Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora

by Michelle M. Wright

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.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, History

296 pages, Paperback

First published December 17, 2003

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this - Wright's insight into the writings that she discusses makes me want to venture out of my comfort zone and read the novels/poetry she presents. Additionally her own writing is clear and compelling.

[Myriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best part of this book are its first three chapters which juxtapose in modern (i.e. postcolonial) lingo, racist 18th c. discourse by Hegel, Jefferson and Robineau, to demonstrate how each discourse relied on its historical moment and geographical location for its production of racist thought; this is followed by a tracing of counter-discourses by Dubois, Césaire/Senghor, Fanon. The final chapters on current African Diasporas are undeveloped and, as such, disappointing. A promising scholar.

[Anjali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michelle Wright's book is impressive in scope... what a project?! To think through notions of black subjectivity from a european colonial tradition through black (inter)nationalism, and then through black feminism?? wow.