In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
Kwame Anthony Appiah
There is no single African essence to recover, he argued, because race was never real.
Appiah turned the critique on cultural nativism itself. He dismantled the idea of a single African identity or "race" grounding African philosophy, arguing that pan-Africanism had inherited the very racial essentialism it opposed. Skeptical of ethnophilosophy's hunt for an authentic collective mind, he pressed instead for a philosophy that is African by circumstance, not by metaphysical essence. Cosmopolitan, and wary of every appeal to roots.
Its legacy. It won the Herskovits Award and reshaped debates on race and identity beyond Africa.
- Author
- Kwame Anthony Appiah
- First published
- 1992
- Genre
- Philosophy
- Theme
- African Philosophy and Ideas
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- African Religions and Philosophy — John S. Mbiti
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- African Philosophy: Myth and Reality — Paulin J. Hountondji
He coined the word the whole field would then spend decades trying to escape.
- Philosophy and an African Culture — Kwasi Wiredu
Thinking in a colonizer's language, he warned, can smuggle in a foreign metaphysics.