Originary Displacement

Preamble

It is widely believed that a real thing called “America” exists. It is precisely this idea of an America in itself that we should not accept without examination. Is “America” really the anchorage point that supports the social-cultural practices of African Americans, or is it rather a complex idea formed inside the (historical-transcendental) movement of the constitution of the African American as material idea? In any case, one could show how this idea of “America” took form in different strategies and the definite role it played in them.¹

I can restate, in a more explicit fashion, the stakes of the question that will organize itself somewhere near the core of this essay by noting the salience of Ralph Ellison’s suggestion, proposed in his 1964 critical review of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: “It is possible that any viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole.”² Herein, then, I can state the central theoretical proposition of this essay: that, in a certain way, we should generalize and therefore radicalize W. E. B. Du Bois’s formulation of the African American sense of identity as “a kind of double consciousness,” experienced under the palpable force of the practice of racial distinction, to American identities as such and to modern subjectivities in general.³ Although this central suggestion is primarily theoretical, it also bears a methodological implication. Thus if all critical reflection must proceed by way of example in order to maintain within its elaboration a responsibility to the historicity of its problematic, the orientation that I wish to give to Du Bois’s formulation is that the study of a particular example of identity in the modern era—that of the African Diaspora in general—might well serve as an exemplary guide in rethinking the grounds of identification. Even more precisely, my own methodological focus is primarily on the African American in what has historically become the United States. I propose, following Du Bois, that this problematic identity, or identity that is a problem, is a good example, “good to think with.”

Developing this proposition will lead us to challenge certain theoretical formulations under which African American subjects have been thought. It is time that we systematically expose the pervasive operative presumption that general theory or conceptual reflection is formulated elsewhere than in African Diasporic (American) studies, and that it is only applied here. We will have to bring this presumption into question for two reasons.

First, we must question this practice because those theoretical positions have been formulated in disciplines of knowledge that have themselves been marked by uncritical presuppositions about African American identity, principally through the itinerary of the concept of race (or the concept of purity that organizes it) within their formation and development (since the sixteenth century). There is no contemporary discourse that is free or independent of the itinerary of the concept of race.⁴ It is at this precise juncture that I wish to articulate the questions that I am following here with some of those adduced by Homi Bhabha in his publication on the question of race and the discourse of Michel Foucault. We can both affirm and supplement Bhabha’s formulation. If the problem of post-Enlightenment anthropologies “is to think the unthought that falls between the empirical and the transcendental . . . that which is not given to consciousness,” Bhabha suggests that we can insert a new question into this schema: Precisely to the extent that they are practices, “what is the structuring principle of that in-between intertextual and interdisciplinary space” of the knowledges of “race” (as concept or ensemble of concepts) and racism (as both concept and practice of racial distinction)—and the gap between “race” and racism here is nothing if not immeasurable—in the field of the general deployment of racism? Affirming Bhabha’s recognition of the excessiveness of this “new question” to Foucault’s established discourse...