Afro-Caribbean Philosophy gained academic recognition in the late 1980s as an integral part of the acceptance of the wider field of Africana philosophy, which brought together the philosophical traditions of Africans, African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. Although sharing a pre-colonial African heritage and a deep concern with issues of race, the colonial and postcolonial periods in the histories of these three philosophical traditions brought significant divergences between them.

Among the distinguishing features of Afro-Caribbean philosophy are its schools of Afro-Christian philosophy, historicism, poeticism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and their relations with philosophies of race, colonial domination, science and rationalism. The Afro-Caribbean traditions of existential and transcendental thinking are to be found primarily in inter-relations between poeticist thinkers like Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter Edouard Glissant, Lewis Gordon and Clevis Headley, along with the distinct heritage of pre-colonial African theories of the human self, like those of the Yoruba, the Dogon or the Adinkra.

As phenomenology focuses on the self-constituting (existential) and knowledge-constituting activities of consciousness, a solid grasp of the distinct theories of the self, which inform Afro-Caribbean philosophy are vital for an understanding of the distinctness of Afro-Caribbean phenomenology. Thus, in addition to discussing briefly the historicist and poeticist schools, professor Henry will take up in greater the details the Adinkra theory of the self that has profoundly influenced the development of Afro-Caribbean phenomenology.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.