X-The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

Abstract

This book offers an original account of matters African American within the context of modernity understood as an epistemic horizon. With special reference to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, X shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the historical problematization that underwrote 20th century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity. If for Du Bois, “the problem of the color line” coincides with the modern horizon, the idea of the human and its avatars - the idea of race and the idea of culture - emerged together with the violent, hierarchal inscription of the so-called African or Negro into a horizon of commonness beyond all natal premises. On such horizon, the world, if there is such, from the inception of something like the Negro as a problem for thought has never been and could never be only one, or pure. It is always at least and never only double. The problem of the Negro in America is thus an exemplary instance of modern historicity in its most fundamental sense. This conception offers an original perspective within African American and African Diaspora studies, but also challenges analogous objects of study across the dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g. anthropology, history, and sociology) and various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies, and takes critical reference to key contemporary figures such as Cecil Taylor, Hortense Spillers, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.

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