Critical Philosophy of Race: Intersections with Culture, Ethnicity, and Nationality Beyond the Black/White Binary

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College, and CUNY Graduate Center

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writings have focused on social identity, epistemology and politics, sexual violence, Foucault, and Latino issues in philosophy. She has written two books: Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), Real Knowing (Cornell 1996); and she has edited nine, including Thinking From the Underside of History co-edited with Eduardo Mendieta (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2003), Feminist Epistemologies co-edited with Elizabeth Potter (Routledge 1993), Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, co-edited with Eva Feder Kittay (2006), Identity Politics Reconsidered co-edited with Michael Hames-Garcia, Satya Mohanty and Paula Moya (Palgrave 2006); and Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader co-edited with Mariana Ortega (SUNY 2009). She is originally from Panama, but lives today happily in Brooklyn.

www.alcoff.com

"Alien and Alienated"

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State

Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and is the author of two books on Heidegger and a book on Sartre. He has written numerous essays on Kant, Hegel, twentieth century continental philosophy, and critical philosophy of race.

"What Binary?"

Kathryn T. Gines, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Penn State

Kathryn T. Gines is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State.  She is also the founding Director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP) and the director of Cultivating Underrepresented Students in Philosophy (CUSP).  Gines’ primary research and teaching interests lie in continental philosophy, Africana philosophy, black feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race.  Gines has published articles on race, assimilation, and sex and sexuality in contemporary hip-hop, including: “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism” in Imperialism, Slavery, Race, and Genocide: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt. (Eds. Dan Stone and Richard King. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007.); “The Ambiguity of Assimilation: Commentary on Eamonn Callan’s, ‘The Ethics of Assimilation’” in Symposia on Gender Race and Philosophy, Volume 2, number 2. May 2006. (Posted online at http://web.mit.edu/sgrp/2006/no2/Gines0506.pdf); “Sex and Sexuality in Contemporary Hip-Hop” in Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason – a series in Pop Culture and Philosophy. (Eds. Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby. Chicago: Open Court, 2005);  and  “Sartre and Fanon: Fifty Years Later” in Sartre Studies International. Volume 9, Issue 2, 2003. Most recently Gines has co-edited an anthology titled Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010).

Dr. Gines will serve as Moderator for all Panel Sessions.

Namita Goswami, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University

Namita was educated at Emory University. She works in Adorno, Spivak, Foucault, and Postcolonial, Critical Race, and Feminist Theory. Selected publications include “Auto-Phagia and Queer Trans-Nationality: Compulsory Hetero- Imperial Masculinity in Deepa Mehta’s Fire,” SIGNS: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Volume 33, Number 2, Winter 2008; “Existence Authoritarian: Compulsion, Facticity and the Philosophy of Identity,” Rethinking Facticity, (Albany:  State University of New York Press), edited by François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson, forthcoming March 2008; “Shifting Grounds: Identity, Partition, and the Anglo-Indian Subject of History,” South Asian Review: A Journal of South Asian Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume 27, Number 1, 2006. She also co-authored with Dr. Paul Courtright, “Who was Roop Kanwar? Sati, Law, Religion, and Post-Colonial Feminism,” in Religion and Personal Law in Secular India:  A Call to Judgment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), edited by Dr. Gerald J. Larson, 2001. Her manuscript on philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory is in late stages of revision and is under advance contract with SUNY Press.

"Flesh and Blood: Postcolonial Theory, African-American Feminism, and a Phenomenology of the Body"

David H. Kim, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and member of the Asian American Studies Program, University of San Francisco

David H. Kim is Associate Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of San Francisco. His areas of research include ethics, philosophical psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of race, and comparative philosophy. Some of his recent essays include, “What is Asian American Philosophy?” in Philosophy in Multiple Voices, ed. George Yancey, and “The Unexamined Frontier: Dewey, Pragmatism, and America Enlarged,” in Pragmatism, Nation, and Race, eds. Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta. He is currently working on an edited volume on race and emotion, as well as essays on the history of anti-imperialist thought and on the relations between race, nation, and xenophobia.

"Imperialism and Xenophobia in American Orientalism"

Kyoo Lee, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, John Jay College, The City University of New York

Kyoo Lee, 2009-2010 Mellon Resident Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay, CUNY, where she is also affiliated faculty for the Justice Studies and Gender Studies Programs. At the CUNY Graduate Center, she teaches feminist theory for the Women’s Studies Program, leads a couple of faculty seminars in the Humanities such as ReOrientale, and is currently co-editing an issue on “Safe” for the Women’s Studies Quarterly (The Feminist Press). With a dual doctoral training in continental philosophy and literary theory, she writes in the intersecting fields of aesthetics, Asian American studies, comparative literature/philosophy, continental philosophy, critical race theory, cultural studies, feminist philosophy, gender studies, poetics, post-phenomenology and translation. Her articles have appeared in Angelaki, the Comparatist, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-century Thought, How to Talk to Photography, Mythos and Logos, A New Kind of Containment, Parallax, Philosophical Writings, Poetry Review, Race and Nationalism Reader, SOAS Literary Review and Social Identities; some of the forthcoming pieces concern Asian American irony, Descartes and Princess Elizabeth, and a phenomenological reading of Xuanpin (the dark female animal) in the Daoist classic, Daodejing. Having recently completed a book manuscript on Cartesian alterity, she started working on a Mellon-funded project on familial alterity and the political ontology of documentation. www.kyoolee.net

"Is She Yoko?—A Hauntology of the Third Sex a.k.a. the Oriental Woman"

José Medina, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's & Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University

José Medina (Ph.D. from Northwestern University, 1998) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. He works in philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and philosophy of culture and ethnicity. He has published numerous papers on theories of meaning and identity.  Symposia on Gender, Race, and Philosophy dedicated an issue (May 2005) to the discussion of his article “Identity Trouble” (see http://web.mit.edu/sgrp). Medina has also published  articles in Cognition, Dialectica, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, International Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Pragmatics, Philosophical Forum, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophical Studies, and Social Epistemology (among other professional journals).  His current book project is entitled The Epistemology of Resistance: Racial and Gender Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Critical Imagination.

"Color Blindness, Meta-Ignorance, and the Racial Imagination"

Mariana Ortega, Professor of Philosophy, John Carroll University

Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy and current holder of the Shula Chair in Philosophy at John Carroll University, University Heights, OH. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Her main areas of research are twentieth century continental philosophy, specifically Heideggerian Phenomenology, Latina feminism and race theory. Her research focuses on questions of self and sociality, visual representations of race, and the question of identity. She has published articles in journals such as Hypatia, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, International Philosophical Quarterly, and Radical Philosophy Review. She is co-editor with Linda Martín Alcoff of the anthology Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY, 2009). She is currently working on a monograph that elaborates a notion of self as multiplicitous subjectivity in light of Existential Phenomenological views and Latina feminisms.

"Mexican and Black? Really? Photographic Representation of Racialized Bodies, the Visible, and the Invisible"

Sonia Sikka, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa

Dr. Sikka’s primary areas of research are philosophy of culture and continental philosophy.  In addition to works on Heidegger, Levinas and Nietzsche, she has written on aspects of Johann Gottfried Herder’s thought in light of contemporary debates regarding race, identity, relativism and multiculturalism.  More recently, she has been engaging more broadly with the topic of identity formation, in relation to Canada, the U.S. and India.  Her publications on race and ethnicity include: “Herder and the Concept of Race” (Herder Yearbook, 2006), “‘Learning to be Indian’: Historical Narratives and the ‘Choice’ of a Cultural Identity” (Dialogue, 2004), and “Heidegger and Race” (in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, 2003).  Dr. Sikka is also the author of a forthcoming monograph, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge University Press, expected publication date 2011).

"In What Sense are Dalits 'Black'?  Race, Caste and the Struggle for a Positive Identity"

Ronald R. Sundstrom, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of San Francisco

Ronald Robles Sundstrom is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco; additionally he teaches courses for USF’s African American Studies program and the Master of Public Affairs program for the Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good. His areas of research include race theory, political and social theory, and African and Asian American philosophy, and he has published several essays and a book in these areas, including The Browning of America and The Evasion of Social Justice (SUNY, 2008). His forthcoming work is on racism, xenophobia, and homophobia, and includes a book on Mixed Race and the Ethics of Identity.

"Xenophobia and Nativism"

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Penn State

Professor Taylor received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Morehouse College and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He writes on aesthetics, race theory, Africana philosophy, pragmatism, and social philosophy, and is the author of the book Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2004). His recent work includes a study of video model Vida Guerra, an essay on post-analytic race theory, and keynote lectures to the Philosophical Society of South Africa, the Alain Locke Society, and the Philosophy of Education Society. He is currently at work on a book called Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (under contract, Blackwell).

"Fly Away Home: Roots and Routes in Black Aesthetics"