Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought

Africana thought, as I will be using it in this book, refers to an area of thought that focuses on theoretical questions raised by struggles over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid and creolized forms in Europe, North America, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Africana thought also refers to the set of questions raised by the historical project of conquest and colonization that has emerged since 1492 and the subsequent struggles for emancipation that continue to this day. These latter questions and struggles have been characterized by Enrique Dussel, the Latin American philosopher, historian, and theologian, as those that reflect modernity’s “underside.”