Many of you have probably seen the excellent “Ferguson Syllabus” created by Sociologists for Justice, which has been circulated widely over the last several days and which provides a collection of research articles used to inform the arguments and positions represented in their Statement on Ferguson. I strongly encourage you to keep circulating that document, and to use Sociologists’ for Justice suggested hashtag #socforjustice when you do.
If you work in academia but outside of a Sociology Department, as I do, I suspect you’ve thought to yourself how helpful it would be if a corresponding syllabus were produced and circulated for your own discipline, as I have. (Would that it were the case that professional Philosophers could agree on something like a”Statement on Ferguson,” but I’m not holding my breath for that!) Below, I’ve attempted to BEGIN the construction of a “Ferguson Syllabus” for the discipline of Philosophy. The list of materials I have here is, of course, non-exhaustive and incomplete, so I welcome any amendments or additions from readers who specialize in Philosophy, Political Theory, Critical Race Studies and the like.
Just leave your suggestions in the comments section to this post, and I will do my best to amend this draft version of a “Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers” in a timely manner. I’ve listed only books here– no articles– because an emphasis on primary material is the prevailing custom in the (somewhat limited) area of Philosophy in which I work. But I’ve also included a separate list of anthologies that include many, if not most, of the seminal philosophical works in race theory and (broadly speaking) Enlightenment/democratic theory. As anyone who has ever attempted to construct a “new” syllabus knows, crowdsourcing via social media–or just regular old flesh-and-blood social networks– is a tremendous help when one finds oneself up against the daunting challenge of teaching new material (or teaching familiar material in new ways). I invite you all to help in this endeavor.
Following the lead of Sociologists for Justice, I will ask that you use the hashtag #philosophersforjustice when you share this syllabus on Facebook, Twitter or other social media.
Primary Readings (Monographs):
- The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
- Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
- The Racial Contract, Charles Mills
- Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
- The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi
- Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, Linda Martin Alcoff
- The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire
- Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls
- The Colonization of Psychic Space, Kelly Oliver
- Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, bell hooks
- Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul Taylor
- The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins
- Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, Eds. Kimberle Crenshaw et al
- Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
- Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Charles Mills
- The Idea of Race, Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott
- Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Eds. Jean Stafancic and Richard Delgado
- Race, Ed. Robert Bernasconi
**UPDATE**
Supplementary Readings:
(The following texts are collected from readers’ suggestions in the comments selection below. I will continue to update this section as more titles are submitted.)
- Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V. Hartman
- Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields
- Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics, Robert Gooding-Williams
- Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Ed. Joy James
- On The Postcolony, Achiille Mbembe
- The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson
- Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young
- In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, Leon Higginbotham
- Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, George Yancy and Janine Jones
- The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Muhammad
- Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, Ladelle McWhorter
7 comments on “Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers”
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I want to add stuff, but I am having real issues understanding how to limit what should be included (if that makes sense as a problem).
Saidiya Hartman: Scenes of Subjection (though this might be history instead of philosophy? This is part of my problem with limiting stuff).
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony. Maybe also his essay on Necropolitics.
Sylvia Wynter: "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument"
Nelson Maldonado-Torres: Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (maybe technically theology?)
And then important for the entire project of creating syllabuses for ferguson, Roderick Ferguson's The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference.
And if we are going to be including works like Rawls' Justice as Fairness (which is probably an important contribution), maybe also Marion Iris Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference? (and I am now restraining myself from continuing to just comment with more and more suggestions). Thanks for putting this together, Leigh.
Okay, another comment. Considering this list cannot be all things, and some things have to be cut for other things to be added, I am officially suggesting the cutting of the Foucault. Not that biopolitics don't matter to all of this, but I am not sure I think they are the essential thing here for us to get our head around (I am sure that saying that officially means I get kicked out the biopolitics studies club. And probably the Foucault club as well).
I would add Saidiya V. Hartman Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America; Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life; Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, a Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics; Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy (Essays by Foucault on the American Prison System and Jared Sexton on Racial Profiling and Societies of Control);
Oh, Racecraft. I should have added that. I also want to add Denise Ferreira da Silva's excellent Toward Global Idea of Race.
Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color; George Yancy and Janine Jones (Eds.), Pursuing Trayvon Martin; Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well; Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness.
If one wants a Foucauldian analysis, I think Ladelle McWhorter's Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy would actually be more helpful for understanding the present situation than actually reading Foucault himself.
Other suggestions, something by Huey Newton, maybe To Die for the People, or Revolutionary Suicide.
And, in order to understand the demands and possibilities for philosophy thinking these problems, I would add Lucius Outlaw's On Race and Philosophy.
Or we could make one simple, practical change:
http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2014/08/28/averting-the-next-ferguson-one-simple-solution/