Abstract

A historial entity understood as Negro or African American confounds normative ideas about the character of the object of study in the human sciences. For such an entity is always both and neither. The project of W. E. B. Du Bois, especially 1894-1910, was exemplary of both the conundrums of the problem of essence that attend any such inquiry and a way to think beyond them. If epistemic problematization emerges only as a rending of the fabric of existence then Du Bois practice is exemplary. The requisite mode of study is open to aporia and partiality even if it is still guided by principle. It must attune itself to both the specific character of epistemic emergence and the exemplary capacity of such an irruption. The work of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are each critically engaged in this discussion, along with key reference to Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Franz Boas.

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