What is Black Identity?

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Michelle Maria Wright, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2006
• Publisher: Persee
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: Persee
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://www.persee.fr/doc/cchav_0184-1025_2006_num_40_1_1464
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: L'objet identité. Épistémologie et transversalité
• Start Page: 135
• End Page: 151
• Keywords: traditions; knowledge; sexuality; identity; blackness; power; gender; African Daspora; heteropatriarchal logic; western philosophy
• Research Categories: Philosophy; Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies

Abstract

This essay looks at the genealogy of blackness in the West, from the Enlightenment “invention of the Negro” to the counter-discourses offered by 20th century writers and philosophers from the African Diaspora. Bringing both her personal experiences and these discursive traditions under the lens, Michelle M. Wright looks at how gender, sexuality, knowledge and power, inform, subvert and (re)inscribe blackness as central to Western identity as she moves from Thomas Jefferson’s invention of the Negro through Hegel’s dialectic of progress up to contemporaiy black theorists and writers such as Paul Gilroy, Joanna Traynor and Danzy Senna. She then asks if the definition of “black identity” that we now possess in both academic discourse and the quotidian do little more than reinscribe the same heteropatriarchal logic of identity that produced the black as Other to the white Western subject