Hegel (anti)kolonial 2: Hegel and Black History
Hegel denied that people of African origin were capable of contributing to history - yet at the same time, his philosophy is an important source of inspiration in Black intellectual history. On the occasion of Black History Month in the US and Germany, this online workshop explores the ambivalent relations between Hegel’s philosophy and Black History.
Main content
In numerous lectures, Hegel dismissed the inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa as childlike creatures who have never “gained a foothold in history”. Hegel’s denial of Black history cast a long shadow that reaches all the way down to our own time, as is witnessed, for instance, by the 2007 Dakar speech in which the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy unabashedly endorsed Hegel’s position.
Yet at the same time, Hegel is a key point of reference within several strands of Black intellectual history. Influential Black thinkers ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King and Angela Davis, to Steve Biko, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant have deeply engaged his dialectics, as well as his theories of ‘Ethical Life’, freedom and his understanding of self-consciousness. Rather than just appropriating parts of Hegel’s framework by deracializing them, they turned Hegelian concepts into tools for Black liberation and decolonization. Thus, these different strands of Black Hegelianism, woven across the Black Atlantic, exemplify what Charles Mills has recently coined ‘The Black Enlightenment’: they can act as a prism through which we can illuminate the dark underside but also the untapped potential of European Enlightenment thought.
On the occasion of Black History Month in both Germany and the US, and in the spirit of Mills’ inversion of the Enlightenment metaphor, our workshop explores these ambivalent relations between Hegel’s philosophy and Black History.
Program/abstracts: https://hegelantikolonial.wordpress.com/hegel-and-black-history/
About the event series
This is the 2nd event in Hegel (anti)kolonial/, an event series on Hegel and colonialism, racism, and anticolonial thought that is meant to offer a platform for ongoing debates about the ambivalent colonial heritage in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel (anti)kolonial is organized by Daniel James (University Düsseldorf) and Franz Knappik (University of Bergen), with the support of Dina Emundts (FU Berlin) and Tobias Rosefeldt (HU Berlin). More information at hegelantikolonial.wordpress.com.
