In this talk, Professor Mendieta will consider the under-examined and original philosophical contributions of Angela Y. Davis. He will argue that she bridges Marxist inspired historical materialism, through the mediation of Marcusian critical theory,Foucauldian genealogies of punishment and confinement, Black feminist analysis, the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, and a century old American autochthonous Black critical political philosophy. 

Eduardo Mendieta is professor of philosophy at Penn State University. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY Press, 2007). He is also co-editor with Jonathan VanAntwerpen of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011), with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen of Habermas and Religion (Polity, 2013), and with Stuart Elden of Reading Kant’s Geography (SUNY Press, 2011) He recently finished a book titled The Philosophical Animal, which will be published by SUNY Press in 2016.