Daisaku Ikeda and African American Pragmatism: Race, Identity, and Cosmopolitan Becoming in the Dewey-Soka Heritage

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Decolonial Entry Points to Theory, Method, and Resistance to Epistemicide (Table 2)

Abstract

This study examines Japanese educator and Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda’s perspectives on race, identity, and justice relative to those of Deweyan pragmatists Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, Jr and the heritage of African American pragmatism from Du Bois to Baldwin that they advocate and represent. Analysis reveals an “(un)common faith” in the courage of becoming and helps us awaken to our shared humanity and reckon with discrimination, human suffering, and the continued trauma of Black lives under siege. Expanding the contours of the “Dewey-Soka heritage in education,” this study finds that Ikeda’s Eastern perspectives on “oneness” offer African American pragmatism and Curriculum Studies liberatory pathways for survivance in a spatiotemporally infinite selfhood immanent in diversity and the profoundly internalized Other.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University
  Presenting Author