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First published in 1995, I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Bringing together writings by prominent Black thinkers from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee made the case for a tradition of “relational humanism” distinct from the philosophical preoccupations of the West.

Over the past twenty years, however, new scholarly research has uncovered other contributions to the discipline now generally known as “Africana philosophy” that were not included in the original volume. In this revised and expanded edition, Hord and Lee build on the strengths of the earlier anthology while enriching the selection of readings to bring the text into the twenty-first century. In a new introduction, the editors reflect on the key arguments of the book's central thesis, refining them in light of more recent philosophical discourse. This edition includes important new readings by Kwame Gyekye, Oyeronke Oy ewumi­, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, Charles Mills, and Tommy Curry, as well as extensive suggestions for further reading.

An exploration of how Indigenous and Black communities shaped religious imagery and navigated life in colonial Lima.

Colonial Lima was steeped in Christian devotional imagery. While Spaniards set the norms for these works, it was the city’s Black and Indigenous majority that engaged with them most. As members of lay societies of worshippers called confraternities, subalterns were Lima’s key promoters of religious art, surpassing the colonial hierarchy.

Ximena Gómez argues that, by commissioning and exhibiting sacred images—in chapels and urban processions, adorned with clothing and accessories—Indigenous and Black confraternities created Lima’s visual culture. In one case study, the Indigenous confraternity of the Virgin of Copacabana "invisibly" transforms a sculpture into an object that reflected its multiethnic Andean caretakers. Another case study, that of the confraternity of the Virgin of the Antigua, finds Black worshippers initially united in their interpretation of a Spanish image and later fracturing when some of its members applied a West African interpretive lens. Taking advantage of Lima’s rich documentary record, In the Hands of Devotees centers the ritual practices of Black and Indigenous people and opens possibilities for incorporating subalterns into the history of Lima’s art when limited extant visual evidence has survived.