminaries as Almícar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Sekou Touré, Steve Bantu Biko, Walter Rodney, Thomas Sankara, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Sylvia Wynter, and Angela Y. Davis. People are not underdeveloped, they all agree; they are forced to appear so.
Despite achieving his doctorate in economics in 1957, Amin did not at first take the academic route. He worked as a researcher and economic advisor in Egypt and Mali before teaching in Senegal and France from 1963 till 1970 when he became the director of the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification in Dakar, Senegal, a post he held till 1980 when he became Director of the Third World Forum in the same city.
Amin’s conributions are above all his ideas. His books and articles are too numerous to mention in this brief memorialization. Bibliographies of his writings are available on multiple websites, including the Third World Forums’. In his tribute, Vijay Prashad rightly states:
In his most important book, Accumulation on a World Scale (1970), which propelled him into the front ranks of dependency theory, Amin showed how resources flowed from the countries of the periphery to enrich the countries of the core through a process that he called “imperialist rent.”
The term “Eurocentrism” is used today without most users being aware of its having been coined by Amin in his book bearing that name: L’eurocentrisme (1988). In that work he focused on capitalism as a cultural system instead of a set of algorithmic expectations premised on profit and efficiency as proposed by its proponents in microeconomics. Today the term is often used without understanding of the material conditions of cultural capital, which reveals the continued importance of reading and re-reading Amin’s thought on the subject. That the expression is deployed across the globe is a testament to what it elucidates and the prescience of Amin’s insight.
Jeremy Glick, who is a member of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and whose book The Black Radical Tragic (2016) won the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award, said this, which was included in the letter Amin received on 1 January 2018:
Samir Amin is for me a figure like Gramsci or Fanon or The Beatles—someone I’ve been learning from all my life. I actually can’t imagine my intellectual and political life without Amin’s interventions.
Many would agree. Former Caribbean Philosophical Association President Jane Anna Gordon and I met with Samir in his office in downtown Dakar this past June right before the conference in which he was being honored. The office was a floor beneath his apartment at the Third World Forum. We spent a wonderful afternoon discussing his memories of conversations and collaborations with great revolutionaries whom we all admired such as Cabral, Fanon, Touré, and Sankara, each of whom he new personally, and then we shifted to the contemporary global state of affairs.
Samir commented on the contemporary situation of the relations between Russia and the United States, challenges to the European Union, and the complexity of what China is doing as a world leader in this negative moment of renewed primitive accumulation. We talked about the anemia of many leftist groups born from their allergy to power. We reflected on the impact of postmodernism on contemporary political life, where there are even postmodern fascists laying claim to anti-essentialism and rallying against their supposed victimization. We derided the silliness of pitting class, gender, and race against each other instead of thinking through, as especially Thomas Sankara did, their interconnectedness and multiple forms of production under global capitalism. And we talked about the centrality of understanding freedom and the flourishing of life as political goals.
Jane and I were moved by the gift of an intimate moment with an intellectual simply being who he is and speaking his mind. Although there are many studies and portraits that have been written about Samir Amin, and there will no doubt be many more to come, what we witnessed was a core passion for dignity and respect for life marked by a maturity and courage.
The Caribbean Philosophical Association and the Senegalese Philosophical Society organized a wonderful celebration after Samir and others received their award. The Senegalese band Nakodjé sang and played moving music with a variety of traditional instruments that drew everyone to the dance floor. A circle was formed into which jumped many, which included Bachir and Conceição, to express their joy and make their case, in dance, for the continued celebration of life. Among them was Samir, whose face revealed the joy and light of an overwhelmed heart.
Though many of us will continue to read his words, those of us with the good fortune to be there that night will remember him in that moment of a perfect metaphor of what the proverbial “it” was all about, which is the dance of life with the humility and commitment to a cause that is greater than ourselves and always worth fighting for.
A Conversation with Samir Amin
by Thomas Meagher
Ideas occupy a peculiar location in human existence. Ideas are part of our human reality, yet they also appear to mediate that same reality. To understand one’s reality is to have ideas about that reality. Yet there are ideas about ideas, and this facilitates the project of treating some ideas as if they were not ideas at all. At this level, false ideas can be regarded as if they were real beyond any reproach.
Such is the reality that so many intellectuals of the global south have set out to reckon with. Racism and colonialism are also products of ideas. Many of the ideas upon which they are based are patently false; they willfully distort reality. The intellectual struggle to overcome such ideas requires a fight on multiple fronts. It must elucidate how such ideas depart from fidelity to reality and make clear why they have been erected in order to do so. It must articulate alternative ideas and explore how such ideas can remain true to the reality out of which they emerge and to realities that shall come.
Oppressive ideas typically take a false idea as if it were a plainspoken statement of an eternal reality; such a reality is taken as inevitable in order to preempt efforts to imagine other possibilities. Intellectuals of the global south, then, have had to take up the challenge of fighting toward liberation, simply, by paying closer attention to reality, as this is a first step toward imagining non-oppressive futures.
I begin with these general remarks because they express simple truths about our subject: the life and work of Samir Amin—an intellectual who sought to overcome oppressive ideas through putting forth a clearer understanding of reality. But Amin was also not an intellectual who believed his ideas emerged from his singular intellect, his personal genius. He was, he believed, doing his part to serve the communities of which he was a part, to honor the struggles of which he was only a part.
To value Samir Amin, then, demands valuing the communities and debates that animated his work. Yet, we may also posit the converse: to value the contributions of intellectuals from the global south demands valuing the work of its best exemplars, and Amin was surely that.
The context of the conversation below is linked to precisely these dynamics. I spoke with Samir Amin at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal on June 22nd, 2018, at the annual meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA). The CPA was started out of a commitment to value the intellectual production of thinkers from the global south and to facilitate venues for them to exchange ideas and, importantly, to value each other.
The location of the meeting speaks to these aims. The CPA has never been governed by a narrow geographic understanding of the Caribbean; its effort is to cultivate an ongoing shift in the geography of reason, as Lewis Gordon, its first president, formulated it back in the early 2000s, rather than to fabricate a provincial re-centering of reason in the islands of the Antilles alone. And Cheikh Anta Diop, of course, who was one of the twentieth century’s great intellectuals, devoted much of his efforts toward valuing the intellectual production of African peoples that colonial ideas had sought to expel from reality.
At this meeting, the CPA awarded Amin the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Prize. It would be difficult to conceive of a more deserving candidate. Amin’s bibliography is extensive and his influence in the study of economics, political economy, colonialism and neo-colonialism, development and dependency theory, and world-systems analysis is extraordinary. Simply put, Samir Amin dedicated his life to the intellectual struggle to more accurately describe the reality we inhabit in order to open new possibilities for the future.
To some readers, Amin’s work may not appear at first philosophical, and certainly Amin was not interested in convincing most audiences of his relevance to their fields. He simply did the work. But his work was shaped by a profound reflection on human possibility and a keen attention to the meaning of and possibility for rigor in human scientific inquiry. Amin’s work bustled with philosophical interventions into ongoing debates in a variety of fields, but his philosophical insights were always, then, applied such that they were meaningful beyond philosophy. He was a philosophical scientist and a scientific philosopher.
This is not to say that Amin’s work is only of interest to philosophers seeking exemplary applications of philosophical thought. For instance, his classic text Eurocentrism, published originally in 1988, offers reflections of profound metaphilosophical import. That work traces the political, economic, and historical origins of Eurocentrism, and, given the ongoing problem of Eurocentricity in philosophical thought, that alone is of crucial significance to any philosopher today. But the argument does not stop there, since Eurocentrism ultimately offers a reflection on the relationship between material conditions and intellectual production in general. This includes its many quite radical and challenging claims about philosophical traditions beyond what “the West” has claimed as its own, claims at once provocative and revealing of the startling depth of Amin’s knowledge of philosophical history.
Amin passed away on August 12th, a month and a half after this conversation. He had wanted to expand upon the answers you will find below. This was not to be. But his movement from the realm of the living to the realm of the ancestors, as with all of our philosophical forbears, does not mean that the conversation we may now have with his ideas must come to an end. Amin saw his work as part of ongoing struggles, as enmeshed in debates to build another world. To honor him is to honor his continuing relevance to those debates, but it is also to honor those struggles that continue.
Here, then, is a transcript, with minor modifications for grammatical clarity, of my conversation with Samir Amin on June 22nd, 2018:
One of the arguments you’re most well-known for is the idea that, whereas many say that the global south is “marginalized” or “excluded” from the global economic system, that’s not the case—they are, you argue, incorporated, but incorporated peripherally. I wanted to ask a question in parallel about global south intellectuals. If there is a global intellectual system—or global system for the production of knowledge—is it a parallel case with intellectuals where intellectuals of the global south have been incorporated peripherally? And if so, if the suggestion for national economies is to de-link, is the suggestion the same for intellectuals?
Unfortunately, what you say is correct. I think that because the intellectuals—or the academics, as part but not necessarily the exclusive part of intellectuals, since that means something wider than people who have degrees (leaders of popular movements, leaders of popular parties, workers, etc. are intellectuals in a way because they try to understand the society and to act in one way or another) —are part of the society, and if their society is part of the global system, then they are part of the global system. So, they are integrated, and this is creating for them a problem in many cases.
There are those who are happily integrated: they’ve got a good job; they repeat what they have learned. They are what I call the “good students.” The “good students,” in my opinion, are not very clever ones; they are clever enough to understand what they learn and to repeat it, but they have no critical vision.
By contrast, the so-called “organic intellectuals” of the resistance movement—a movement that starts with resisting and then tries to go further into a positive alternative—are always a minority. And this minority was at certain times quite widely represented among the young and particularly the students—and with effects on their teachers. That was the case in the ’60s, and not only in the south but also in the north. At other periods, they accept the system, which means they accept the basic ideology of the system—which is so-called liberalism, each one for her/himself, competition, etc.
Marx said, as early as the Manifesto, that the ideology of the dominant class is the dominating ideology of the society. This means that even the victims share (at least partly) that ideology. We can see that this is what is facilitating the strategy of capital to scatter, segment, and dismantle the resistance of what I call the global proletariat. In the west, 90% of the people are wage earners. Out of this 90%, maybe 80% are just selling their labor power; 20% are associated with the ruling of the system and therefore do benefit from it much more than the others. In the periphery, though, the majority are still, in many cases peasants or the so-called “urban poor,” who are selling their labor power indirectly. They are not independent producers but are completely caught upstream and downstream by those who provide the imports and those who provide the market for their products. They are reduced, therefore, to being sub-contractors for capital. And each of those segments sees their interests in a very narrow way. In most cases, that is, they seek—quite legitimately—to defend the rights that they have, defending their job security, pension, etc.
But this is a defensive strategy, and we need to move from a defensive strategy to an offensive strategy. That is, to have common projects, common targets. You need to discuss that, to see what could be the most efficient (for a time) common target. And it would be different from one country to another, from one period to another. For instance, re-establishing job security might be a target, but it has to be discussed.
Therefore, what we need is an International, not only internationalism as a general sympathy for others. In most cases, the latter is already present, but we need more than that—we need an organized effort, we need organization.
Now, it cannot be a repetition of the patterns of the past. It cannot be a repetition of the Second International—one country, one party (“the good one”) where all the mass organizations and trade unions are just transmission belts of the “true” party. No: we need to accept a variety, diversity. Not diversity for so-called cultural reasons, etc., but for the variety of interests we have.
For instance, peasants have an interest in selling at higher prices. Urban poor consumers have an interest in having food at a lower price. There is a contradiction there. We can imagine collective negotiation, if the state power is in favor of that (if you have part of the state’s power), to organize collectively to see how to deal with this problem, etc. But, unfortunately, the majority of the intellectuals at the present time are playing the game of those in power.
You’ve argued that in the shift from what you call “tributary” forms to capitalist forms, the process is quicker and less troublesome in those places where you have a peripheral tributary system. That is, a comparatively under-developed tributary system can easily become capitalist, but a more developed tributary system and ideology will not facilitate the turn to capitalism so easily. Is the shift from capitalism to socialism directly parallel, where those in the periphery of capitalist development are most susceptible to a shift to socialism, or is the story more complicated?
Yes. What I think is my contribution is that point exactly: the so-called “unequal development” of societies throughout world history has created advanced forms and peripheral forms. Now, if we take the difference between capitalist societies and pre-capitalist societies, Marx showed very clearly that capitalism is qualitatively different from all previous systems in the sense that it is based on the law of value governing not only the production of the economic system but the production of the society, including its ideology, including its political organization, including everything. Including also, therefore, its understanding of religion and its art. I wrote 50 to 60 years ago a paper on art with the provocative title, “Integration or Protest?”, distinguishing two families of art. It’s not a question of qualifying it as good or bad, but of art that serves the function of integrating the people into the system versus art that shows the rejection of the system, the ire against it.
I summarize it in the following way: in capitalism, wealth is the source of power. In pre-capitalist systems—all of them—it is the opposite: power is the source of wealth. That is a qualitative change. And, therefore, the pseudo-Marxists, those advancing an over-simplification of Marxism in which the infrastructure and super-structure are regarded as always the same across different societies, are incorrect: it is organized in a very different way. Therefore, I rejected the two major theories, not only within Marxism, but [also] within the broader set of historical visions, historical philosophies, etc.: the “stages” model (from so-called “primitive” to feudalism, and so on) and the distinction between the so-called European pattern, regarded as exceptional, and the others.
I rejected that and said no: we have three ages in civilization. One, let’s call them communal, based in kinship and a relatively higher degree of equality, though with some inequality (there are leaders, there are some families with more rights than others, etc.). Then the second is the family of tributary rule. That is where the political power is relatively centralized and pumps out surplus produced by peasants and handicapped people through a variety of means. These peasants or handicapped people can be free individuals or families, or unfree—limited by serfdom, or reduced to slavery. But they are pumping out that surplus through political means.
In that family, you have a few advanced patterns. The most advanced tributary pattern is the Chinese one, functioning on a large-scale which presented at some point of time roughly one-third of humankind. The system of pumping there was perfectly organized by the state. The Chinese state invented something. Consider the examinations in the Confucian schools, which promulgated a meritocracy not to be found in Europe until the twentieth century. For a long time, in Europe it was the aristocracy which was the ruling administration, and even now in the United States, I don’t know if you have a civil service, really, or not, as compared to Europe.
Another case, on a smaller scale, is [ancient] Egypt. It’s a small China, with more or less exactly the same rules of organization, of state power. Not only formally centralized but really centralized. Now, the Europeans had an attempt at that with the Roman Empire organized in that way, but then it broke down with invasions of people who were still at the communal type. And out of that came a decentralized pattern. Feudalism is decentralization: it has the small feudal lord, and of course you can have some respect for the king and so on, but a lot of independence. And that gave flexibility. That explains why you have the Italian towns, the Hanseatic towns, etc., a margin of maneuver which the feudal condition enabled.
So, I called it the rule—and I don’t like the word “law,” because “law” implies it is objectively necessary—the rule of unequal development. That is, that the less advanced potentially have an advantage. And that is repeating.
One of the other main points central to your work is the emphasis on the study of actually existing capital. For instance, you have argued that Marx’s Capital is a brilliant text and a huge leap forward, but there are a number of issues—among them the matter of Eurocentrism—that stem from its focus on a sort of theoretical essence of capital rather than on actually-existing capital. Given that, I’m curious about your thoughts on the role for philosophy in building the future, in building alternative futures to capital. If we talk about economics as needing to study actually existing capital, is there also philosophical work to be done beyond that that needs to be done in order elaborate possibilities for the future?
I deal with these issues in my paper on the Communist Manifesto 170 years later (forthcoming in Monthly Review). I find that text to be more relevant today than it was in its time.
Marx and Engels had [a] gigantic intuition about what was in the process of becoming. Because in its time, 1848, capitalism was limited to England, part of France, Belgium, and a very small part of West Germany. That’s all. Elsewhere, there were nuclei here and there but nothing more. They understood that that system was bound to be expanding very quickly and would conquer Europe within some decades (which happened) and would conquer the “world” that had started in the Americas but would continue (which happened), and that therefore was bound to become a global system—and fast.
Now, Marx and Engels at that time were optimistic and they thought that that would create the conditions for, if not a global socialist revolution, many socialist revolutions in different places. And it happened—a few years later, for instance, there was the Paris Commune. Then, with the Second International, Engels thought that Germany would be a good place for such a thing to happen. And then late Marx, in his correspondence with Vera Zasulich, had the intuition, “Why not Russia?,” precisely because, as we would say today, semi-peripheral, or as Lenin said, a “weak link.” And this is what happened. So, they had this intuition.
In Eurocentrism, you showed an incredible breadth and depth of knowledge of the history of philosophy. One of the issues on the minds of many readers of this blog is the relation between ancient Egyptian philosophy and the philosophy of today. So, I am curious about your thoughts on the value in studying ancient Egyptian philosophy—or, more broadly, studying the global history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, etc. For you, is the value in doing so not so much about taking ideas from them but rather, simply, in understanding the historical role of philosophy in the production of ideology?
Yes. You see, we have two different examples with many interesting commonalities: the Chinese and the Egyptian.
The Chinese started moving toward what could possibly have become capitalism in the tenth century, that is, five centuries before European mercantilism. The emperor had been Buddhist until then but came eventually to say that religions —all of them—are inventions of human beings. If the people want to believe in them, let them. That was the invention of semi-secularism: tolerance for those who believe in religions, but the administration would be indifferent to it, basing recruitment of imperial functionaries on meritocratic grounds. And land is the property of the state, of the emperor, but is administered by the communal villages. So, that is a handicap to private property of land. (And it is still now, with Maoism; land is a non-commodity, a common good of the nation, used in a very unequal way, but it is common property, not private property.) But it stagnated at that point. Precisely because the system was so beautiful and working so well, it became arrogant, believing it had nothing to learn from others—until when they discovered that others were stronger than they were.
Now, Egypt had invented a religion that was something very different. A religion, I think, much more humanistic than any other religion before or after. It invented the concept of the eternity of the soul, which was, not for instance, a Greek concept, or a Jewish concept, etc. To the extent that the first, if I may say, curious revolution was in Egypt, 2500–3000 years before Christ, when the people demanded mummification for everybody, so that everybody could have eternal life. That’s a big move. Of course, the quality of the mummification could be quite different—there were peripheral mummies, so to speak. But still….
Then, in order to explain or invent the eternal soul, there was the trinity. That is, Osiris is assassinated by Set, cut into pieces, and it is his wife, Isis, who collects the pieces to recreate the person for eternity. That is something that Christianity inherited, and, very curiously, according to the Coptic church, the forms of monotheism and the trinity common to Christianity were invented by Egyptian Christians importing these concepts in order to make Christianity a better religion and facilitate its spread.
—A relationship that Eurocentrism would try to turn completely on its head.
Yes. Eurocentrism was based on a series of myths. One is the rediscovery of the ancients—the Greeks and the Romans. The other dimension is related to the superiority of feudalism—that is, the freedom of the feudal lords with respect to the kingdoms. All the effort to construct absolute monarch[s]—particularly in France and England—were a copy of what the Chinese had done. The work of Étienne Balazs is magnificent in that respect. It shows that the people who built the absolute monarchy in France and Britain admired China as the model. The ideas of the eighteenth century, which led to the Enlightenment, etc., were repeating that continuously: that China is more advanced precisely because of its absolute monarchy. That model, they thought, could put an end to the anarchy of the feudal [system] and so on. The third and ugliest myth was simply racism, but that came later.
You have just received the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. I was wondering if that holds significance for you, what significance Fanon holds for you, and if you think that there’s a legacy that Fanon has left for us to fulfill?
Yes, I think the points I’ve made, the fundamental idea, is that the struggle for reconquering independence starts from the periphery. And that is not a struggle for becoming like the others, but, rather, changing the whole world. That is, in a way, we are potentially more mature than the people in the center. But, simultaneously, that is not guaranteed, because there are classes who can capture that victory for their own short benefits.
These were issues that were discussed, and discussed, and discussed for hours and days and weeks with the liberation movements of the Portuguese colonies, with the FLN of Algeria [Front de libération nationale], with the Nasserians, with those [who] became the Derg in Ethiopia, with the Communist party of South Africa and various people from the ANC [African National Congress].
So, for you, to honor the legacy of Fanon is not about honoring the legacy of an individual, but is instead about honoring the legacy of a series of debates and exchanges that went far beyond one person?
Yes, yes, yes. And that history has to be written. Unfortunately, the historians are ignorant about it. It’s also our fault, in great part, because no archive was kept. Most of those discussions—and in those days I was going to Ghana, to Tunis, Dar-es-Salaam, etc. five times a year—these were debates that were really hard, where you could feel the differences, the nuances in the differences of views. But you could see also that among at least those who were the most devoted in the struggle there was some degree of consensus.
Thomas Meagher is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Political Science at Quinnipiac University. His research is in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and philosophy of race and gender. He recently completed his doctorate at the University of Connecticut, where he wrote his dissertation, “Maturity in a Human World: A Philosophical Study.”
Lewis R. Gordon is Executive Editor of Black Issues in Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; the 2018–2019 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; and chair of the Awards Committee for the Caribbean Philosophical Association. His recent books include, with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and his forthcoming book is entitled Fear of Black Consciousness.
