Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination

Description

A critical study of Edward Wilmot Blyden, whose voluminous writings laid the groundwork for some of the most important African and black diasporic thinkers of the twentieth century. Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination is a critical study of one of the most prolific and knowledgeable black-world intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on his writings, it shows the contradictions, ambiguities, complexities, and paradoxes in Blyden's powerful black racial nationalism. Blyden was a modernist who called upon African Americans to "uplift" Africa; yet he was a defender of Africa's culture and customs. He was the most sophisticated critic of Eurocentrism; yet he was an avid Anglophile. He was a Protestant who admired Islam's "civilizing" role in Africa. Blyden was the first black intellectual to advocate for the symbiosis of Africa's "triple heritage": indigenous, Islamic, and Western. His voluminous writings laid the groundwork for some of the most important ideas of African and black diasporic thinkers of the twentieth century, including Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Chiekh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney. Though Blyden is often overlooked in the history of modern black thought, in this book, Teshale Tibebu brings him out of oblivion and engages the reader in an extended, systematic evaluation of his written works. Introduction Africa: Service, Suffering, and Subjection The Critique of Eurocentrism Ishmael in Africa: Black Protestant Islamophilia The African American "Civilizing Mission" The "Mulatto" Nemesis Appraising the Colonial Enterprise Epilogue: Post-Blydenian Reflections