COMBATING HEGEMONIC FORCES, FROM THE CONTINENT TO THE BEAT: CONNECTING AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY TO CRITICAL HIP-HOP PEDAGOGY
Genre
Thesis/DissertationDate
2016Author
Roberts, DeChana M.Advisor
Johnson, AmariDepartment
African American StudiesSubject
African American StudiesPhilosophy
Education
African American Philosophy
African Philosophy
Critical Pedagogy
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
Hip-hop
Philosophy For Children
Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/3479Metadata
Show full item recordDOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/3461Abstract
One of the most critical issues impeding African American liberation today is the American education system, which overwhelmingly and disproportionately, negatively impacts African American youth. In defiance of the hegemonic system, African American adolescents have created alternative modes of expressing their native African sensibilities, connecting them back to traditional ancestral philosophy; one of the resulting cultural productions is Hip-Hop. The proceeding pages will offer a critical analysis of literature on Philosophy for Children (PFC/PWC), Africana Philosophy, and the use of Hip-Hop as a pedagogical tool in the classroom (CHHP), in order to discover connections between these three elements. The results showed significant similarities in the PFC/PWC and CHHP programs, supporting the hypothesis to develop a program incorporating both practices in the classroom as an alternative to Eurocentric pedagogy. Additionally this project creates space for future consideration of the connections between traditional Africana philosophy as praxis and Hip-Hop performance.ADA compliance
For Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodation, including help with reading this content, please contact scholarshare@temple.eduCollections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Beyond Ontological Jewishness: A Philosophical Reflection on the Study of African American Jews and the Social Problems of the Jewish and Human SciencesThe present dissertation is a case study in applied phenomenology, specifically the postcolonial phenomenology of racism theorized by Lewis Gordon and applied to scholarly studies conducted on African American Jews and their kinfolk. My thesis is the following: Presumptively ontological human natures cannot function axiomatically for humanistic research on African American Jews. A humanistic science of Africana Jews must foreground the lived social worlds that permit such Jews to appear as ordinary expressions of humanity. The basic premise here is that subaltern (or denied) humanity exists in a neocolonial social world by virtue of an ordinariness that supervenes on humanity. For example, the more historians consider Africana Jews as ordinary, the more Africana Jews' humanity will appear. And the more human Africana Jews appear, the more inhuman their extraordinary appearance appears. This symbiosis constitutes a basic existential condition. When research on Africana Jews ignores this condition, it succumbs to ontological Jewishnness and other concepts rooted in what postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon calls the "colonial natural attitude.
-
Epistemically Adrift: Mood Disorders and Navigating ResponsibilityThis is a dissertation in philosophy of psychiatry and ethics focused on the question of how does one live and react responsibly to the experience of mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. In looking to the current state of psychiatry and cultural understandings of mental disorder, I identify what I call being “epistemically adrift” – the sense that individuals face too many conflicting opinions and a constant debate of how to live with depression that they are unable to process for themselves what their best options for living are. This feeling of being epistemically adrift is all the more complicated by the experience of mood disorder itself, which often makes individuals feel morally inadequate and pressured to do the right thing without clear direction. In the absence of a clear path regarding depression and anxiety, this dissertation proposes an ethics for depression and anxiety disorders – drawing a virtue theory from the existentialist tradition that focuses on the outskirts of mental disorder in order to create an inclusive ethical system for those generally excluded in moral philosophy. The first chapter outlines the general theory of being epistemically adrift in relation to depression and anxiety and how the themes of uncertainty in these conditions inherently lead to different epistemic insights. This chapter establishes the dissertation’s roots in existential phenomenology and epistemic injustice literature in order to sketch out how the combined uncertainty in interdisciplinary understanding of mental illness with the uncertainty experienced within mood disorders lead individuals to feeling adrift and unable to determine what they should do for themselves in living good lives. Meanwhile I argue that the insights of depression and anxiety attune individuals to the world in different ways than their non-depressed peers, which imports interesting questions regarding our responsibility toward one another. The second chapter explores a case study of this sort of insight, arguing that the experience of excessive or “delusional” guilt within depressive disorders can provide a deeper insight into our general moral responsibility towards one another. I compare this feeling of guilt to Karl Jaspers’ conception of “metaphysical” or collective guilt in his analysis of the German people after the Second World War and Holocaust. These sorts of guilt feelings within depression is often incapacitating and hard to make sense of for individuals, but it additionally has a transformative ability to reevaluate moral life. I argue that parallel to the concept of “depressive realism” where individuals with depression have different and sometimes better insights than others, depressive guilt differently attunes individuals to how they relate to others and the world at large. From there, the third chapter engages with how psychiatric diagnosis shapes and limits one’s perceptions of their freedom and agency. More specifically, this chapter employs an existentialist analysis of how one can react to their diagnosis in bad faith – deflecting their own responsibility either by indulging into diagnostic patterns as inherent destiny or denying the condition’s effect on their motivations. I argue that there must be a middle path where one takes responsibility for one’s situation as being depressed or anxious, which both acknowledges the condition but also sees it as a personal challenge to improve on one’s life. The final chapter of the dissertation culminates in the development of an ethical theory that directly centers itself within the experience of mood disorders. This theory stems from both existentialism for its commitment to projecting meaning on uncertainty and absurdity along with virtue theory which allows for a sense of imperfection and improvement over time. I have been developing a set of virtues for how to be responsible for one’s depression or anxiety. “Responsibility” in this sense is the question of how one responds to their moods and other symptoms related to mood disorders, that is, an account of responsibility that resists narratives of fault or blame. These virtues are meant to be a set of therapy-informed guidelines to help those with depression and anxiety counteract the worst feelings of being adrift and foster autonomy and dignity for themselves.
-
The Mediated Nature of Literature: Exploring the Artistic Significance of the Visible TextMy goal in this dissertation is to shed light on a practice in printed literature often overlooked in philosophy of literature. Contemporary works of literature such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Irvine Welsh’s Filth each make artistic use of the features specific to printed literature such as font and formatting. I show that, far from being trivial aberrations, artistic use of font and formatting has a strong historical tradition going back to the Bucolic poets of ancient Greece. When these features deviate from traditional methods of inscription and perform some artistic function within the work, they are artistically significant features of the works themselves. The possibility of the artistic significance of these features is predicated on works of printed literature being visually mediated when one reads to oneself. All works of literature are mediated by some sense modality. When a work of printed literature is meant to be read to oneself, it is mediated by the modality of sight. Features specific to this method of mediation such as font and formatting can make artistic contributions to a text as well. Understanding the artistic significance of such features questions where we see literature with respect to other art forms. If these features are artistically significant, we can no longer claim that works of printed and oral literature are both the same performative art form. Instead, philosophy of literature must recognize that works of printed literature belong to a visually mediated, non-performative, multiple instance art form separate from the performative tradition of oral literature.
