Jacoby Adeshei Carter

This project is a critical edition of Alain Locke’s lectures entitled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations” which were delivered at Howard University in 1915 and 1916 but remained unpublished throughout his lifetime. It builds on recent archival research conducted at Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center that unearthed evidence of a third delivery of the lectures with new and substantially revised content at Fisk University in 1928. The project collects all three instances of the lecture series in a single volume and offers critical interpretation and analysis of Locke’s philosophy of race in the form of essays by contemporary scholars who are experts in the fields of philosophy of race and Alain Locke studies. The analyses critically assess Locke’s philosophy of race and set his thought within contemporary philosophical debates about race and racism. This volume brings the philosophical insights of an important African American theorist directly to bear on metaphysical, normative, and practical questions currently at issue in the philosophy of race.