Tommy J. Curry | |
---|---|
Academic background | |
Alma mater | DePaul University (MA) Southern Illinois University (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Philosophy |
Sub-discipline | Africana philosophy and Black male studies |
Institutions | Texas A&M University, University of Edinburgh |
Tommy J. Curry is a Black American scholar,author and professor of philosophy. As of 2019 [update] ,he holds a Personal Chair in Africana philosophy and Black male studies at the University of Edinburgh. [1] In 2018,he won an American Book Award for The Man-Not:Race,Class,Genre,and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. [2]
In 2004,Curry received his master's degree at DePaul University and his doctorate in philosophy from Southern Illinois University in 2009. [3] His dissertation,Cast Upon the Shadows:Essays toward the Culturalogic Turn in Critical Race Theory,explored the political philosophy of Derrick Bell using only Black authors and theorists. His dissertation remains the only known work to have done this in the discipline of philosophy. In 2008–2009,Curry was a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State University in the Africana Research Center. [4] His main research areas include critical race theory,Black male studies,and Africana philosophy. [5]
Curry is the author of The Man-Not:Race,Class,Genre,and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. [6] In academic circles,The Man-Not is regarded as controversial for its discussion of the rape of Black males during American slavery by White men and women,its depiction of White feminism as the perfection of patriarchy and American imperialism,and the text's documenting of the rape and domestic abuse Black males suffer at the hands of Black men and women in their communities. However,The Man-Not has received multiple positive reviews in Masculinity Studies,Black Studies,and Gender Studies journals. [7] In August 2018,the Before Columbus Foundation announced that The Man-Not would be awarded a 2018 American Book Award for its original contribution to American literature and thought. [8] Curry's book argues for the creation of a new field of study looking at the experiences and historical development of racialized men and boys the world over. While numerous scholars from inside and outside of academia contributed to the foundations of Black Male Studies,Rasheed (2019) indicates that Tommy J. Curry could be considered the Father of Black Male Studies. [9]
In 2018,Temple University Press made Curry editor of the Black Male Studies series which Curry has claimed is the first book series specifically dedicated to the study of Black men and boys and racialized males to ever be supported on a University Press. [10]
Much of Curry's writing is based on combining social science research with philosophy and theory. He claims that many of the theories offered to explain the lives of Black Americans are not only incorrect but rely on outdated racist modes of thinking. As a scholar of Critical Race Theory,Curry's work focuses on the theories developed by racial realists like Derrick Bell,Richard Delgado,Jean Stefancic,and Kenneth Nunn. He argues that idealist strands of critical race theory are unable to account for the brutal realities of Black death and dying,poverty,and de facto segregation.
In 2017,Curry was targeted by alt-right and neo-Nazi websites for comments he had made on a 2012 podcast,comparing revolutionary violence and armed self-defense in the United States via Jamie Foxx's lead character in the film Django Unchained . [11] [12] According to Snopes and Curry's colleagues,his statements had been taken out of context. [13] [14] [15] According to Al Jazeera ,Curry's case was part of broader pattern of White supremacists targeting U.S. college campuses following the election of Donald Trump as president. [11]
In addition to the American Book Award,Curry has received several academic awards and honors for his research. In 2017,Curry was awarded the Alain Locke Award by the Society of American Philosophy for his public intellectual research and commentaries on anti-Black racism,the death and dying of Black males,and the rape of Black men and boys in the United States. [16] His publications and national profile earned him recognition as one of the Top 15 Emerging Scholars of Color in the United States by Diverse Magazine in 2018. [17] In 2020,his second monograph,Another white Man's Burden:Josiah Royce's Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire,won the Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought from the Josiah Royce Society. [18]
Black studies or Africana studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that primarily focuses on the study of the history, culture, and politics of the peoples of the African diaspora and Africa. The field includes scholars of African-American, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino, Afro-European, Afro-Asian, African Australian, and African literature, history, politics, and religion as well as those from disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, education, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The field also uses various types of research methods.
Josiah Royce was an American Pragmatist and objective idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism. His philosophical ideas included his joining of pragmatism and idealism, his philosophy of loyalty, and his defense of absolutism.
Womanism is a term originating from the work of African American author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose, denoting a movement within feminism, primarily championed by Black feminists. Walker coined the term "womanist" in the short story Coming Apart in 1979. Her initial use of the term evolved to envelop a spectrum of issues and perspectives facing black women and others.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Afrocentricity is an academic theory and approach to scholarship that seeks to center the experiences and peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. First developed as a systematized methodology by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980, he drew inspiration from a number of African and African diaspora intellectuals including Cheikh Anta Diop, George James, Harold Cruse, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Temple Circle, also known as the Temple School of Thought, Temple Circle of Afrocentricity, or Temple School of Afrocentricity, was an early group of Africologists during the late 1980s and early 1990s that helped to further develop Afrocentricity, which is based on concepts of agency, centeredness, location, and orientation.
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.
Ed Guerrero is an American film historian and associate professor of cinema studies and Africana studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His writings explore black cinema, culture, and critical discourse. He has written extensively on black cinema, its movies, politics and culture for anthologies and journals such as Sight & Sound, FilmQuarterly, Cineaste, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Discourse. Guerrero has served on editorial and professional boards including The Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues in the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Florida.
Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher. Since 2013, he has served as the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the current chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He is particularly known for his work in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, social theory, and the philosophy of social science.
Black existentialism or Africana critical theory is a school of thought that "critiques domination and affirms the empowerment of Black people in the world". Although it shares a word with existentialism and that philosophy's concerns with existence and meaning in life, Black existentialism is "is predicated on the liberation of all Black people in the world from oppression". Black existentialism may also be seen as method, which allows one to read works by African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison in an existentialist frame.As well as the work of Civil Rights Activists such as Malcolm X and Cornel West. Lewis Gordon argues that Black existentialism is not only existential philosophy produced by Black philosophers but is also thought that addresses the intersection of problems of existence in black contexts.
Africana philosophy is the work of philosophers of African descent and others whose work deals with the subject matter of the African diaspora. The name does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition. Rather, Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing. Africana philosophy is a part of and developed within the field of Africana studies.
"Africana womanism" is a term coined in the late 1980s by Clenora Hudson-Weems, intended as an ideology applicable to all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture and Afrocentrism and focuses on the experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women of the African diaspora. It distinguishes itself from feminism, or Alice Walker's womanism. Africana womanism pays more attention to and focuses more on the realities and the injustices in society in regard to race.
The white savior is a cinematic trope in which a white central character rescues non-white characters from unfortunate circumstances. This recurs in an array of genres in American cinema, wherein a white protagonist is portrayed as a messianic figure who often gains some insight or introspection in the course of rescuing non-white characters from their plight.
George Dewey Yancy is an American philosopher who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is a distinguished Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college's highest honors. In 2019–20, he was the University of Pennsylvania's Inaugural Provost's Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow. He is the editor for Lexington Books' "Philosophy of Race" book series. He is known for his work in critical whiteness studies, critical philosophy of race, critical phenomenology, and African American philosophy, and has written, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books. In his capacity as an academic scholar and a public intellectual, he has published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites.
Matthew Windust Hughey is an American sociologist known for his work on race and racism. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he is also an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Institute; American Studies Program; Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, & Policy; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative, and; graduate certificate program in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, & Politics. His work has included studying whiteness, race and media, race and politics, racism and racial assumptions within genetic and genomic science, and racism and racial identity in white and black American fraternities and sororities.
C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".
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