Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 346
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-5381-3161-9 • Hardback • February 2020 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-5381-3162-6 • Paperback • January 2020 • $41.00 • (£35.00)
978-1-5381-3163-3 • eBook • January 2020 • $39.00 • (£30.00)
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of over 20 books and known for his national and international influential essays and interviews at the New York Times, "The Stone."
Part 1 Writing While Black: Bearing the Weight of Public Witnessing
Chapter 1: The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America
Chapter 2: Discussing the Backlash to “Dear White America”
With Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed
Chapter 3: Is White America Ready to Confront its Racism and be in Crisis?
With Alex Blasdel at The Guardian
Chapter 4: Walking While Black in the White Gaze
Chapter 5: It Feels Like Being on Death Row
Chapter 6: Blackface: What Does it Says about White America?
Chapter 7: Look in the Disagreeable Mirror: Rethinking Black History for White People
Chapter 8: King’s Dream or Trump’s Nightmare?
Chapter 9: Is Your God Dead?: A Question from the Underground
Chapter 10: Being a Dangerous Professor and Refusing to be Adjusted
Part 2 Untying Odysseus: Traversing Black Philosophical Fragments
Chapter 11: Philosophy as a Practice of Suffering
With H. A. Nethery
Chapter 12: Musings: On Autobiography and Africana Philosophy
With Azuka Nzegwu
Chapter 13: Thinking About Race, History, and Identity
With Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
Part 3 Doing Philosophy in Black: Foundational Traces and the Weight of the Present
Chapter 14: African-American Philosophy: Through the Lens of Socio-Existential Struggle
Chapter 15: Thomas Nelson Baker, Sr.: On the Power of Black Aesthetic Ideals
Chapter 16: Gilbert Haven Jones: Early Black Philosopher and Educator
Chapter 17: Joyce Mitchell Cook: Autobiographical and Philosophical Fragments
Chapter 18: The Pain and Promise of Being Black Women in Philosophy
With Anita L. Allen at “The Stone,” New York Times
Chapter 19: Hateful Speech: The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher
With Brad Evans at “The Stone,” New York Times
Part 4 Meaning-Making and the Generative Space of Black Performative Discourse
Chapter 20: The Scholar Who Coined the Term Ebonics: A Conversation with Robert L. Williams
Chapter 21: Geneva Smitherman: The Social Ontology of African-American Language, the Power of Nommo, and the Dynamics of Resistance and Identity Through Language
Chapter 22: Socially Grounded Ontology and Epistemological Agency: James G. Spady’s Search for the Marvelous/Imaginative Within the Expansive and Expressive Domain of Rap Music and Hip Hop Self-Consciousness
In this collection of interviews and essays, which is divided into four parts, Yancy (Emory Univ.) engages in a timely conversation on racism with several well-known scholars and academic journalists. His interviews and essays in parts 1 and 2 contextualize his reflections, as well as those of his interlocutors, on hate mail (including a racist death threat Yancy received) with the dual aim of exposing racism and shedding light on the white backlash engendered by his teaching. Parts 3 and 4 are, respectively, devoted to biographical sketches of three historically important Black philosophers (Thomas Nelson Baker, Gilbert Haven Jones, and Joyce Mitchell Cook) and to conversations with Anita L. Allen on Black women philosophers, Brad Evans on hate speech, Robert L. Williams on Ebonics, and Geneva Smitherman on Black language and resistance. . . Summing Up: Recommended. All levels.
— Choice Reviews
Across Black Spaces is a path-breaking volume of essays and interviews by one of the top African American philosophers. It is a masterful work, full of vivid writing, definitive analyses, and sharp critiques of domination. Yancy is clearly the leading philosopher and critic of race and racism in the nation. I predict that this highly learned work with its wit and genius will transform our perception of what is possible in a racialized society. Yancy's work is magnificent and in some places truly revolutionary.— Molefi Kete Asante, professor and chair, Department of Africology, Temple University, author of The History of Africa
Across Black Spaces is an opportunity for both those who know George Yancy's vast opus and new readers to encounter a distillation of his leading themes and reflections. Yancy is now one of our great public intellectuals and this collection of essays and interviews is an inspiring introduction to the realities of black experience in the United States.— Naomi Zack, Lehman College, CUNY
This collection features George Yancy at his best. Yancy is fearless in his quest to ground philosophy in lived experience that is both fully human and Black.— Shannon Sullivan, author of Good White People: The Problem of Middle-Class White Anti-Racism
By revealing Yancy’s own experiences as a Black man, Across Black Spaces offers us a mirror in which to see our own. This is an essential resource in helping us do so. — Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University
With a keen eye looking beyond the academy, George Yancy provides a treasure trove of deep insights into white-racist realities from his own and others’ Black experience. A leading global philosopher whose honest critical-racism writings have led to white death threats, he offers a panoply of life-hardened understandings for building a truly democratic America and, indeed, planet earth.— Joe Feagin, Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University, and author of Racist America
In Across Black Spaces George Yancy speaks his powerful and righteous truth on the life and death question of what it means to be Black in the USA of 2020. The most powerful philosophical work illuminates everyday experience and Yancy brilliantly grounds his analysis in realities of contemporary Black experience. Fired by a consciousness of the limits to our time on earth, Yancy has no time to display philosophical erudition for its own sake. His work will disturb, provoke and move you.— Stephen Brookfield, John Ireland Endowed Chair, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis-St. Paul
Bold, brave, and bracing. This welcome compilation of George Yancy’s widely published work forcefully weaves together indictments of white supremacy, tributes to courageous builders of resistance to its violence, and reflections on the role of Black philosophy in deepening our understanding of what philosophy is and does. Exploring with many interlocutors the rich cultural spaces African Americans have created and sustained in the face of the terrors of white supremacy, Yancy helps us see just how African American philosophy, and by extension, the activity of philosophy more generally, arise out of the complex lived spaces to which they are a response.— Elizabeth V. Spelman, professor of philosophy, Smith College
For years, George Yancy has been a truth-telling voice of courage, wisdom, and attempted reconciliation in the racially polarized public sphere. At a time when racial issues have become more central than in decades to the national conversation, his philosophical insight is needed more than ever before. This invaluable collection of articles, interviews, sketches of pioneering black thinkers, and autobiographical reflections, will provide, for those who do not yet know him, a wonderful introduction to his work. — Charles W. Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Speaking one’s truth has been indicative of many efforts to transgress the dehumanizing epistemic and existential boundaries imposed on black being by virtue of various vicious construals of black embodiment as somehow bereft of the sensitivities and sensibilities of full human subjectivity. Here in Across Black Spaces, George Yancy splendidly joins, converses with, and commends a chorus of black figures who traverse the borders of disciplinary domains and genres in ways that exemplify and bear witness to the expansive terrain of critical black thought.— A. Todd Franklin, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, Hamilton College
I used to think of George Yancy as a provocateur with a pugilist's style, throwing necessary punches in the fight against racism. After reading Across Black Spaces I now see him as a man pouring out his heart with humility and strength, urgently attempting to convince people to take a gift he is freely giving and one that we desperately need to accept. . . This is an incredibly important work and one I wish everyone in America and abroad would read.
— Brian Hisao Onishi, Professor of Philosophy at Penn State