Black Enlightenment

About the Book

In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh examines the work of such Black writers as the free Jamaican Francis Williams (1697-1762), Afro-British thinker Ignatius Sancho (ca. 1729-1780), and Afro-American poet Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784) alongside that of their white European contemporaries David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). By rethinking the Enlightenment and its canons, Parekh complicates common understandings of the Enlightenment wherein Black subjects could only exist in negation to white subjects. Black Enlightenment points to the anxiety of race in Kant, Hume, and others while at the same time showing the importance of Black Enlightenment thought. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become "free" in a society hostile to that freedom.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Black Enlightenment  23
2. (Dis)Figuring Kant  50
3. The Changing Rhetoric of Race  74
4. The Character of Ignatius Sancho  106
5. Phillis Wheatley’s Providence  131
Notes  153
Bibliography  177
Index  195

About the Author :
Surya Parekh is Assistant Professor of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at Binghamton University and coeditor of Living Translation.

Review :
“Black Enlightenment does not excuse or accuse a monolithized ‘West,’ but rather shows how European theory could not acknowledge its transformation by Africa rising. Unusual and meticulous documentation, brilliant textual readings. Highly relevant to our annihilation of white supremacy.” - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present) “Offering careful and close readings of key texts written by eighteenth-century Black thinkers, Surya Parekh decenters Kant and Hume from the Enlightenment to emphasize questions around enslavement, freedom, and subjecthood. This strong and important book will touch and inform many fields in current scholarship around the Black Atlantic and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and beyond.” - Laurent Dubois, coauthor of (Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean) "Black Enlightenment offers a highly original argument. It deepens our understanding of the historical and rhetorical complexities of Enlightenment thinking about race by centering a robust reconstruction of the discourse that emerges in the eighteenth century between Black Atlantic writers and the texts and authors they wrote against and, therefore, inevitably with." - Jordan Alexander Stein (Early American Literature) "Given the complexity of its thought, the clarity of its prose, the breadth and depth of its historical perspective, and the scope of its ambition, Black Enlightenment should, by all rights, become not only a benchmark in the study of Enlightenment, but a model for what a rigorously historical and intellectually daring mode of 'reading otherwise' can accomplish." - Luca Alexander Arens (Germanic Review) "Parekh’s achievement should be underscored. He has produced a rich and insightful account that binds together, in the same discussion, figures not often- and not easily- drawn together, by way of a topic (namely, anti- Black racism) that over the last several years has come very much to the fore of academic (and more- than- academic) concerns." - Tony C. Brown (Cultural Critique)