In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture

Introduction

Appiah, then teaching at Harvard, published these essays in 1992; several had appeared earlier in journals. The opening chapters trace how nineteenth-century Pan-Africanists such as Alexander Crummell, and later Du Bois, built the unity of Africa on the idea of race. Developing his 1985 essay “The Uncompleted Argument”, Appiah argues that Du Bois’s sociohistorical concept of race still depends on the biological one it was meant to replace: “The truth is that there are no races.” Further chapters criticise ethnophilosophy and literary nativism, ask whether the “post” in postmodernism is the “post” in postcolonial, and describe African identities as historically made rather than given. The epilogue tells of the dispute over the funeral of his father, Joe Appiah, in Kumasi in 1990 between his family and his father’s matrilineal clan.

Connections

Builds on

• African Philosophy: Myth and Reality1976 · Paulin Hountondji

Criticizes

• Bantu Philosophy1945 · Placide Tempels

More works by Kwame Anthony Appiah

• 2006Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers