Olúfémi Táíwò, Cornell University
Professor
Ithaca, New York
ot48@cornell.edu
Office:
(607) 254-8332
Expert In
Bio/Research
I aim to expand the African reach in philosophy and, simultaneously, to indigenize the discipline and make it more relevant to Africa and African students. My scholarly activities aim to contribute to the creation, at the intellectual level, of the categories that will enable all who share simil...
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Bio/Research
I aim to expand the African reach in philosophy and, simultaneously, to indigenize the discipline and make it more relevant to Africa and African students. My scholarly activities aim to contribute to the creation, at the intellectual level, of the categories that will enable all who share similar experiences to indigenize the alien idioms of our philosophical training and, simultaneously, globalize the historical experience of African peoples and their modes of discourse towards the emergence of authentic African voices in the ongoing polylogue among the world’s peoples.My book, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) was a joint winner of the Frantz Fanon Book Award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015.My works have been translated into French, Italian, German, and Chinese.Teaching InterestsMy pedagogy has always been guided by the need to impress on my students the fact that philosophy, as a discipline and a vocation, has never been univocal or unilingual. Given that the African inflections have always been missing or unheralded in philosophy’s discourses and practices, it has always been crucial to me to inculcate in my students an appreciation of the multidimensionality and complexity of philosophy and the fact that it has always spoken in multiple registers. I strive to enable students acquire a critical awareness of the world that they inhabit, be active participants in whatever sphere of life they find themselves and, finally, be suspicious of cant and ideas or patterns of thought for which they could not generate their own reasons to embrace. Every class I teach aims to produce educated students who are aware of the world, expansively conceived; their place in it, both as individuals and as members of whatever communities they belong to; and the connection between them, their location, and the world.In Africana, I seek to train students who become enthusiastic but critical scholars and\or inheritors of the philosophical traditions domiciled in the global African world especially those regarding social and political philosophy. I hope to help train and mentor graduates who would have as part of their academic credentials the capacity to change the traditional disciplines from within such that those disciplines begin to reflect more truly the diversity of the human experience. Undergraduate courses: I have taught classes ranging from introduction to African Philosophy to Perspectives on Aid and Africa, Critical Race Theory, the Arab-African Spring, Introduction to Africana Studies and Freshman Seminar on Culture, Society and Globalization.Graduate Courses: I hope to attract students who are eager to make discoveries in the intellectual traditions domiciled in the global African world in all historical periods from most disciplinary angles in the humanities and social sciences. More specifically, I will be teaching classes in African Political Thought, Major Figures in Global African Intellectual History, e.g., Du Bois, Rodney, Senghor, Ransome-Kuti, Horton, Nkrumah, etc.), African Philosophy, Modernity and Colonialism, Liberalism and Empire, and Politics of the Judiciary in Africa.
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