 Second, this study will focus, to some degree, on professional academic work. Philosophical activity outside of the academy—in other institutional spaces or prior to the emergence of contemporary universities and their professional scholars—will not be peremptorily excluded here, but will be relevant insofar as it bears on the work that happens or might happen in or near the academy. The academy is of course not the only site for responsible attempts at knowledge production, but it is a mechanism for systematically enshrining certain of these attempts as resources for more work. That is the aspect of Africana philosophy that I mean to take up here.