Norman Ajari is a French-American philosopher and activist, a board member of the Frantz-Fanon Foundation, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. In his essay La Dignité ou la mort: éthique et politique de la race (La Découverte), Norman Ajari implacably analyses the European philosophic tradition, and he connects it with repressed histories in radical black thought, slave rebellions, the death of subordinate groups, the revolutionary use of Christianity in North and South America.
Je me suis attaché dans cette étude à toucher la misère du Noir. Tactilement et affectivement. Je n’ai pas voulu être objectif. D’ailleurs, c’est faux : il ne m’a pas été possible d’être objectif. (Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952)
Norman Ajari will hold a public meeting at WEGIL entitled Black Dignity and Black Pessimism focused on the history of black political thought and how it never pictures the black community in pessimistic terms but often emphasises the ability of white communities to overcome the hostility they feel. What if these progressive ideals and reformist political agendas were nothing but an evolved and adapted version of systemic racism?
The global movement Black Lives Matter has proved that racial submission and de-humanization have permanently characterised Western civilizations. Pessimism is not to be considered as paralysing fatalism, instead it is the precondition for reaffirming black dignity.
supported by Ambasciata degli Stati Uniti d’America in Italia
in collaboration with Modulo Arti | Master Studi e Politiche di Genere Roma Tre
