Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh
• Jordan Alexander Stein (bio)

Black Enlightenment
surya parekh
Duke University Press, 2023
216 pp.

Black Atlantic writing, indelibly shaped by the transatlantic slave trade, articulates powerful demands for freedom. The project of Surya Parekh's suggestive and learned study, Black Enlightenment, is to ask what else Black Atlantic writing articulates and, indeed, how recent scholars' attention to freedom has made some of those other articulations hard to see. Treating Olaudah Equiano's 1789 Narrative as a temporal threshold—contemporary with the rise of political abolition in Britain—after which concerns for freedom come to dominate Black Atlantic writing, Black Enlightenment turns back the clock to consider earlier eighteenth-century writings by Francis Williams, Phillis Wheatley, and Ignatius Sancho. These span geographies (Jamaica, New England, London) and genres (poetry, letters). Yet they were all taken up, directly and indirectly, by indisputably [End Page 504] major Enlightenment thinkers who also wrote before the political ascent of abolition in the late 1780s, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Black Enlightenment thus seeks to demonstrate both how earlier Black Atlantic writers made heterogenous claims on Black humanity in the spirit of the Enlightenment, and how those claims were "imperfectly foreclosed" by advocates of Enlightenment who nevertheless could not see to expand its claims to Black subjects (4).

Individual chapters alternate between these points. The first reads Williams's one extant poem in relation to his civil suits that tried to establish his right to property and inheritance from his free Black father. Williams's right to do so troubled Hume so much that in 1753 he revised his essay "Of National Characters" to include a footnote making clear that the deracinated (and what we would now call cultural or historically contingent) claims to national identity for which that essay advocates do not extend to a free Black man in Jamaica trying to claim them as a British subject. This essay and its footnote were read by Kant, who, we learn in chapter 2, elaborates on Hume's footnote in a section of his own Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). Here we see how Kant pursues racist generalizations that appear simple but in fact proceed through a complex rhetorical "flatten[ing of] the figure of the Black subject" (66). The reader is urged not to dismiss Kant's racism but to understand the carefulness and consequence of the "original contribution" he constructs (52). That contribution morphs, however, by chapter 3, which considers the racism of Kant's late anthropological writings. Here the philosopher's rhetorical strategy is not to flatten Black subjectivity so much as to align whiteness with morality. The result is a monogenic, hierarchical theory of race that legitimates what has come to be sometimes shorthanded as an Enlightenment logic of white supremacy. As "subsequent generations of German and French scientists" fall under the influences of Kant's ideas about race, the possibility of a Black Enlightenment subject is foreclosed in favor of a universal Enlightenment subject—one whom Equiano, explicitly writing against the Kantianisms of James Tobin and Gordon Turnbull, aspires in his letters and his Narrative to be (91).

These first three chapters present a tight argument about a ranging but interconnected group of texts. With this debate and its outcome established, the last two chapters invite us to reread some of the Black Atlantic writers whose names may be familiar but whose texts will appear [End Page 505] unfamiliar in light of the preceding argument. Chapter 4 moves back to the 1780s, rereading Sancho's letters for a "disjunction between the character 'Negroe' and the subject of Enlightenment, empire, and aesthetics" they attempt to straddle (110). The only Black Briton known to have voted in the eighteenth century, Sancho exercises forms of enfranchisement that, his writings suggest, are his due to, and not in spite of, a life where "the Middle Passage is a condition of entry" for political subjectivity (4). Chapter 5 turns back again, to Phillis Wheatley in the 1770s, considering this enslaved poet's engagements with Christianity. Reading Wheatley as a contributor to Enlightenment aesthetic theory, we see her rhetorical uses of Christian...