Grant Farred - Böcker

A timely exploration of and intervention into the South African ideological landscape from the perspective of the colored community. In Midfielders Moment, Grant Farred explores the ways in which political fissures are being articulated in the new South Africa. By examining the politics, literature, and culture of an historically disenfranchised c

This book attempts to address crucial political and cultural issues in contemporary South Africa: the experience of being coloured, the occupation of the racial interstices, and the condition of hybridity in a society marked by a penchant for polarity.

Whom does society consider an intellectual and on what grounds? Antonio Gramsci’s democratic vision of intelligence famously suggested that “all men are intellectuals,” yet within academic circles and among the general public, intellectuals continue to be defined by narrow, elite criteria. In this study of four celebrated citizens of the African diaspora-American boxer Muhammad Ali, West Indian Marxist critic C. L. R. James, British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, and Jamaican musician Bob Marley-Grant Farred develops a new category of engaged thinker: the vernacular intellectual. Extending Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual, Farred conceives of vernacular intellectuals as individuals who challenge social injustice from inside and outside traditional academic or political spheres. Muhammad Ali, for example, is celebrated as much for his dazzling verbal skills and courageous political stands as for his pugilistic talents; Bob Marley’s messages of liberation are as central to his popularity as his lyrical and melodic sophistication. Neither man is described as an intellectual, yet both perform crucial intellectual functions: shaping how people see the world, oppose hegemony, and understand their own history. In contrast, the careers of C. L. R. James and Stuart Hall reflect a dynamic blend of the traditional and the vernacular. Conventionally trained and situated,  James and Hall examine racism, history, and the lasting impact of colonialism in ways that draw on both established scholarship and more popular cultural experiences.Challenging existing paradigms, What’s My Name offers an expansive and inclusive vision of intellectual activity that is as valid and meaningful in the boxing ring, the press conference, and the concert hall as in academia.

In Martin Heidegger Saved My Life, Grant Farred combines autobiography with philosophical rumination to offer this unusual meditation on American racism. In the fall of 2013 while raking leaves outside his home, Farred experienced a racist encounter: a white woman stopped to ask him, “Would you like another job?” Farred responded, “Only if you can match my Cornell faculty salary.” The moment, however, stuck with him. The black man had gravitated to, of all people, Martin Heidegger, specifically Heidegger’s pronouncement, “Only when man speaks, does he think-and not the other way around,” in order to unpack this encounter. In this essay, Farred grapples with why it is that Heidegger-well known as a Nazi-resonates so deeply with him during this encounter instead of other, more predictable figures such as Malcolm X, W. E. B. DuBois, or Frantz Fanon.Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

In the twenty-first century, the idea of race in sports is rapidly changing. The National Basketball Association, for instance, was recently home to a new kind of racial conflict. After a recent playoff loss, Houston head coach, Jeff Van Gundy alleged that Yao Ming, his Chinese star center, was the victim of phantom calls, or refereeing decisions that may have been ethnically biased. Grant Farred here shows how this incident can be seen as a pivotal moment in the globalization of the NBA. With some forty percent of its players coming from foreign nations, the idea of race in the NBA has become increasingly multifaceted. Farred explains how allegations of phantom calls, such as Van Gundy's challenge the fiction that America is a post-racial society and compel us to think in new ways about the nexus of race and racism in America.

The Burden of Over-representation artfully explores three curious racial moments in sport: Jackie Robinson’s expletive at a Dodgers spring training game; the transformation of a formality into an event at the end of the 1995 rugby World Cup in South Africa; and a spectral moment at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Grant Farred examines the connotations at play in these moments through the lenses of race, politics, memory, inheritance and conciliation, deploying a surprising cast of figures in Western thought, ranging from Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to Judith Butler, William Shakespeare, and Jesus-the-Christ. Farred makes connection and creates meaning through the forces at play and the representational burdens of team, country and race.Farred considers Robinson’s profane comments at black Dodgers fans, a post-match exchange of “thank yous” on the rugby pitch between white South African captain FranÇois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela, and being “haunted” by the ghost of Derrida on the occasion of the first FIFA World Cup on African soil. In doing so, The Burden of Over-representation provides a passionate, insightful analysis of the social, political, racial, and cultural consequences of conciliation at key sporting events.

The Burden of Over-representation artfully explores three curious racial moments in sport: Jackie Robinson’s expletive at a Dodgers spring training game; the transformation of a formality into an event at the end of the 1995 rugby World Cup in South Africa; and a spectral moment at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Grant Farred examines the connotations at play in these moments through the lenses of race, politics, memory, inheritance and conciliation, deploying a surprising cast of figures in Western thought, ranging from Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to Judith Butler, William Shakespeare, and Jesus-the-Christ. Farred makes connection and creates meaning through the forces at play and the representational burdens of team, country and race.Farred considers Robinson’s profane comments at black Dodgers fans, a post-match exchange of “thank yous” on the rugby pitch between white South African captain FranÇois Pienaar and Nelson Mandela, and being “haunted” by the ghost of Derrida on the occasion of the first FIFA World Cup on African soil. In doing so, The Burden of Over-representation provides a passionate, insightful analysis of the social, political, racial, and cultural consequences of conciliation at key sporting events.

As Africana Studies celebrates its fiftieth anniversary throughout the United States, this invigor ating collection presents possibilities for the future of the discipline’s theoretical paths. The essays in Africana Studies focus on philosophy, science, and technology; poetry, literature, and music; the crisis of the state; issues of colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism; and the ever-expanding diaspora. The editor and contributors to this volume open exciting avenues for new narratives, philosophies, vision, and scale in this critical field of study-formed during the 1960s around issues of racial injustice in America-to show what Africana Studies is already in the process of becoming.Africana Studies recognizes how the discipline has been shaped, changing over the decades as scholars have opened new modes of theoretical engagement such as addressing issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and cultural studies. The essays debate and (re)consider black and diasporic life to sustain, provoke, and cultivate Africana Studies as a singular yet polyvalent mode of thinking.Contributors: Akin Adeṣọkan, John E. Drabinski, Zeyad El Nabolsy, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Kasareka Kavwahirehi, Gregory Pardlo, Radwa Saad, Sarah Then Bergh, and the editor

As Africana Studies celebrates its fiftieth anniversary throughout the United States, this invigor ating collection presents possibilities for the future of the discipline’s theoretical paths. The essays in Africana Studies focus on philosophy, science, and technology; poetry, literature, and music; the crisis of the state; issues of colonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism; and the ever-expanding diaspora. The editor and contributors to this volume open exciting avenues for new narratives, philosophies, vision, and scale in this critical field of study-formed during the 1960s around issues of racial injustice in America-to show what Africana Studies is already in the process of becoming.Africana Studies recognizes how the discipline has been shaped, changing over the decades as scholars have opened new modes of theoretical engagement such as addressing issues of gender and sexuality, politics, and cultural studies. The essays debate and (re)consider black and diasporic life to sustain, provoke, and cultivate Africana Studies as a singular yet polyvalent mode of thinking.Contributors: Akin Adeṣọkan, John E. Drabinski, Zeyad El Nabolsy, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Kasareka Kavwahirehi, Gregory Pardlo, Radwa Saad, Sarah Then Bergh, and the editor

Apartheid, ironically, provided Grant Farred with the optimal conditions for thinking. He describes South Africa’s apartheid regime as an intellectual force that, “Made thinking apartheid, more than anything else, an absolute necessity.”  The Perversity of Gratitude is a provocative book in which Farred reflects on an upbringing resisting apartheid. Although he is still inclined to struggle viscerally against apartheid, he acknowledges, “It is me.”Unsentimental about his education, Farred’s critique recognizes the impact of four exceptional teachers-all engaging pedagogical figures who cultivated a great sense of possibility in how thinking could be learned through a disenfranchised South African education.The Perversity of Gratitude brings to bear the work of influential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The book tackles broad philosophical concepts-transgression, withdrawal, and the dialectic. This leads to the creation of a new concept, “the diaspora-in-place,” which Farred explains, “is having left a place before one physically removes oneself from this place.”Farred’s apartheid education in South Africa instilled in him a lifelong commitment to learning thinking. “And for that I am grateful,” Farred writes in The Perversity of Gratitude. His autopoiesis is sure to provoke and inspire readers.

Apartheid, ironically, provided Grant Farred with the optimal conditions for thinking. He describes South Africa’s apartheid regime as an intellectual force that, “Made thinking apartheid, more than anything else, an absolute necessity.”  The Perversity of Gratitude is a provocative book in which Farred reflects on an upbringing resisting apartheid. Although he is still inclined to struggle viscerally against apartheid, he acknowledges, “It is me.”Unsentimental about his education, Farred’s critique recognizes the impact of four exceptional teachers-all engaging pedagogical figures who cultivated a great sense of possibility in how thinking could be learned through a disenfranchised South African education.The Perversity of Gratitude brings to bear the work of influential philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The book tackles broad philosophical concepts-transgression, withdrawal, and the dialectic. This leads to the creation of a new concept, “the diaspora-in-place,” which Farred explains, “is having left a place before one physically removes oneself from this place.”Farred’s apartheid education in South Africa instilled in him a lifelong commitment to learning thinking. “And for that I am grateful,” Farred writes in The Perversity of Gratitude. His autopoiesis is sure to provoke and inspire readers.

Grant Farred has long had a passionate connection with sports. In A Sports Odyssey, he weaves together an account of his own sports fandom that is profoundly personal and universal.As readers of his Long Distance Love know, Grant Farred has been a supporter of the English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club, for decades. His fandom for that team launched an unexpected connection with a world beyond the limits of the apartheid state of his upbringing in South Africa. However, A Sports Odyssey shows that as Farred’s fervor for Liverpool ended, he developed a new set of sports attachments in Ithaca, New York: to his son’s youth basketball career, to the men’s basketball team at Cornell University and its coach, and even to professional teams like the New York Knicks. Farred’s bemusement at finding himself a sports parent, a New Yorker, and a company man, only underline the sincerity of his affections.In A Sports Odyssey, Farred writes elegantly and eloquently about how sports and sports fandom create a sense of belonging, but also loss. This is a heartfelt examination of how we find “home” in who and what we love. In the series Sporting

Grant Farred has long had a passionate connection with sports. In A Sports Odyssey, he weaves together an account of his own sports fandom that is profoundly personal and universal.As readers of his Long Distance Love know, Grant Farred has been a supporter of the English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club, for decades. His fandom for that team launched an unexpected connection with a world beyond the limits of the apartheid state of his upbringing in South Africa. However, A Sports Odyssey shows that as Farred’s fervor for Liverpool ended, he developed a new set of sports attachments in Ithaca, New York: to his son’s youth basketball career, to the men’s basketball team at Cornell University and its coach, and even to professional teams like the New York Knicks. Farred’s bemusement at finding himself a sports parent, a New Yorker, and a company man, only underline the sincerity of his affections.In A Sports Odyssey, Farred writes elegantly and eloquently about how sports and sports fandom create a sense of belonging, but also loss. This is a heartfelt examination of how we find “home” in who and what we love. In the series Sporting

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of relation and Heideggerian ontology, Farred outlines how various relationships-the significantly different relationships Messi has with his club team FC Barcelona and the Argentine national team; Farred's shifting modes of relation as he moved between his South African team and his Princeton graduate student team; and Suarez's deep bond with Uruguay's national team coach Oscar Tabarez-demonstrate the ways the politics of relation both exist within and transcend sports. Farred demonstrates that approaching sports philosophically offers particularly insightful means of understanding the nature of being in the world, thereby opening new paths for exploring how the self is constituted in its relation to the other.

In Entre Nous Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of relation and Heideggerian ontology, Farred outlines how various relationships-the significantly different relationships Messi has with his club team FC Barcelona and the Argentine national team; Farred's shifting modes of relation as he moved between his South African team and his Princeton graduate student team; and Suarez's deep bond with Uruguay's national team coach Oscar Tabarez-demonstrate the ways the politics of relation both exist within and transcend sports. Farred demonstrates that approaching sports philosophically offers particularly insightful means of understanding the nature of being in the world, thereby opening new paths for exploring how the self is constituted in its relation to the other.

Derrida and Africa takes up Jacques Derrida as a figure of thought in relation to Africa, with a focus on Derrida’s writings specifically on Africa, which were influenced in part by his childhood in El Biar. From chapters that take up Derrida as Mother to contemplations on how to situate Derrida in relation to other African philosophers, from essays that connect deconstruction and diaspora to a chapter that engages the ways in which Derrida—especially in a text such as Monolingualism of the Other: or, the Prosthesis of Origin—is haunted by place to a chapter that locates Derrida firmly in postapartheid South Africa, Derrida in/and Africa is the insistent line of inquiry. Edited by Grant Farred, this collection asks: What is Derrida to Africa?, What is Africa to Derrida?, and What is this specter called Africa that haunts Derrida?

Derrida and Africa takes up Jacques Derrida as a figure of thought in relation to Africa, with a focus on Derrida’s writings specifically on Africa, which were influenced in part by his childhood in El Biar. From chapters that take up Derrida as Mother to contemplations on how to situate Derrida in relation to other African philosophers, from essays that connect deconstruction and diaspora to a chapter that engages the ways in which Derrida—especially in a text such as Monolingualism of the Other: or, the Prosthesis of Origin—is haunted by place to a chapter that locates Derrida firmly in postapartheid South Africa, Derrida in/and Africa is the insistent line of inquiry. Edited by Grant Farred, this collection asks: What is Derrida to Africa?, What is Africa to Derrida?, and What is this specter called Africa that haunts Derrida?

An intensely personal, and philosophical, account of why white America’s racial unconscious is not so unconsciousAn Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.Framed through the experiences of the author’s biracial son, An Essay for Ezra is intensely personal while also powerfully universal. Drawing on the social and political thought of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Grant Farred examines the temptation and the perils of essentialism and the need to discriminate-to engage the black mind as much as the black body. With that dialectic as his starting point, Farred engages the ideas of Jameson, Barthes, Derrida, Adorno, Kant, and other thinkers to derive an ethics of being in our time of social peril. His antiessentialist racial analysis is salient, especially when he deploys Dave Chappelle as a counterpoint to Baldwin-and Chappelle’s brilliant comic philosophic voice jabs at both racial and gender identity.Standing apart for its willingness to explore terror in all its ambivalence, this theoretical reflection on racism, knowledge, ethics, and being in our neofascist present brings to bear the full weight of philosophical inquiry and popular cultural critique on black life in the United States.

An intensely personal, and philosophical, account of why white America’s racial unconscious is not so unconsciousAn Essay for Ezra is a critique of terror that begins but by no means ends with the presidency of Donald J. Trump. A father addresses his son and a boy shares his observations in a dynamic dialogistic exchange that is a commentary of and for its time, taking the measure of racial terror and of white supremacy both in our moment and as a historical phenomenon.Framed through the experiences of the author’s biracial son, An Essay for Ezra is intensely personal while also powerfully universal. Drawing on the social and political thought of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Grant Farred examines the temptation and the perils of essentialism and the need to discriminate-to engage the black mind as much as the black body. With that dialectic as his starting point, Farred engages the ideas of Jameson, Barthes, Derrida, Adorno, Kant, and other thinkers to derive an ethics of being in our time of social peril. His antiessentialist racial analysis is salient, especially when he deploys Dave Chappelle as a counterpoint to Baldwin-and Chappelle’s brilliant comic philosophic voice jabs at both racial and gender identity.Standing apart for its willingness to explore terror in all its ambivalence, this theoretical reflection on racism, knowledge, ethics, and being in our neofascist present brings to bear the full weight of philosophical inquiry and popular cultural critique on black life in the United States.

A call to arms exploring the protest movements of 2020 as they reverberated through the athletic worldStarting with the refusal of George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks to participate in an August 2020 playoff game following the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Grant Farred shows how the Covid-restricted NBA “bubble” released an energy that spurred athletes into radical action. They disrupted athletic normalcy, and in their grief and rage against American racism they demonstrated the true progressivism lacking in even the most reformist-minded politicians and pundits. Farred goes on to trace the radicalism of black athletes in a number of sports, including the WNBA, women’s tennis, the NFL, and NASCAR, locating contemporary athletes in a lineage that runs through Muhammad Ali as well as Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. Only a Black Athlete Can Save Us Now uses sport as a point of departure to argue that the dystopic crisis of our current moment offers a singular opportunity to reimagine how we live in the world.Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself  Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy-engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.

A provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself  Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy-engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.

Uncovering Hollywood’s perpetual longing for a lost industrial America“We don’t make things in America anymore”: like clockwork, this refrain resurfaces in political discourse, a reflection of yearning for a bygone era of industrial productivity. In his latest work, Grant Farred uses the 1990 film Pretty Woman to expose and critique this lingering nostalgia for late-industrial capitalism. Situating Pretty Woman alongside Reagan-era films including Wall Street, Farred examines the congealment of such a pervasive romanticized view of the United States as a fading industrial powerhouse. Drawing on an eclectic range of thinkers-from Raymond Williams and Slavoj Žižek to Mick Jagger-The Prettiest Woman offers a unique analysis of the ways Hollywood perpetuates the myth of a lost “productive America,” highlighting the seductive power of this fantasy despite its disconnect from economic and political realities.

Since he was a young adult, Grant Farred has wandered the world.  Born in South Africa, his own personal growth was fueled by dreams of English football, as a player, and then, when age and reality set in, as a fan.  Coming to the United States at a still young age, Farred still loved football -- especially Liverpool -- and watched it from afar.  Writing about his experience, Farred shares with the reader his experience growing up colored in South Africa, moving to England, and finally to the US, and how his passion for football kept company with his many moves.  Along the way, he talks about the contradictions of football; how race and class politics mix on and off the pitch; how Farred's own ideas about what it means to be a colonial subject is both reinforced and liberated by the idea of football, and how players can serve as gods and mosnters.

This book uses Édouard Glissant’s concept of the transfer and the transplant to examine Jacques Derrida and Albert Memmi’s distinctive relationships to French colonialism.Both the transfer and the transplant undertake the work of reconciling oneself with the place of first habitation, the process of dislocation, and the new place of habitation. In Glissant’s definition, the transplant makes an effort to maintain the culture of first place of habitation, while the transfer attempts to form a relationship with the new place of habitation. The essays featured in this volume designate Memmi, the Tunisian, as the transplant while Derrida, the Algerian, struggles with the difficulties of the transfer. By engaging with the work of these three figures, this book presents a triangulation of Mediterranean-Atlantic-metropolitan French philosophical thought.