Phenomenology, Race, Politics

Catalog description

This course traces how the philosophical orientation called 'phenomenology' was taken up, modified, and developed in the 1960s by theorists of race, colonialism, and radical politics, and subsequently inflected otherwise by feminist, queer, and trans* theorists since the 1990s. Phenomenology began as an effort to move philosophy away from the split of mind-body and subject-object that characterized Platonic idealism and Cartesian rationalism; it presumed that human beings experience the world through embodied perception, which makes intellect and physical/sensual embodiment inseparable. This premise opened up a generative line of flight as the idea of 'experience' became crucial to theorizing how colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy shaped the subjectivity -the embodied perspective and action- of both masters and subalterns. But in problematic ways, some theorists of 'identity politics' linked experience to 'authenticity,' and thereby made policing claims about who could speak and how. Our goal is to assess the philosophical premises, political uses and risks of 'experience' as a trope in theorizing politics. In this 7-week experiment, key theorists include Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Franz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Joan Scott, Fred Moten, and Gayle Salamon.