X--The Problem of the Negro As a Problem for Thought by Chandler Nahum Dimitri;

Author:Chandler, Nahum Dimitri; [Nahum Dimitri Chandler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SUBJECT
ISBN: 5014997
Publisher: Fordham UP
Published: 2013-10-16T05:00:00+00:00

The Historiographical Sovereign

The General Schema

If we might anticipate the possibility of such a thought, it remains that within African American studies, a still dominant traditional interpretation of this historical problem grounds itself on certain conceptual presuppositions that would preclude it.20 First, this approach tends to presuppose a determined historical identity or origin as its ground, a certain “America” and (often presupposed in turn as a ground of this “America”) a certain “Euro-American,” or better “White,” subject. Secondly, it also, almost universally, presupposes the question of the ground or possibility of such an identity or origin.21

We need to rethink this traditional understanding of the African American problematic. An interpretation founded on such presuppositions cannot be general; it cannot give an account of the general system or possibility (historical or transcendental) in which a subject emerges (however its nominality is modified, as Euro or Afro, or some other such heading). In a sense, an interpretation, such as the traditional one, presupposes what it must explain; that is, it presupposes the system (historical or transcendental) in question. It does this by presupposing an origin of the system. In order not to operate this way, on the basis of such a presupposition, we must rethink the status or possibility of origin. In our discursive context, this means rethinking the status of a certain Euro-American subject. To undertake this rethinking, we must recognize a certain continuity of the structure of the constitution of a Euro-American subject with the processes operative in the constitution of an Afro-American subject. Let us be clear—not a simple continuity of subjectivity, but rather of the processes by which subjectity is constituted. What we will discover is that although there are differences, there is no stable ground for marking an inside and outside. Or, we can say, while there is no stability to any mark that would claim to register or recognize an inside and an outside, the yield of the processes in question is a differential deployment or dispersal of position in relation. We will not be able to undertake this rethinking unless we rethink the problem of identity or origin in general.

If one considers discourses about African Americans, their historical and contemporary experience of social subordination is mirrored in discussions of African American identity, American identity or identities, and American society in general. What happens here is a strange tale, stranger still for its ubiquity, for the fact that it remains both so legible (I will not say obvious) and so hidden. For in those texts, often under the guise of recognizing the agency of African Americans in the making of some social text, it is the constitutive force of the African American subject(s) that is most precisely blunted, dulled, or denied. These discourses have yet to comprehend (rather, they precomprehend) the ground on which they stand or, shall we say, pretend to stand. The unthought in these discourses is always, more or less, the status of a Euro-American subject. Herein lies the enigma: in trying to explain the

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