Interview with Professor James Haile III

Abstract

I am a philosopher by training, but have come to less and less identify with the category. I have always been interested in the stories we tell ourselves, and how we discover or locate ourselves in those narratives. As such, I have always been drawn towards literatures of all kinds, but specifically to African-American literature and the questions it raises about place, nationality, nationhood, identity, truth, and the structure of narrative construction itself. Much of my work centers on literary works, but also some of hip-hop equally concerned with auto-ethnography or storytelling. Philosophy as a discipline concerns itself with “truth†and the adequation of truth to experience (in its varied forms), but is less concerned with thinking of ourselves as narrative constructions of social, political, economic, historical and personal stories or mythologies. I, though, am interested in viewing philosophy as a mythological praxis, and its self-appointed idea of “truth†being just one of the mythologies it tells itself to ground itself as a discipline.