Enrique Dussel and Alain Locke: A Project in Black Histories and Inter-American Philosophy of Liberation

In this paper, I explore several key concepts in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation in order to situate Alain Locke’s general New Negro project (Locke’s work and conceit from the Renaissance-era 20s and up through the end of his life) as an example of such philosophy of liberation in black American thought and history. Foundational to this paper is the idea that history itself has been marginalized, where not simply erased, especially in the case of white Western imperialism, and that investigating history requires something of a liberatory praxis for the liberation of oppressed peoples. Also foundational to this paper is the intuition that Locke is not taken seriously enough as a revolutionary thinker in liberation-motivated philosophic thought, despite being a professional philosopher and a critical pragmatist in the American tradition. To remedy this, I use Dussel’s systematic requirements for a philosophy of liberation to argue that Locke is, and ought to be considered, a revolutionary thinker in the black American tradition. Using Dussel has the added bonus of bringing the Americas together to understand what might be possible in something like inter-American decolonial philosophy.