Linda Martín Alcoff

Caring to Know by Vrinda Dalmiya is a remarkable, and remarkably original, work. It develops a significant extension of the care-ethical framework for epistemology, builds on as well as critiques Western feminist philosophy, and offers an original interpretation of the Mahābhārata's implication for epistemic norms. But perhaps most importantly, it invents an entirely original epistemology unlike anything, really, in English. The revolutionary dimensions of the book are clear from the beginning: this is a work of decolonial epistemology.For the period of our shared presence in the profession of philosophy, moral theory and epistemology have begun a cautious conversation. There is now moral epistemology, a field of...

Living in these times of ongoing, persistent, and extreme antiblack racism, from police violence to voter suppression to crushing unemployment and poverty, it feels a harsh task to criticize the hegemony of the black/white binary in antiracist discourses. The difficult challenge of this critical project has always been the question of how to critique the binary without deflating our commitment to address antiblack racism or implicitly denying the value and importance of work that is centered on this virulent form of racism. The presidency of Barack Obama in the United States has only underscored the fact that even in the twenty-first century the hysteria of what some have called “negrophobia” continues to thrive and even to grow. And what is also persistently obvious is that antiblack racism is a kind of equal-opportunity phenomenon, infecting all communities of color in both overt and subtle ways.Yet combating antiblack racism will require a coalition of forces motivated to come together with a sense that the full range of race and identity related problems are acknowledged and addressed. It thus requires an understanding of all the ways racism itself works. The articles in this special issue showcase the growth in our understandings of racism, from antiblack racism, to the explosion of xenophobic nativism, to the incapacity of the binary to capture Asian American women.Clearly, we should begin to refer to racisms in the plural. The multiple ways in which the targets of racism are constituted, (mis)represented, and interpellated reveal differences of form, and not only, or even always, differences of degree. Some groups are purported to be intellectual and cultural inferiors, some are purported to be intellectually superior but unable or unwilling to assimilate, others are viewed as constituting an inherent existential threat to the West as a whole because of their religious culture. These are just the main examples. Contrasting narratives yield different affective responses, from contempt to animosity to fear to a complete disavowal of existence, with coordinated practical responses that range from forced assimilation into a stratified and segregated structure, to hysterical overreactions of competitiveness, to military aggression. There may be commonalities running through these variations such as a basic disrespect for life, but these variations cannot explain the formations of specific racist narratives or the diversity of practices.Rather than highly general arguments about functionalism and universal aversions to difference (arguments that breed pessimism, lack convincing evidence, and eclipse important distinctions), we need local analyses. Anti-Latino racisms are themselves pluralist and diverse, with quite different treatment meted out to Cubans of the professional class versus Guatemalan day laborers or Puerto Ricans seeking social services. Latinos in Germany often have quite a different experience than those in Arizona. Racisms take their opportunities from local discourses and conflicts and histories.It is precisely this power of local conditions to construct effective local racisms that gave the black/white binary its explanatory value. Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the long history of lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the civil rights movement were central to the formation of the complicated and always contested narrative of U.S. national identity. These conditions provided a discursive and conceptual repertoire with which to interpret other groups and other relationships, and also a set of practices—institutional as well as interpersonal—that could be applied or revised and sometimes given new life. The black/white binary continues to have prescriptive purchase on the representation and treatment of other groups.Yet what the critics of the binary hold is that it never exhausted or entirely dominated the formation of racialized identities or racial practices and relationships in the United States. It is simply impossible to reduce all aspects of the racial history of the United States into this framework. Attempting to do so obscures the diverse forms of treatment, as if genocide and expulsion can be made analogous to enslavement. The latter is a form of instrumentalization; the former two are attempts at erasure. Neglecting such differences will undermine the possibility for coalition and will also reduce our capacity to comprehend fully the forms of racism that occur between and across communities of color.Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of “racial formations” and “racial projects” remains a useful orientation that allows for the comprehension of local and particular histories but also makes possible the linking of projects within larger historical frames.1 The concept of racial formations is the idea that there is a constant historical fluidity of the concepts and practices of race, while the concept of racial projects concerns the ways in which institutions govern the norms of conventional practice and social interaction to produce functional effects. The white racial projects in evidence today as the West transforms its demographic makeup are intensely specific, with their incessant focus on Islam, for example, yet connected to long histories of imagining the nation in racial and religious terms. My exhortation for more localized analyses of racial phenomena is not meant to convey the idea that any practices are irreducibly local: every idea, concept, and practice of race resonates with memories, whether fictive or material or both, and gains strength from both diachronic and synchronic connections.As Ronald Sundstrum's work here shows, the nation remains a critical venue for racial projects, not simply as an imaginary place in which racial configurations are organized but also as a material site of political institutions that manage resources and rights in accordance with complex structures of differentiated positionality. The currents of anti-immigrant xenophobia that unite Western countries today require analyses of the ways in which racial concepts play a central role but they also showcase the inadequacy of the black/white binary to explain all aspects of the current contestations and alignments.We who work in the philosophical wing of critical race theory need to learn from our comrades in law and the social sciences to be more decentralized in our theory, and thus more adept at comprehending the rapid pace of change in configurations of meanings and practices. The inaugural issue of this journal, with its excellent essays working on race from this expanded lens, bodes well for the future theoretical work to be found here. I recommend regular reading.

This paper will develop a set of concerns about a central feature of Ásta's account of social categories that she calls “conferralism.” I argue that generalist approaches to social categories such as Ásta provides are inadequate as a way of understanding the diverse formations of diverse categories, and that conferralism overemphasizes the power of top-down forces (what she calls “persons with standing”) to confer social identities. This approach then underplays the horizontal and bottom-up influences on category formation as well as the historical formation of many social identities, especially ethnicity and race. Conferralism sets aside not only physical differences that play a role in some categories but also group-related historical experiences and practices that produce the “base properties” that justify the use of social identity categories.

This article reflects on the worlds that María Lugones has made and has transformed, particularly for the doing of feminist theory. Thus this article will be more exploratory than argumentative: to explore the lessons that Lugones's work holds, especially her work on pluralist feminism, world-traveling, the uses of anger, boomerang perception, and the multiplicitousness of both our selves and our communities, for our twenty-first-century challenges. This article argues that Lugones's work addresses how to negotiate conflicts that arise within social movements of liberation, within coalitions or spaces of shared commitments.

This anthology provides the definitive theoretical sources of contemporary thinking about identity, including explorations of race, class, gender, and nationality. Explores the long and rich tradition of philosophical analysis and debate over the genesis, contours, and political effects of identity categories. Provides the definitive theoretical sources and contemporary debates by leading theorists such as selections from Hegel, Marx, Freud, DuBois, Beauvoir, Lukács, Fanon, Hall, Guha, Hobsbawm, Wittig, Butler, Halperin, R. Robertson, Said, and LaClau. Combines general and specific analyses of particular identity categories: race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, nationality. Allows for a comparative study of identities through multiple theoretical frameworks.

In his epistles, St. Paul sounded a universalism that has recently been taken up by secular philosophers who do not share his belief in Christ, but who regard his project as centrally important for contemporary political life. The Pauline project—as they see it—is the universality of truth, the conviction that what is true is true for everyone, and that the truth should be known by everyone. In this volume, eminent New Testament scholars, historians, and philosophers debate whether Paul's promise can be fulfilled. Is the proper work of reading Paul to reconstruct what he said to his audiences? Is it crucial to retrieve the sense of history from the text? What are the philosophical undercurrents of Paul's message? This scholarly dialogue ushers in a new generation of Pauline studies.

This chapter suggests an approach to decolonial feminism drawing from Latina feminist theory and practice. Rejecting an imperial feminism involves something else besides “going local”: it requires a genuine reorientation of feminist theory toward the everyday. This chapter considers how this affects the central debates about gender identities and gender liberation. How might we approach gender questions in the context of learning from, rather than teaching, lo cotidiano of the impoverished? This would counter the popular accounts of identity formation that view it as necessarily involving either authoritarianism from above, or irrationality from below. The chapter then explores the late theologian Ada-María Isasi-Díaz’s development of a mujerista theology, which adapted certain aspects of liberation theology’s “preference for the poor” to US Latinas.

When feminist movements develop intersectional analyses of the problems they are addressing, especially to include race and class as well as other dimensions of society, their analyses of sexism will shift, and their demands will as a result become more structural, systemic, and radical. This paper will focus primarily on sexual harassment, with the understanding that harassment often escalates to coercive sex. I will argue that the future of the #MeToo movement not only should become more radical, but it must in order to achieve its own stated objectives of decreasing sexual harassment, assault and violence, given the significance of their institutional support systems and the fact that the highest incidence of sexual harassment is among low-wage workers. There are important issues of philosophical methodology involved in this shift. Including race and class alongside gender from the start means that considerations of “inclusion” cannot come in only after the central concepts and paradigms are created.

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds to these essays.

This volume is an act of talking back, of talking heresy. To reclaim the term “realism,” to maintain the epistemic significance of identity, to defend any version of identity politics today is to swim upstream of strong academic currents in feminist theory, literary theory, and cultural studies. It is to risk, even to invite, a dismissal as naive, uninformed, theoretically unsophisticated. And it is a risk taken here by people already at risk in the academy, already assumed more often than not to be uninformed and undereducated precisely because of their real identities. Of course, identity is today a growth industry in the academy, across the humanities and social sciences, influencing even law and communication studies. The constitutive power of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and other forms of identity has, finally, suddenly, been recognized as a relevant aspect of almost all projects of inquiry. However, as I shall discuss in this essay, simultaneous to this academic commodification of identity is an increasing tendency to view identity as politically and metaphysically problematic, some have even said pathological. So on the one hand the theoretical relevance of identities has become visible, while on the other hand many theorists are troubled by the implications of the claim that identity makes a difference. Increasingly, then, the attachment to identity has become suspect. If identity has become suspect, identity politics has been prosecuted, tried, and sentenced to death. To espouse identity politics in the academy today risks being viewed as a member of the Flat-Earth Society. Like “essentialism,” identity politics has become the shibboleth of cultural studies and social theory, and denouncing it has become the litmus test of academic respectability, political acceptability, and even a necessity for the very right to be heard. In contrast, there has been a noticeable thaw regarding the term essentialism. What was once perfunctorily denounced at the start of every paper in feminist theory has recently been tentatively examined by a few theorists for possible signs of validity..

Apparently, Latinos are “taking over.” 1 With news that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the United States, the public airwaves are filled with concerned voices about the impact that a non-English dominant, Catholic, non-white, largely poor population will have on “American” identity. Aside from the hysteria, Latino identity poses some authentically new questions for the standard way in which minority identities are conceptualized. Are Latinos a race, an ethnicity, or some combination? What does it mean to have hybridity as the foundation of an identity, as is the case for mestizos and most Latinos? The term “Latino” signifies people from an entire continent, sub-continent, and several large islands, with diverse racial, national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic aspects to their identity. Given all this internal diversity, is “Latino” a meaningful identity at all? Latino identity is, with few exceptions, a visible identity, for all its variability, and I will argue that unless we pay close attention to the way in which Latino identity operates as a visible identity in public, social spaces, our analyses of its social meanings and political effects will be compromised. In the following three chapters, I will address three issues that Latino identity raises, issues that have political ramifications but that also require us to think about the philosophical assumptions at work behind common ideas about race and ethnicity. First, what is the relationship between Latino identity and racial categories? Second, how do Latinos fit into, and challenge, the black/white binary thinking about race that has long dominated public discourse in the U.S.? And third, what does it mean to have a mixed identity, for Latinos or for other mixed race groups? Throughout, we will have to pay close attention to the especially significant heterogeneity of this particular population. Does such diversity threaten identity or does it reveal that identity has never presumed uniformity? Only recently has the concept of pan-Latino, or generic Hispanic, identity overtaken the older identity monikers of “Cuban,” “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” etc. in significant national discourses across the United States..