Being apart: The African diaspora and the existential.
Item
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Title
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Being apart: The African diaspora and the existential.
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Identifier
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AAI3330365
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identifier
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3330365
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Creator
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Parris, LaRose T.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert F. Reid-Pharr
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Date
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2008
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Black Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a theoretical study of Western and Africana literatures that challenges the epistemic erasure of Africana historiography, philosophy and literature in the Western canon---an erasure that has created a blind spot towards Africana texts possessing existentialist themes that, in some cases, predate and in all cases reinterpret modern existentialist thought.;In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European theorists David Hume, Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, and Thomas Jefferson establish theories of African sub-humanity and ahistoricality. Yet as early as the nineteenth-century, Africana scholars David Walker and Frederick Douglass challenged Hume, Hegel, and Jefferson by citing both ancient and modern Western historical sources that verified the African racial identity of the ancient Egyptians, whose culture and civilization shaped those of ancient Greece and Rome. In Douglass and Walker's works, both scholars explore two principal existentialist themes: Being and Freedom. While Walker and Douglass interrogate classical history to verify African culture and civilization, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction and James's The Black Jacobins hold that Western chattel slavery gave birth to the development of Western modernity, global capitalism, and Empire. Both Du Bois and James enrich their studies of nineteenth-century America and Haiti by using the materiality of slavery to dovetail into nuanced readings of Africana Being and Freedom.;This exploration of Being and Freedom is taken even further in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon's discussion of the colonized subject's lived experience of racism provides the text's center; yet he delves into this lived experience of racism to tease out theoretical linkages among seemingly divergent schools of thought: existentialism, materialism, dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The result is a work posits the colonials subject's quest for Freedom as the apotheosis of existential actualization.;While Fanon's work explores the loss of the colonial subject's native tongue, he offers no corrective. One generation later, however, Barbajan historian, critic, and poet Kamau Brathwaite proffers his theory of Nation Language as the answer to Fanon's question of colonial alienation and European cultural imperialism. Nation Language seamlessly combines both theory and praxis, as Africana orature and music become the cultural conduit for Africana liberation.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
