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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity

Jones, Donna

Paperback

Series: New Directions in Critical Theory, Book 45

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGLBTQIA Studies

ISBN10: 0231145497
ISBN13: 9780231145497
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Dec 27 2011
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as mechanical, and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse.

Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.

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