Transatlantic Resonances
as a Site of Philosophical Inquiry

With this roundtable, we conclude the lecture series “Transatlantic Resonances: Philosophical Entanglements between Africa and the Americas.”

Over the past three months, seventeen lectures have explored the transatlantic space as a site where philosophy emerges not as a singular, canonical tradition, but as a plural and contested field of knowledge production unfolding across continents, languages, media, and historical conditions. The roundtable takes up the guiding questions and central insights of the series and asks what it means – historically, methodologically, and systematically – to treat transatlantic resonances themselves as a site of philosophical inquiry.

A first thread running through the series concerns the circulation and translation of concepts. Notions such as ubuntu, Nepantla, Amefricanity, and decolonization emerged from specific linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts, yet have travelled – often under colonial and postcolonial conditions – into global philosophical and political discourses.

The lectures repeatedly raised the question of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of such resemantizations: When does the global uptake of situated concepts open new philosophical horizons, and when does it distort or appropriate the traditions from which they emerge? The roundtable will revisit this tension between situated concepts and global perspectives, and ask what structural pressures shape the conditions under which non-Western concepts are invited to circulate.

A second thread concerns the epistemologies of the African diaspora forged in the crucible of slavery, colonialism, resistance, and resilience. From Lélia Gonzalez’s Amefricanity and the living philosophy of the quilombos, through the longue durée of Négritude and the epistemic continuities linking the Gulf of Benin and Salvador de Bahia, to the Black Atlantic and the double reception of Frantz Fanon at home and abroad, the series traced how memory, corporeality, spirituality, music, and oral traditions constitute genuine modes of philosophical knowledge production. This raises fundamental methodological questions for the history of philosophy: How can philosophical historiography do justice to oral archives, embodied practices, and knowledge that resists canonical textual forms?

A third thread brought Indigenous philosophies and ecological thought into focus. The lectures on Nahua tlamatiliztli, cosmopolitical encounters in the Americas and beyond, and oceanic and liquid ecologies showed how Indigenous ontologies of land, territory, and relationality challenge modernity’s materialist and rationalist paradigms – and how these philosophical questions are inseparable from concrete struggles over land rights, extractivism, and ecological stability.

Finally, the series highlighted traditions of liberation and feminist genealogies that connect the shores of the Atlantic and reach beyond them: Liberation Theology and Philosophy in Latin America, African liberation philosophy between utopia and dystopia, the multidirectional migration of emancipatory ideas exemplified by Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and feminist countermappings from Latin America, Africa, and their diasporas that redraw the maps of freedom and agency.

The roundtable brings these threads together to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of philosophy as an inclusive, intercontinental, or global practice of knowledge production. What does the metaphor of “resonance” offer as a philosophical method – as opposed to models of influence, transfer, or comparison? What have we learned about the interconnections, but also the persistent tensions and asymmetries, that shape philosophy as an intercultural project between Africa and the Americas today? And what tasks emerge from this for a history and practice of philosophizing in a globalized world?

Speakers of the lecture series, fellows, and members of the GloPhi research group will discuss these questions together with the audience. Everyone is warmly invited to join the conversation.

More Information:

• Lecture Series “Transatlantic Resonances: Philosophical Entanglements between Africa and the Americas”
• Livestream of the Roundtable

Presenters

Livestream