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- Title
Thinking About Race, History, and Identity:An Interview with George Yancy.
- Authors
YANCY, GEORGE; DEL GUADALUPE DAVIDSON, MARIA
- Abstract
In this wide-ranging interview, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson interviews prominent philosopher George Yancy. Davidson explores Yancy's autobiographical roots and how he became deeply passionate about philosophy, African-American philosophy, questions of racial embodiment, and identity. Malcolm X and history are explored as entry points into questions regarding white myth-making and the racist iconography of the Black body. Yancy discusses his concept of the white gaze as a site of social and historical practice and hegemony. Within this context, Yancy pulls from his book Black Bodies, White Gazes, which is an important and unique philosophical text that engages questions of the body through the lens of critical philosophy of race, embodiment, and phenomenology. Yancy's book created an important and unique conceptual space for focusing African American philosophy on the reality of Black embodiment. This embodiment, for Yancy, functions as a site for doing theory, and raises important epistemological and social ontological questions. In short, Yancy places a conceptual premium on understanding Black lived experience under white power. Yancy also discusses the intersectional dynamics between race and gender and the protean character of Blackness. Davidson engages Yancy's work on whiteness and how he understands its structure. Yancy is among a very small group of Black philosophers who have made important contributions to African American philosophy, critical whiteness studies, and critical philosophy of race. More specifically, his work has been instrumental in engaging the meta-philosophical assumptions of philosophy through its structural whiteness.
- Subjects
YANCY, George; AFRICAN American philosophy; AFRICAN American philosophers; PHENOMENOLOGY; RACISM
- Publication
Western Journal of Black Studies, 2016, Vol 40, Issue 1, p3
- ISSN
0197-4327
- Publication type
Article