Ato Sekyi-Otu

Last updated
Ato Sekyi-Otu
Born
Daniel Sackey Walker

1941 (age 8182)
NationalityGhanaian
EducationA.B. in Government, PhD in Political Philosophy
Alma mater Harvard, University of Toronto
Occupation(s)Political philosopher, Emeritus Professor

Ato Sekyi-Otu is a Ghanaian political philosopher. He was born at Saltpond, Ghana in 1941 and until 1971 was known as Daniel Sackey Walker. He was educated at Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast, where he was Head Prefect in 1960-61 and completed his Cambridge Higher School Certificate in 1961 with distinctions in Greek and Latin. He went to Harvard and received an A.B. in Government in 1966. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Toronto where he worked with the renowned Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson and received his PhD in 1971.

Contents

Sekyi-Otu taught in the Department of Social Science and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto until he retired in 2006 as Emeritus Professor. He is best known for his work on Frantz Fanon and Ayi Kwei Armah. In 1996 he wrote an acknowledged classic in the literature on Fanon entitled "Fanon's Dialectic of Experience" published by Harvard University Press. His most recent book is "Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays published by Routledge in 2018, which won the 2019 Caribbean Philosophical Association Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award.

Sekyi-Otu's work has been widely taken up in South Africa [1] and in the Caribbean.

Published works

Online articles by Ato Sekyi-Otu

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frantz Fanon</span> French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher (1925–1961)

Frantz Omar Fanon was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique. His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frankfurt School</span> School of social theory and critical philosophy

The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies, such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fredric Jameson</span> American academic and literary critic (born 1934)

Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).

<i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> 1961 book by Frantz Fanon

The Wretched of the Earth is a 1961 book by the philosopher Frantz Fanon, in which the author provides a psychoanalysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation, and discusses the broader social, cultural, and political implications of establishing a social movement for the decolonization of a person and of a people. The French-language title derives from the opening lyrics of "The Internationale".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homi K. Bhabha</span> Indian critical theorist (born 1949)

Homi Kharshedji Bhabha is an Indian-British scholar and critical theorist. He is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies, and has developed a number of the field's neologisms and key concepts, such as hybridity, mimicry, difference, and ambivalence. Such terms describe ways in which colonised people have resisted the power of the coloniser, according to Bhabha's theory. In 2012, he received the Padma Bhushan award in the field of literature and education from the Indian government. He is married to attorney and Harvard lecturer Jacqueline Bhabha, and they have three children.

Négritude is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s, aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude gathers writers such as sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Abdoulaye Sadji, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, racism and Eurocentrism. They promoted African culture within a framework of persistent Franco-African ties. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting one's self and identity, and ideas of home, home-going and belonging.

Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.

Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.

Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.

Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. It has a rich history within continental philosophy, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and running since through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.

Elias Kifon Bongmba is a Cameroonian-American theologian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lord–bondsman dialectic</span> Passage of book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The lord–bondsman dialectic is a famous passage in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is widely considered a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and it has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers.

<i>Black Skin, White Masks</i> 1952 book by Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, with Fanon sharing his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.

The HonourableSylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.

Robert L. Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is known as a reader of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and for his work on the concept of race. He has also written on the history of philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Jay</span> American historian and professor

Martin Evan Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.

Nigel Gibson is a British activist, a scholar specialising in philosophy and author whose work has focussed, in particular, on Frantz Fanon. Edward Said described Gibson's work as "rigorous and subtle". He has been described as a leading figure in Fanon scholarship.

Robert Warburton Cox was a Canadian scholar of political science and a former United Nations officer. He was cited as one of the intellectual leaders, along with Susan Strange, of the British School of International Political Economy and was still active as a scholar after his formal retirement, writing and giving occasional lectures. He was professor emeritus of political science and social and political thought at York University.

<i>Toward the African Revolution</i> Collection of essays written by Frantz Fanon

Toward the African Revolution is a collection of essays written by Frantz Fanon, which was published in 1964, after Fanon's death. The essays in the book were written from 1952 to 1961, between the publication of his two most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon expands on the themes of colonization, racism, decolonization, African unity, and the Algerian Revolution in the essays, most of which come from his time writing for El Moudjahid, the official newspaper of the FLN.

John O'Neill (1933-2022) was a Canadian sociologist, phenomenologist, and social theorist known for his writings on critical social theory, philosophy, political economy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and mass culture. O’Neill was the author, editor, and translator of over 30 books and hundreds of articles, many of which have been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. O’Neill's work focuses on the notion of corporeal knowledge and embodiment as mediated by familial relationships and social welfare. O’Neill was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at York University (Emeritus), where he also co-founded the Programme in Social and Political Thought in 1972.

References