Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora

A 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. Persistent nationalist and sexist ideologies were later subverted 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 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. Persistent nationalist and sexist ideologies were later subverted, Wright shows, in the work of Black women writers including Carolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments 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

About the Author :
Michelle M. Wright is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is a coeditor of Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices.

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