Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora [Paperback]

Michelle M. Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 2003

Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subjectivity throughout the African diaspora. In this unique comparative study, Michelle M. Wright discusses the commonalties and differences in how Black writers and thinkers from the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, France, Great Britain, and Germany have responded to white European and American claims about Black consciousness. As Wright traces more than a century of debate on Black subjectivity between intellectuals of African descent and white philosophers, she also highlights how feminist writers have challenged patriarchal theories of Black identity.

Wright argues that three nineteenth-century American and European works addressing race—Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, and Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races—were particularly influential in shaping twentieth-century ideas about Black subjectivity. She considers these treatises in depth and describes how the revolutionary Black thinkers W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon countered the theories they promulgated. She explains that while Du Bois, Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon rejected the racist ideologies of Jefferson, Hegel, and Gobineau, for the most part they did so within what remained a nationalist, patriarchal framework. Such persistent nationalist and sexist ideologies were later subverted, Wright shows, in the work of Black women writers including Carolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde and, more recently, the British novelists Joan Riley, Naomi King, Jo Hodges, and Andrea Levy. By considering diasporic writing ranging from Du Bois to Lorde to the contemporary African novelists Simon Njami and Daniel Biyaoula, Wright reveals Black subjectivity as rich, varied, and always evolving.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An important book for scholars of the African diaspora, Becoming Black puts the word ‘diaspora’ back into African American studies. There are bold new conversations here.”—Sharon Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity

“Becoming Black yields a complex and differentiated understanding of Enlightenment discourses on race and offers a framework for comparing the different models of subjecthood that underwrote the varying histories of colonialism and slavery. It is unique in that it brings Afro-German and Afro-French writings into dialogue with Afro-British and African American texts. There is no existing study of the African diaspora that brings such a range of national traditions together.”—Madhu Dubey, author of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism

From the Publisher

"Becoming Black yields a complex and differentiated understanding of Enlightenment discourses on race and offers a framework for comparing the different models of subjecthood that underwrote the varying histories of colonialism and slavery. It is unique in that it brings Afro-German and Afro-French writings into dialogue with Afro-British and African American texts. There is no existing study of the African diaspora that brings such a range of national traditions together."—Madhu Dubey, author of Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism

"An important book for scholars of the African diaspora, Becoming Black puts the word ‘diaspora’ back into African American studies. There are bold new conversations here."—Sharon Holland, author of Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December 17, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822332884
• ISBN-13: 978-0822332886
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #457,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Rome, Italy and raised there as well as Rabat, Morocco; Florence, Italy; The Hague, Holland and Waterloo, Belgium as the daughter of an African American diplomat and Polish-Czech American school teacher, Michelle M. Wright received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Oberlin College in 1992 and her Ph.D. in the same from the University of Michigan in 1997. She has served on the faculties of Carnegie Mellon University, Macalester College and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is currently an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Duke UP 2004), co-editor of The Black German Experience, a special issue of the journal Callaloo with Tina Campt (2003); co-editor with Faith Wilding and Maria Fernandez of the anthology Domain Errors: A Cyberfeminist Handbook (Autonomedia Press, 2003) and Blackness and Sexualities, co-edited with Antje Schulman (Lit Verlag Berlin, 2006).