ABSTRACT
What does it mean to say, as Ebrahim Moosa (2001) recently put it, that “[w]e are compelled by the lessons of history to understand that humanity is global and not continental”? What lessons are these? In what way do we still persist in being continental? And what is at stake in our alleged fi xation with continentality? Moosa, a native of South Africa, himself performed an act of trans-continentality as he delivered these words in an address to a U.S. audience just a few months before the tragic events of September 11th.1 “Americans,” to be sure, have heard similar calls from different groups of peoples on this side of the Atlantic Ocean long before that tragic date and its aftermath. Paradigms of migration and diaspora, along with the defi ant claims of nonassimilationist politics, put into question the very meanings of American and Latin American identity.2 While these paradigms and forms of politics have elicited important work in cultural studies, they have not been equally infl uential in philosophy.3 And philosophy undoubtedly remains one of the disciplines in which the continental spirit is most active and seductive.
