olufemi taiwo | Cornell University (original) (raw)

Videos by olufemi taiwo

Does the United States Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

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What I Do as A Philosophy Teacher

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Papers by olufemi taiwo

https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/taiwo, 2020

The global fury unleashed against police brutality and anti-Black racism in the United States con... more The global fury unleashed against police brutality and anti-Black racism in the United States continues unabated. As poet Gil Scott-Heron once said, "America is once again in shock! America leads the world in shocks. Unfortunately, America does not lead the world in deciphering the causes of shocks." The country has been forced, once again, to do some soul-searching intended, presumably, to decipher the cause of this shock.

Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflections on the Politics of Sisterhood (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press), 2003

Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 1984

African Studies Quarterly, 1997

Anyone who has lived with, worked on, and generally hung out with philosophy as long as I have an... more Anyone who has lived with, worked on, and generally hung out with philosophy as long as I have and who, and this is a very important element, inhabits the epidermal world that it has pleased fate to put me in, and is as engaged with both the history of that epidermal world and that ...

Journal on African Philosophy, 2003

Thought and Practice in African Philosophy, Jul 1, 2002

A Companion to African Philosophy, 2005

Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey, eds., Òrìsà Devotion as World Religion: the Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 2008

This piece takes a close look at the contributions of two very important thinkers whose works hav... more This piece takes a close look at the contributions of two very important thinkers whose works have, on the whole, framed the deployment of what I call the decolonizing trope in contemporary African philosophy: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Kwasi Wiredu. I argue that, in light of current discussions in African life and politics and current trends in African philosophical discourse dominated by this trope, it may be time to, at least, rethink, if not abandon, the trope. The viability of a conceptual decolonization in philosophy may have been oversold; the trope may give a false impression of the complexity of the situation it is designed to help attenuate; and it may be having deleterious consequences on discourse and its progress even if they are unintended.

The literature on race/racism and modern Euro-American philosophy obscures a category of continen... more The literature on race/racism and modern Euro-American philosophy obscures a category of continental African thinkers who not only embraced modernity and its core tenets but used them as the metric for judging their societies and self-making. Their embrace of modernity led them to share certain assumptions about their societies' past like those that ground the racism of modern Euro-American philosophy. The literature has not attended to their ideas. The obscuring arises from racializing the discourse of philosophy and race/racism within a black-white/whitenonwhite schema. We, instead, historicize the discourse and show how, in embracing modernity, Africans managed, simultaneously, to repudiate modern philosophy's racism. African thinkers never saw modernity as white or quintessentially European: it is the latest iteration of the human march to a better life for the species; they historicized it. The paper concludes with an exegesis of one such thinker from nineteenth century West Africa, James Africanus Beale Horton.