Abstract

With the 1992 Los Angeles riots as mark, this opening discourse interlaces a thinking of the question of relation in the phrase "between me and the other world" from the opening paragraph of W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk of 1903, with a reception of Jacques Derrida's early 1970s elaborations on the problem mimesis, or the double, and a resounding of Cecil Taylor's encoding of the problem of historicity in Silent Tongues of 1974. It formulates the difficulty for any engagement of the problem of the Negro as a problem for thought as if theoretical practice could be purely theoretical. Yet, it likewise stages in its own locution a poetics of theoretical work that is practical theoretical.

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