This is an exciting time in African Diaspora studies, as scholarship increases in breadth and depth to engage more extensively – or for the first time – with a dazzling array of black communities, histories, cultures, politics, literatures both within and without the continent of Africa. This is also a challenging time, as a broader array of scholars and scholarly approaches necessarily encounter fundamental differences with one another. The heated exchanges that have occurred at recent conferences on the African Diaspora, African American studies and Black European studies point to the arrival of ›new‹ epistemologies of black subjectivities and collectivities that challenge many of the accepted truths of established epistemologies.
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