| For the first time in critical theory, the Black subject can see itself whole. It can now tell its story from the emergence of the first humans in Africa to the present, as a relatively unbroken continuum. The epistemological conditions for the emergence of a new Black subjectivity have never been better than in what I tentatively call the Dakar-Brazzaville-Stanford 'Conversation' (DBSC) about Black Africa and ancient Egypt. The DBSC stands for a number of major Black scholars (Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile Obenga, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and St. Clair Drake) in those parts of the world, and the common denominator I identify in their historical, anthropological, and philosophic theorisations of Africa. My aim is to extend the 'conversation' by examining what it means for literary theory. The extent of Western historiography's misrepresentation of Africa's significance in civilisation is only now being openly acknowledged in Western intellectual discourse. African and Black foundational, philosophic, historical, and literary texts, shaped by particular systems of signs that are a clue to the African and Black mental worlds, require a particular kind of reading. Therefore, as part of the effort to represent Africa more adequately, a shift of perspective and form now enables Black fiction and literary theory to posit an alternative understanding of the idea and history of literature itself. And this involves recovering and redeploying ancient Egypt in its connection to Black Africa.; Though there is increasing evidence in world scholarship that the first inhabitants of ancient Egypt were a negroid people, that their mystical beliefs laid the foundation for ancient Egyptian civilisation, and that philosophic speculation is, ultimately, Egyptian in origin, I do not know of any study that has systematically teased out the consequences of this flourishing scholarship for Black literary theory. The ultimate purpose of my thesis, therefore, is to deconstruct two figures (Hegel and Derrida) who have cast a shadow on Black literary theory. I do this by re-reading and, especially, re-contextualising them, to show that their philosophies are ancient Egyptian in origin. As a result of this re-historicisation, I argue that Black African and ancient Egyptian philosophies remain the most viable paradigms within which Black literary theory has a bright future. But it is a future that re-places Hegelian and Derridian philosophies in their originary Egyptian contexts in order to pare them of the unhelpful accretions Hegel and Derrida brought to them. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
