Missing persons: The search for the postcolonial subject in the African Atlantic.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the means by which the European discourse on subjectivity is directly contingent upon a black Other, and how that Other has responded with counter-discourses on the black Subject. The first chapter begins with the theories of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur to Gobineau, arguing that the latter provided the first detailed scientific analysis of racial hierarchies to justify the oppression and/or exploitation of a racial group as a nation's Other, and that the former's theory of the Self and Other is based upon a model of European superiority and African inferiority respectively. The second chapter looks at Thomas Jefferson's invention of the Negro to show how the notion of an inferior black as a nation's Other developed before (but eventually in tandem with), the European discourse. The section ends with an analysis of the black Other's role in both modern European and American discourses on the nation and the relationship between this discourse and Western theories of subjectivity. The second part of the dissertation looks at the counter-discourse on subjectivity, or Subjecthood as they developed in Africa and the African Atlantic (Western Europe and North America). The third chapter starts with W. E. B. Du Bois, focusing on his theories of double consciousness and the Veil. The chapter then links these tropes to the metaphor of the mask used by the Negritudists Senghor, Cesaire and Fanon, and their respective theories of Subjecthood. At the conclusion of the chapter, I look at why this metaphor of the mask was deployed to discuss the black Other-as-Subject, and how such varied theories were derived from it. In the final chapter, I examine some of the literature and theoretical debates on the black Subject from the African Atlantic, looking at how the Western discourse on the black Other has impacted contemporary figurations of the black Subject.