Black Narricide and Ontological Sovereignty: The Mischaracterization of American Slavery in Philosophy

Abstract

The Africana philosophy reliance on a few mainstream theorists of slavery, who constitute the school of philosophical thought, diminishes the philosophical importance of the theories of slavery and freedom developed by early Black thinkers. Since the first African slaves landed in Virginia in 1619, early Black thinkers have used slave narratives to chronicle how enslaved Africans resisted slavery and its everyday genocidal logics. By providing intellectual critique of slavery as a barbaric genocidal logic of Western culture, writings by enslaved Africans and freedmen have provided the most systematic deconstruction of western moral and political philosophy rooted in slavery as a philosophical concept. While slave narratives have been studied in Africana philosophy, Africana philosophers draw from mainstream philosophical traditions that mischaracterize and justify African slavery, to advance entrenched concepts of ethics, morality, idealism, skepticism, and phenomenology as revered paradigms in the western canon. By following this trajectory, Africana philosophers fail to distinctly develop genealogies within Africana philosophy of how early Black thinkers historicized African slavery differently from Western thinkers, specifically, how enslaved Africans confronted domestication of slaves and how they fought for the abolishment of slavery. This dissertation aims to demonstrate how slave narratives offer both historical and philosophical accounts of how Black thinkers deconstructed Western theories of slavery and the evolution of theories of race that supplanted the theories of slavery in America from the 17th to the 19th century. Through the lens of Black Narricide, I argue that since the seventeenth century Black thinkers developed a unique genre of Black philosophical discourse that deconstructed the 18th and 19th century theories of slavery rooted in theology, natural law, positive law, natural history, and ethnology. The dissertation shows how the works of most of the Black thinkers have been overlooked by Africana philosophers, and mischaracterized by mainstream scholars in their effort to justify slavery.