by Lewis R. Gordon
The best testament to a scholar’s work is its necessity for the continued life of one’s own. I have taught Professor Nkiru Nzegwu’s writings since the late 1990s in my courses on Africana philosophy, Africana political thought, and aesthetics.
Nzegwu is Professor of Africana Studies at Binghamton University, where she also previously held appointments as Professor of Art History and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. Born in Nigeria of Igbo ethnicity, she describes in The Journal of African Philosophy as follows:
Succinctly, I am a Renaissance woman. In full, however, I am a university professor, teacher, researcher, philosopher, art historian, curator, artist, poet, digital academic journal publisher, administrator, gallery owner, radio producer, mother, friend and lots more. Over the course of my adult life, I have undertaken a number of initiatives and embarked on numerous endeavors as opportunities presented themselves. And so, the broad and interdisciplinary range of my intellectual work and accomplishments do not fall into one category. For the purposes of this interview, I will limit my responses to the discipline of philosophy, in particular, and the academe, in general.
I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa, and began my professional life in academia in two departments in the State University of New York at Binghamton—the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Art History. After tenure in the two departments in 1996, I moved my philosophy line to the Department of Africana while retaining the other in Art History. Two years later, I moved the art history line to the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture graduate program. Some years later, I consolidated both lines in the Africana Studies department. These moves were undertaken to foster and advance my research.
I have taught for twenty-five years at Binghamton University, one of the four flagship universities of the State University of New York system. My research attention is focused on three main fields of study—feminist/African Women studies; African philosophy; and African and African Diaspora art. In the course of my teaching career at Binghamton, I introduced a number of first-ever, full-fledged academic courses to be taught in an American university, notably, philosophy of Orisha worship, Santería Art, Hip-hop I and Hip-hop II, Contemporary African Art, African Aesthetics, Philosophy of Colonialism, and African Women and Feminism. As well, I developed and taught a number of introductory Africa-focused art and gender courses, long before these sorts of courses became widely offered in universities across the United States.
Presently, I am a full Professor in the Department of Africana Studies as well as Coordinator of the once vibrant graduate program of Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture (PIC) that the university dismantled. PIC was a disruptive program that was tremendously liked by prospective scholars and philosophers whose areas of scholarship and research, and sometimes their specific cultures, were effaced by the academy and the traditional discipline of philosophy. Establishment philosophers—either in the Analytic or Continental traditions—did not really embrace nor approve of PIC. Most felt that philosophy should remain true to its “traditional” character—white, Western, and largely male.
In addition to teaching hers writings, I have cited and discussed them in the notes and bibliographies of my articles and books. This is the case as well for many other scholars and artistic practitioners in her fields. It is, however, her 2006 monograph Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture that solidified her place in Africana philosophy, philosophy of culture, anti- and postcolonial studies, women and gender studies, and African studies, which is the basis for this discussion of her thought in Black Issues in Philosophy. To state that Family Matters is a classic is no exaggeration. It receives attention in too many articles, books, and reviews to mention here. I discuss it, in addition to her writings on colonialism, art, and poetry, in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy.
The core ideas of that and other works by Professor Nzegwu is the ongoing dispelling of misrepresentations about Africa and the ideas produced by African and African diasporic peoples. Much academic study of Africa is unfortunately guided by projections that elide reality, and the conceptual frameworks governing market forces about Africa create a palimpsest situation of an underlying set of communicative practices in which and through which de facto African peoples live.
This understanding connects Professor Nzegwu’s artistic and scholarly work through a metacritical examination of what are avowed and seen versus elements that transcend both. Though the specificity of her empirical work focuses on Igbo society, she connects those elements across ideas from many ethnic groups in Nigeria and across the continent into the Americas.
As women and gender are often referenced in her work, this critical approach questions how women and gender are produced. Her work thus decenters and questions Euromodern hegemonic misrepresentations of the scope and validity of Eurocentric forms of knowledge. This makes her work, then, valuable for scholars and theorists who may not have Africa as their focus since the conceptual tools she produces—such as understandings of relational models of family units not premised on Euromodern bourgeois nuclear ones with a patriarch at its center—offers humility to disciplinary hubris.
Many of Professor Nzegwu’s contributions to the profession focus on building institutional homes for new ideas. The organizations and journals she founded or co-founded—such as the African Resource Center, the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies, and the award-winning journal JENda—play important roles in the cultivation of research beyond the institutions that persist in focusing on outmoded and misguided models of human study. Her writings address such needs through their metatheoretical explorations into the conditions of knowledge and epistemically affected subjects.
Given her commitments to building institutions, her anthologies are efforts to give voice to communities often overlooked. This is clearly the case in her decision to put together the speeches of the Obi His Majesty Igwe Nnaemeka Alfred Achebe. Professor Nzegwu’s contributions in her work on the Obi Achebe are not only as an editor but also the detailed discussions she offers of governing structures in Igbo society, Afro-modern reconciliations with tradition, and the complex history of Onitsha (a Nigerian city that hosts the largest market in Africa). The last observation is developed in her Onitsha at the Millennium (Africa Resource Press, 2013). For her book specifically on Obi Achebe, see His Majesty Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe: A Ten-Year Milestone (Africa Resource Press, 2013).
Professor Nzegwu’s brings to the fore the difficulty of translating certain African concepts into European frameworks. For instance, for the sake of translation she uses the term “monarch” to refer to the Obi, although the word properly means “heart.” In effect, the Obi is the heart of the people, which means the logic of in this case “his” (complicated, given her work on the fluidity of gender terms) leadership and rule as a symbiotic concept. I have argued that notions of “kings,” “queens,” and “monarchs” are not appropriate terms to describe historically African forms of leadership. Much of this is elaborated beautifully in Professor Nzegwu’s introduction to His Majesty Nnaemeka Alfred Ugochukwu Achebe in which she explains Obiship and connects it to spiritual leadership.
The question of translation emerges in nearly all of Professor Nzegwu’s writings addressed for which the primary audience is steeped in Eurocentrism. For instance, she articulated early on the nuance of translating African terms in her introduction to her 1998 volume Issues in Contemporary African Art. There, she pointed out that the word “contemporary” in the African context functions like “modern” in the European one. The complicated question of historical erasure becomes evident in hegemonic presumptions of there being no past “modern” Africa, even though modern actually means “present” or belonging to the present. The complicated problem of being present is that it could only be determined by a relationship to the future. There is thus a retroactive impact on the articulation of the contemporary and the present, because it entails a future belonging that affects the past.
In effect, then, the work of philosophers, scholars, and artists like Professor Nzegwu and Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (on whom I commented last year) raises a set of research initiatives that transcend their own work. They are setting the stage of simultaneous production and reconstruction.
These considerations also bring to the fore Professor Nzegwu’s important work as a critic. This aspect of her work is evinced not only in her rigorous, often poignant, interrogations of Eurocentrism in the work of white Africanists (for example, Philip Curtin) and white feminists (for example, Martha Nussbaum) but also internally with regard to the work of African critics, philosophers, and scholars, as her critical essays on Paulin Hountondji (APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, Fall 1996: 130–135) and K. Anthony Appiah reveal.
The connecting threads of her critique focus on scholarly integrity, responsibility, and their importance for looking further into the nuance and complexity of concepts and how communities live them. That sexual designation is also formulated as kinds of offspring in Ibgo society holds within it the absence of a hierarchy in which a female is derived from a male. The English translation of nwanyi into “woman,” for example, misrepresents the concept since the Igbo term exceeds the scope of what woman signifies in the English language.
Professor Nzegwu pays attention to such translational failures not only in studies of gender and sex but also across groups such as the multivariant African diaspora. Her co-edited The New African Diaspora (Indiana UP, 2009) is an instance of this commitment. The unfortunate tendency to interpret the African diaspora in a singular, linear model premised on the United States not only in the hegemonic white academy but also in certain programs of African diasporic studies leads to much confusion. African populations are culturally diverse and dynamic in the United States and across the globe. The global hegemony of the U.S. unfortunately often elides this reality through an invested portrait in conceptions of African Americans that exist only in part in specific areas of the country. The reality across the United States and the globe is one of populations often rendered invisible by caricatures imposed on them.
There is much more I could say on Professor Nzegwu’s work. I have not, for example, discussed her paintings and poetry, some of which could be found in exhibits, on the cover of books such as Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí’s The Invention of Women, and magazines and anthologies such as Possibilities: Literary Arts Magazine (Ottawa, Canada) and African Women and Feminism (Africa World Press, 2002).
Professor Nzegwu is part of an intellectual movement that includes a core group of stellar Nigerian philosophers and social theorists such as Lawrence Bamikole (University of the West Indies at Mona), John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji (University of the West Indies at Mona), Chika Mba (University of Ghana), O.J. Oguejiofor (Nnamdi Azikiwe University), Ike Ferdinand Odimegwu (Nnamdi Azikiwe University) Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (Stony Brook), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Cornell), in addition to the more senior in age art historian Rowland Abiodun (Amherst). They have taken on the tasks of those such as Sophie Bosede Oluwole (1935–2018), F. Abiola Irele (1936–2017), Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1963–2007), who are now among the ancestors.
Together, members of this group are doing their part in correcting the damage done by more than a century of bad scholarship on West Africa, and they are also communicating well with theorists and scholars across the continent and the diaspora toward what I have been calling over the past quarter of a century a shift in the geography of reason.
For a recent interview with Professor Nzegwu, see: “Nkiru Nzegwu on Gender in African Tradition,” An interview with Nkiru Nzegwu on matriarchy, sexuality, and gender fluidity in Africa (with a quick chat at the end about her work on African art). History of Philosophy without Gaps (March 3, 2019): https://historyofphilosophy.net/gender-nzegwu
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; and Chair of Global Collaborations for the Caribbean Philosophical Association. His most recent books are his co-edited anthology with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), and his forthcoming monograph Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA and Penguin Book in the UK) and his collection of essays 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei (Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press). His public Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/LewisGordonPhilosopher/ and he is on Twitter @lewgord.
