For the appearance of this work, I must, above all, thank my editor at Fordham University Press, Helen Tartar. And, I am most deeply thankful. For, since first speaking with me in the autumn of 1993 about the project of which this book is an expression, she has remained steadfast—for what is now a generation of thought, at least—in her affirmation of my efforts to think the work of W. E. B. Du Bois anew and to address certain concerns in modern social thought from my somewhat peculiar path of thinking. A scholar, a writer, simply could not hope for more, in a lifetime. She has, indeed, changed my world. I hope that herein she can find some sense of the measure of my gratitude and appreciation, as well as some retrospective value in seeing this discourse into a new public presentation. And for that event, such as it is, I also thank Tom Lay of Fordham Press, who with the kindest prodding has shepherded this book into its present form, and Tim Roberts, of the American Literatures Initiative.
Then, this text was gifted with two anonymous readers, who were kind enough to make themselves known to me, Fred Moten and David Lloyd. It is hard to imagine any other two readers who might have engaged the study in such a fundamental manner, affirmatively critical to the limit, in such a way as to not only push me to render this discourse at the highest level that I could bring to the table, now, but by way of their own exemplary paths of inquiry and questioning, to recognize my own work as part of a renewed horizon of shared discourse and urgent concern with thinking anew today. When this study grows up, I hope that it will be like David’s own beautiful discourse under the heading Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2008) from which I drew inspiration in my final revisions to my own study, with which it shares much, in particular on its “lower frequencies,” as Ralph Ellison suggested in another context. And then, too, for me, Fred Moten has been from our first discussion the first voice of my generation to which I listen; to discover in the event that he had given a listen to this locution—anonymously, as it were—heartened me to try to bring to it another order of voice. I hope that he hears herein, and on every page, all that we share.
And then, from somewhere near the mid-point of the journey entailed in the making of this book, Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo and Maria Phillips became essential to its realization—most fundamentally, in matters of the spirit. They have been there, always, at the other end of the line, waiting, patiently, affirmatively, ever-hopeful. A master of the graphic arts, Franc has tendered his remarkable genius for the shaping of the cover design. For their contribution to both layers of its form, both its inside and its outside, this book, then, belongs also to them.
For those who know what it means to write, they will doubtless understand that I write with two hands: one is that of my wife, Ayumi, as she attends to certain practices of our shared life, in particular the close care just now of the still toddler son, Aaron Eisuke, that we share and hold together in family; the other, is mine, as I try to trace in outline the night-lines and dreams that come to me in the darkness of thought, inscribing them, attending thus to other forms of our life, sharing them with her, all the while. This book is hers too. Her dreams, at least some of them, are recorded here, just as well as mine. I hope all who read it remember this.
At the outset of any textual reference, I must thank Danielle Kovacs, curator of collections in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library of the University of Massachusetts Libraries, and the trustees of the David Graham Du Bois Memorial Trust, respectively, for assisting me on numerous matters over many years and for ensuring scholarly access to so much work by and about W. E. B. Du Bois, most especially that contained in the papers of W. E. B. Du Bois housed at Amherst.
“Anacrusis,” the opening text for this study, was published in an earlier, slightly shorter version, without certain annotations (which, although mainly prepared in the autumn of 1991, are presented here for the first time), under the title “Between” in Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture 20 (April): 26–27. I thank Thomas Keenan and Eduardo Cadava for the suggestion of the idea, and Mark Wigley as guest editor, for the invitation to contribute to the special issue “Violence Space.” During the time of the first composition of this text, Sue Hemberger, academic officemate and intelligence extraordinaire, the eighth wonder of the world, in my judgment, read every line and affirmed the thought at its inception—which still means the world to me.
Chapter 1, “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” was previously published in a form proximate to its presentation here in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal for Literature and the Arts 50, no. 3 (2008): 345–410. I thank Wayne State University Press and Jonathan Flatley of Criticism for permission to republish it. An early version of some sections of this chapter were presented at the conference “The Academy and Race: Toward a Philosophy of Political Action,” sponsored jointly by the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Africana Studies at Villanova University, March 8–10, 1996, and subsequently published in Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 19, no. 1 (1996): 78–95; thus, I also thank Callaloo and its editor Charles Rowell, for kind consent to the republication of those revised sections here. That important conference was organized by Kevin Thomas Miles, who remains for me a principal philosophical interlocutor on these matters. Several diverse configurations of thought, position, and intellectual generation were gathered for the first time at that conference, and the impact of the interlocutions inaugurated there remain widely distributed, even if not always explicitly so, across the disciplines of philosophy, literature (comparative as well as English), and the social sciences, in the United States. It thus remains a signal moment for my own intellectual generation. (See Chapter 1 note 55 below for references on this matter.) I also thank Mae G. Henderson and Julie Elizabeth Byrne for conversations related to the development of the earlier version of this chapter. The second half of the chapter was initially brought to full formulation during my year as a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. While there, I was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Ford Foundation that I wish to acknowledge and for which I remain grateful. As well, I received the support of the faculty, staff, and other members of the School of Social Science during the 1998–99 academic year. I thank the faculty of the school, especially Professors Joan Scott and Michael Walzer, and the late esteemed scholars, Clifford Geertz and Albert O. Hirschman (in particular the latter, who by way of a fundamental sense of hospitality, took a notable interest in my concerns with the work of W. E. B. Du Bois), for their intellectual generosity and hospitality during that time. Above all, the interlocution of Professors Charles Sheperdson, Thomas Flynn, Nancy Hirschman, and Kamran Ali, for which I am deeply thankful, often led me to think further on these matters than I had yet thought possible. Just as important, I wish to note in deepest thanks that this essay in the first full version of its present form was prepared during the autumn of 2004 in Zarautz, in the Basque Country, on the northern coast of Spain, where I was able to remain for a time and write, through the kind generosity of Karmele Troyas and Arturo Coello Leyte and through the careful life friendship of Alberto Moreiras and Teresa Vilarós-Soler, while on a sabbatical.
Chapter 2, “The Figure of the X: An Elaboration of the Autobiographical Example in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois,” revised here, was published in earlier form in Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, eds., Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 235–72. Sections of this chapter were presented at conferences organized by the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick, May 21–23, 1993, and the Department of German Studies at Emory University, March 25–27, 1993; to the Department of English, Duke University, February 3, 1993, and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton, University, January 11, 1993; and at the Workshop on the Politics of Race and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies, University of Chicago, May 2, 1992. The initial formulations outlined here were first presented at sessions of the American Anthropological Association, on “Displacement, Diaspora, and the Geographies of Identity,” in Chicago, November 20–24, 1991, organized by Smadar Lavie and Ted R. Swedenburg, and on “Transnational Subjectivities of Africans in the Diaspora,” in San Francisco, December 2–6, 1992, organized by Helan E. Page and Donna D. Daniels. Smadar Lavie and Robert Gooding-Williams read this essay in its entirety and gave me distinct and principled responses; Lavie’s response indicated in the introduction to Displacement, Diaspora an Geographies of Identity was especially thoughtful, for which I am most appreciative and from which I have benefited beyond that interlocution. I thank David Theo Goldberg for our early and ongoing dialogue; Abebe Zegeye and Julia Maxted for the wonderful invitation to Warwick; Angelika Bammer for her unfailing generosity, of which her sense of critical responsibility and the invitation to Emory were just a small part; Thomas Holt for the freedom and openness of his response to Du Bois, which teaches by example; and Sue Hemberger, gifted scholar, teacher, and friend, whose questions in her own engagements in American and African American literature and social thought have been formative for mine.
Chapter 3, “The Souls of an Ex-White Man: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Biography of John Brown,” was published in an earlier, somewhat shorter version in CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 1 (spring 2003): 179–95. I wish to acknowledge and thank both Scott Michaelsen, coeditor of that journal, and Michigan State University Press, its publisher, for permitting its revised publication here. It was presented in several contexts. At the Collegium for African American Research, Wesphalia Universität, Münster, Germany, it was read in public for the first time and dedicated to Herbert and Fay Aptheker on March 20, 1999, as part of a panel on Du Bois at the millennial turn, where the engagement and papers by fellow panelists Robert Bernasconi, David Farrel Krell, Ronald A. T. Judy, and Kevin Miles, and the careful hearing and questions by Robin Blackburn from the audience, made the experience historic. At Cornell University, it was presented by way of the invitation of Nancy Hirschman under the auspices of the Department of Government through the “Crossing Borders/Crossing Boundaries: A Dialogue Between Political Theory, Political Science, and Related Disciplines” lecture series on April 25, 2000, on the occasion of which I was especially gifted with the presence and questions of Hortense Spillers, Leslie Adelson, Susan Buck-Morss, and Milton Curry. And then, it served as the text for the opening session of the Faculty Seminar Series of the Program for Comparative American Cultures, while I served as chair of that program, at Johns Hopkins University, on November 14, 2000. Through the generous invitation of Kalpana Seshadri of Boston College, a generosity of more than one occasion, for which I remain grateful, it was presented on March 16, 2001 in the Seminar on Post-Colonial Studies, based in the Humanities Center at Harvard University, on the occasion of which Lewis Ricardo Gordon and Paget Henry, both then of Brown University, notably joined the discussion and gave the text their most considered engagement, on the line of an ensemble of questions about intelligence and intellectual practice in “black,” which remains with me today. Finally, it was also read with considerable courtesy in absentia by the panel organizer and chair, my then senior colleague Sara Castro-Klaren of Johns Hopkins University (and for her affirmation, I remain grateful today, for she had been kind enough to think of me for the invitation to present the paper, whereas in the event I regretfully could not make the journey to New York) as part of a panel “Teaching and Resisting Genre: Beyond Literary and Cultural Studies,” organized under the auspices of the Division on the Teaching of Literature, Modern Languages Association, at the annual meetings, December 28, 2002, in New York.
Chapter 4, “Originary Displacement: Or, Passages of the Double and the Limit of World,” was published in an earlier form, under its main title only and without the section under the subheading “Theoretical Conjunction,” in boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 27, no. 3 (fall 2000): 249–86, a special issue, “Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. Du Bois,” edited by Ronald A. T. Judy. The majority of the essay that forms the basis of this chapter was first prepared during the winter months of 1993 and then further developed during the fall of 1994, although certain key elements were developed as noted below in the spring of 1988. The earlier version of this chapter, or sections of it, were presented in several contexts. A section was presented at “The Re-mapping of Scholarship: A Working Conference on African Peoples in the Industrial Age,” sponsored by the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, September 30–October 1, 1994; I thank Earl Lewis and Robin D. G. Kelley for their hospitality on that occasion, and Francis Abiola Irele, Sylvia Wynter, and Joe Trotter for their dialogue during this conference. At Duke University, I presented a portion of the essay as part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture Series sponsored by the Program in African and African American Studies, March 25, 1996; I thank George Elliott Clarke, Lee Baker, Jan Radway, Jonathan Goldberg, and Fredric Jameson for their critical engagement on that occasion. In early 1998, the essay was read in several contexts: at the Johns Hopkins University, sponsored by the Program in Comparative American Cultures and the Humanities Center, for which I thank Robert Reid-Pharr, Katrina McDonald, Walter Benn Michaels, Neil Hertz, and Frances Ferguson for their engagement, and Virginia Hall for her editorial assistance; at a conference on the “New World Orders? New Terrains in an Era of Globalization,” at the University of California at Irvine, for which I thank Richard Perry and Bill Maurer for the invitation; in a seminar sponsored jointly by the Department of African and African American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Institute at the University of California at Davis, for which I thank Zoila Mendoza for her indefatigable support on the occasion, Carol Smith, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Patricia Turner, and Aklil Bekele for making it work, and my former teachers Cynthia Brantley, Desmond Jolly, and Carl Jorgensen for their continued generosity and affirmation, and Frederic Jameson, my senior colleague at Duke at the time, for a considered second hearing on the Davis occasion and his further comments, most of which remain at stake for the future life of these thoughts; at the first meeting of the Working Group on Law, Culture, and the Humanities at the Georgetown University Law Center, for which I thank Austin Sarat, Ken Mack, and Brook Thomas for their engagement. Too, I must note that at the inception of the work presented here, in the book as a whole, but especially in this chapter, the American Bar Foundation (ABF) made available to me a fellowship of several years duration under the aegis of its law and social science program. While the problematics of law articulate only within the depths of this study (hardly at all in the form of the concerns of positive law), the support of the ABF allowed me the space to pursue fundamental research on the philosophical and moral premises of legality, as such, and to situate them amidst general questions of social theory, which has in turn informed virtually every page of this study. Thus, I thank especially William L. F. Felstiner, whose idea it was to start the program that brought me to the ABF, which he directly adjudged, Bryant Garth and Robert L. Nelson, subsequent executive directors of the ABF, who continued to enable my work there, but especially Christopher L. Tomlins, for his example in scholarship (even though he did not know it then), and Elizabeth Mertz, who remains a most decisive mentor for me (even though she never claimed such), showing the finest sense of what it might mean to be a scholar, manifesting both the most profound intelligence, yet always as a part of a community of learning, something that she has always held in the highest regard. This inception is all still with me, a generation forward and ongoing.
“Parenthesis” was prepared and presented for the inaugural symposium of the project Issues in Critical Investigation, The African Diaspora, convened by Professor Hortense Spillers within the auspices of the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee—September 30 to October 1, 2011. I thank Professor Spillers for her always inimitable example and intellectual friendship that seems already of a lifetime, in stellar form on the event, as well as my fellow panelists Ronald A. T. Judy, Fred Moten, and Tiffany Ruby Patterson, and other participants in the conference, notably Milton Curry, Ifeoma Nwankwo, and Nicole Waligora-Davis, for their engagement in the event. A version of this chapter is forthcoming among the proceedings from that conference to be published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; I thank the editors of that journal, Tiffany Ruby Patterson and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, along with SUNY Press for permission to include that text as part of this chapter. The opening passages of this chapter were also presented as part of an introduction of Cedric Robinson on the occasion of the second of two seminars that he presented under the title of “Staging Black Radicalism” through the auspices of the Critical Theory Institute and the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, February 6, 2012. I thank not only Professor Robinson for his profoundly generous example of decades, but also Tiffany Willoughby-Herard for her own previous exemplary introduction of Professor Robinson, along with Jared Sexton and Kyung Hyun Kim, respectively of the programs named above, for the invitation and opportunity to offer my own thoughts on that rich and quite remarkable occasion.