In My Father’s House

A book of essays by the British-Ghanaian philosopher, subtitled Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Appiah asks what it means to speak of African identity, and argues that the idea of Africa as a single race or culture was largely invented by outsiders and by nineteenth-century Black intellectuals in the Americas. Early chapters examine Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, arguing that even Du Bois's attempt to define race in social terms falls back on a biological notion that science does not support. Appiah then criticises nativism in African literary theory and Wole Soyinka's idea of a unified African world. A chapter on ethnophilosophy and its critics assesses the debate over African philosophy, and another compares traditional religious thought with modern science. He discusses postcolonial and postmodern art and the troubled modern African state. The book closes with the dispute over his father's funeral in Kumasi, a story about the many identities one family can hold.

It is a careful philosophical critique of race and of claims about a single African essence, and a humane model of thinking about identity without either denying or worshipping it.