Wilson Kwamogi Okello 
On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human [EPUB ebook] 
Toward Black Specificity in Higher Education

In ‘No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues, ‘ Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter critiques the social and human sciences for perpetuating social hierarchies, particularly through the Western humanist framing of ‘Man’ as the universal representation of humanity. Human development theories revolve around this concept, necessitating acquiescence to the category Man to claim humanity. But Blackness complicates and unsettles these terms in ways the fields of higher education and educational research are in many ways just beginning to confront.




On Blackness, Liveliness, and What It Means to Be Human extends Wynter’s critique to human development and academic knowledge production, arguing that Black specificity can create new possibilities for Black being. Wilson Kwamogi Okello closely examines holistic development theory, aiming not to reform but to reimagine the ‘self’ it presupposes. Taking what he describes as a multimodal and multisensory approach, Okello engages a chorus of writers, thinkers, and cultural workers—Baldwin, Bambara, Brand, Hartman, Lorde, Sharpe, Spillers, Wilderson, and more—to reframe Blackness as a social, political, and historical matrix, going beyond the study of Black experiences, biology, or culture. Punctuated throughout by stunning images from artist Mikael Owunna’s ‘Infinite Essence’ series, the book proposes and enacts a methodological attunement to Blackness that can guide theory, policy, and practice toward an alternative praxis for the benefit of Black living.

Tabela de Conteúdo

Introduction: Preliminary Vocabulary toward Black Specificity




Part I: On What It Means to Be Human



1. Loving Black Flesh in Higher Education



2. Breathing, Being, and Human Development



3. ‘Look a Negro!’ Explicating Self-Definition




Part II: Black Ontological Possibility: The Praxes of Self-Definition



4. Invention: Narrating the Impossibility of Black Ontology



5. Toward an Ontology of Black Intimacy



6. Presence: Black Ontology as Image-Making and Imagination amid the ‘Uninhabitable’



7. ‘Make it intact’: Toward Ethical Regard in Higher Education




Part III: Carcerality and the Radical Imagination of Self-Definition



8. On the Possibility of Black Thought to Guide Educational Policy and Practice



9. ‘I can’t be a pessimist’: Carcerality, Black Study, and Staging Black Futures



Gratitude

Notes

References

Index

Sobre o autor

Wilson Kwamogi Okello is Assistant Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University.