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Biographical note
Mabogo Percy More is a former professor of philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He is the author of many journal articles and his latest book is Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation (HSRC Press, 2017). He was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015.The title of the autobiography captures the intentions of the memoir: in reading these reflections, the non-black audience is given a glimpse of what it is like for the black person to be in philosophy, embodied as a black person and possessing a different epistemology. Simply put, More's memoir is about the negotiation that black scholars have to make in order so "survive" in the academy. … Overall, Looking Through Philosophy in Black reads as an ode, an ode to the black bodies that wish to continue with their careers in philosophy.
Journal of World Philosophies
Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a compelling story of one man’s struggle for philosophy against the odds, willed by the author’s determination to think freedom under the heel of apartheid South Africa. Buoyed by the Black Consciousness Movement—the author was a classmate of the murdered student leader Abram Onkgopotse Tiro—Mabogo Percy More became a philosopher. Recognized today as one of the most important interlocutors of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness philosophy, More challenges us to reflect on “Being-Black-in-an-Anti-Black-World”—the ontological impossibility of being Black and being a philosopher—as he engages Africana philosophies born of struggle. Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a remarkable and engaging story of life and the human condition. Doggedly resisting philosophy’s epistemic apartheid, its racism and its colored-blindness, More asks us to contest the absurd mediocrity, downright incompetency and paucity of thinking in higher education and by extension in civil society.
- Nigel C. Gibson, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College,
Looking Through Philosophy in Black: Memoirs is not only a chronicler and definer, it is a courageous narrative that takes philosophy head-on from the locus of blackness. Mabogo P. More makes a unique and extraordinary contribution to self-writing with a lucid craft that grapples with the question of being in the world.
- Tendayi Sithole,
A compelling account of a life lived in fidelity to the urgency of freedom, More’s autobiography is marked by a profound and sustained commitment, against the odds, to philosophy as a practice of freedom. This account of the life of the mind, made against the dead weight of racism, moves from the outskirts of Johannesburg to the world via jazz, philosophy and struggle.
- Richard Pithouse, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand,
Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a tour de force, a work that delivers. It is a powerful existential reflection on African and Africana philosophy, and at the same time a highly revealing account of what it means to be a Black philosopher today.
- Paget Henry, professor of Africana studies and sociology, Brown University,
This series, published in partnership with the Caribbean Philosophical Association, turns the lens on the unfolding nature and potential future shape of the globe by taking concepts and ideas that while originating out of very specific contexts share features that lend them transnational utility. Works in the series engage with figures including Frantz Fanon, CLR James, Paulo Freire, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Walter Rodney, and concepts such as coloniality, creolization, decoloniality, double consciousness and "la facultad".
Series Editors: Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon