Colloquium: Adebayo Ogungbure, Texas A&M University
Biography:
Adebayo Ogungbure is a Ph.D. candidate and a Lechner scholar in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His research interests include African, Africana/Black Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Black Male Studies, Social Epistemology, Colonialism, Empire and Transatlantic Migration and the intersections between Philosophy and Ethnic Literatures. His research on Africana Sci-fi, “Unbounding the Black Imago: How the Representation of Blackness in Superhero Fiction Propagates Negative Models of Anti-Racist Practice” was awarded the 2019 Cushing-Glasscock Graduate Humanities Research Award. He was also a recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Teaching, at Texas A&M University. His publications appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Black Studies, International Journal of Humanities, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, and the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. He currently serves as a Graduate Teaching Fellow/Consultant for the Center for Teaching Excellence at Texas A&M University.
BLACK EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE DERELICTICAL CRISIS OF AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY:
From its inception in the early 70s, formalized discourse in Africana philosophical scholarship in the United States has been plagued by a derelictical crisis—a crisis of knowledge. The first dimension of this crisis stems from the systems of knowledge generated within philosophical scholarship that does not primarily center the ideas and thought systems produced by black thinkers as the groundwork for representing blackness or cataloguing the black experience. The second concerns the tendency to project negative epistemic ascriptions to black subjects in current scholarship in social epistemology. This work engages with this problematic by imagining a new sub-disciplinary focus within Africana philosophy, namely “Black Epistemology,” which offers a positive view of blackness in relation to the discourse on knowledge. The black epistemological perspective discussed in this work explores the connections between ascriptions of agency and epistemic power in relation to how the knowing subject is characterized as the ground for shaping reality, truth and the world as we know it.