Black Enlightenment

“Black Enlightenment does not excuse or accuse a monolithized ‘West,’ but rather shows how European theory could not acknowledge its transformation by Africa rising. Unusual and meticulous documentation, brilliant textual readings. Highly relevant to our annihilation of white supremacy.” - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

“Offering careful and close readings of key texts written by eighteenth-century Black thinkers, Surya Parekh decenters Kant and Hume from the Enlightenment to emphasize questions around enslavement, freedom, and subjecthood. This strong and important book will touch and inform many fields in current scholarship around the Black Atlantic and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and beyond.” - Laurent Dubois, coauthor of Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean

"Black Enlightenment offers a highly original argument. It deepens our understanding of the historical and rhetorical complexities of Enlightenment thinking about race by centering a robust reconstruction of the discourse that emerges in the eighteenth century between Black Atlantic writers and the texts and authors they wrote against and, therefore, inevitably with." - Jordan Alexander Stein, Early American Literature

"Given the complexity of its thought, the clarity of its prose, the breadth and depth of its historical perspective, and the scope of its ambition, Black Enlightenment should, by all rights, become not only a benchmark in the study of Enlightenment, but a model for what a rigorously historical and intellectually daring mode of 'reading otherwise' can accomplish." - Luca Alexander Arens, Germanic Review

"Parekh’s achievement should be underscored. He has produced a rich and insightful account that binds together, in the same discussion, figures not often— and not easily— drawn together, by way of a topic (namely, anti- Black racism) that over the last several years has come very much to the fore of academic (and more- than- academic) concerns." - Tony C. Brown, Cultural Critique

"Expanding the agents of Enlightenment thought beyond well-known canonical philosophers, Parekh looks at an understudied moment of Black subjectivity: the period before the mainstreaming of abolition in the 1780s. . . . Through an examination of a period in Europe and its colonies when citizenship was expanding and political boundaries were insecure, the book lucidly demonstrates that what is suppressed through the figure of Black genius is the question of Black political subjectivities and the anxieties they produced in both white abolitionists and proslavery advocates." - Cristina Esteves-Wolff, Caribbean Studies