Description
Book SynopsisA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany
Trade 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 PostmodernismTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
vii
Introduction: Being and Becoming Black in the West 1
1. The European and American Invention of the Black Other
27
2. The Trope of Masking in the Works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Aime Cesaire 66
3. Some Women Disappear: Frantz Fanon's Legacy in Black Nationalist Thought and the Black (Male) Subject
111
4.
How I Got Ovah: Masking to Motherhood and the Diasporic Black Female Subject 136
5. The Urban Diaspora: Black Subjectivities in Berlin, London, and Paris
183
Epilogue: If the Black Is a Subject, Can the Subaltern Speak? 229
Notes 233
Bibliography 261
Index 269
