{"title":"苏里亚-帕瑞克的《黑色启蒙》(评论)","authors":"Jordan Alexander Stein","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a934217","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Black Enlightenment</em> by Surya Parekh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jordan Alexander Stein (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Black Enlightenment</em><br/> <small>surya parekh</small><br/> Duke University Press, 2023<br/> 216 pp. <p>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, <em>Black Enlightenment</em>, 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 <em>Narrative</em> as a temporal threshold—contemporary with the rise of political abolition in Britain—after which concerns for freedom come to dominate Black Atlantic writing, <em>Black Enlightenment</em> 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 <strong>[End Page 504]</strong> major Enlightenment thinkers who also wrote before the political ascent of abolition in the late 1780s, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. <em>Black Enlightenment</em> 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).</p> <p>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 <em>Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime</em> (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 <em>Narrative</em> to be (91).</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 505]</strong> 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...</p> </p>","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"138 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh (review)\",\"authors\":\"Jordan Alexander Stein\",\"doi\":\"10.1353/eal.2024.a934217\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Black Enlightenment</em> by Surya Parekh <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jordan Alexander Stein (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Black Enlightenment</em><br/> <small>surya parekh</small><br/> Duke University Press, 2023<br/> 216 pp. <p>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, <em>Black Enlightenment</em>, 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 <em>Narrative</em> as a temporal threshold—contemporary with the rise of political abolition in Britain—after which concerns for freedom come to dominate Black Atlantic writing, <em>Black Enlightenment</em> 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 <strong>[End Page 504]</strong> major Enlightenment thinkers who also wrote before the political ascent of abolition in the late 1780s, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. <em>Black Enlightenment</em> 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).</p> <p>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 <em>Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime</em> (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 <em>Narrative</em> to be (91).</p> <p>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 <strong>[End Page 505]</strong> 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. 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引用次数: 0
摘要
以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者 Surya Parekh 著 Black Enlightenment Jordan Alexander Stein (bio) Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh Duke University Press, 2023 216 pp.跨大西洋奴隶贸易对大西洋黑人的写作产生了不可磨灭的影响,他们表达了对自由的强烈要求。苏里亚-帕瑞克(Surya Parekh)的这本富有启发性和学识的研究著作《黑人启蒙》,旨在探究大西洋黑人的写作还表达了什么,以及近来学者们对自由的关注是如何使其他一些表达变得难以察觉的。黑人启蒙运动》将奥劳达-艾奎亚诺(Olaudah Equiano)1789 年的《叙述》视为一个时间门槛--与英国政治废奴运动的兴起同时代--在此之后,对自由的关注开始主导大西洋黑人的写作,并将时间倒流,思考弗朗西斯-威廉姆斯(Francis Williams)、菲利斯-惠特利(Phillis Wheatley)和伊格纳修斯-桑乔(Ignatius Sancho)十八世纪早期的写作。这些作品跨越地域(牙买加、新英格兰、伦敦)和体裁(诗歌、书信)。然而,这些作品都直接或间接地被无可争议的 [第 504 页完] 主要启蒙思想家所采用,这些思想家也是在 17 世纪 80 年代末废奴政治兴起之前写作的,其中包括大卫-休谟、伊曼纽尔-康德和托马斯-杰斐逊。因此,《黑人启蒙运动》力图证明早期大西洋黑人作家是如何本着启蒙运动的精神对黑人人性提出异质主张的,以及这些主张是如何被启蒙运动的倡导者 "不完美地排除在外 "的,而这些倡导者却看不到启蒙运动对黑人主体的主张(4)。各个章节在这些观点之间交替进行。第一章解读了威廉斯现存的一首与他的民事诉讼有关的诗歌,这些民事诉讼试图确立威廉斯从其自由黑人父亲那里获得财产和继承权的权利。威廉斯这样做的权利让休谟深感不安,以至于他在 1753 年修改了他的《论民族性格》一文,并在其中加入了一个脚注,明确指出该文所主张的脱胎换骨(以及我们现在所说的文化或历史上的偶然性)的民族身份主张并不适用于一个试图以英国臣民身份主张这些权利的牙买加自由黑人。康德阅读了这篇文章及其脚注,我们在第二章中了解到,康德在他自己的《关于美的和崇高的感受的观察》(1763 年)中的一个章节阐述了休谟的脚注。在这里,我们可以看到康德是如何通过复杂的修辞手法 "将黑人主体的形象扁平化"(66),来进行种族主义概括的,这些概括看似简单,但实际上是通过复杂的修辞手法进行的。我们敦促读者不要否定康德的种族主义,而要理解他所构建的 "原始贡献 "的谨慎和后果(52)。然而,这一贡献在第 3 章中发生了变化,该章探讨了康德晚期人类学著作中的种族主义。在这里,这位哲学家的修辞策略不是将黑人的主体性扁平化,而是将白人与道德统一起来。其结果是形成了一种单一的、等级森严的种族理论,使有时被简称为白人至上的启蒙逻辑合法化。由于 "随后几代德国和法国科学家 "都受到康德种族观念的影响,黑人启蒙主体的可能性被排除,取而代之的是一个普遍的启蒙主体--艾奎亚诺在他的书信和《叙述》中明确反对詹姆斯-托宾和戈登-特恩布尔的康德主义,渴望成为这样的主体(91)。这前三章对一组范围广泛但相互关联的文本进行了严密的论证。有了这一争论及其结果,最后两章将邀请我们重读一些大西洋黑人作家的作品,根据前面的论证,这些作家的名字可能耳熟能详,但他们的作品却显得 [尾页 505]陌生。第 4 章回到 1780 年代,重读桑丘的书信,寻找"'黑人'这一角色与启蒙运动、帝国和美学主题之间的脱节",这些书信试图跨越这些主题 (110)。桑丘是已知的唯一一位在十八世纪投票的英国黑人,他的著作表明,桑丘行使选举权的形式是由于他的生活,而不是因为他的生活,在这种生活中,"中间通道是政治主体性的进入条件"(4)。第五章再次回到 17 世纪 70 年代的菲利斯-惠特利,探讨这位被奴役诗人与基督教的关系。将惠特利作为启蒙美学理论的贡献者来解读,我们会看到她在修辞上对基督教的运用。
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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...