Background
Wright, Michelle Maria was born on October 31, 1968.
( Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subj...)
Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subjectivity throughout the African diaspora. In this unique comparative study, Michelle M. Wright discusses the commonalties and differences in how Black writers and thinkers from the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, France, Great Britain, and Germany have responded to white European and American claims about Black consciousness. As Wright traces more than a century of debate on Black subjectivity between intellectuals of African descent and white philosophers, she also highlights how feminist writers have challenged patriarchal theories of Black identity. Wright argues that three nineteenth-century American and European works addressing race—Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, and Count Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races—were particularly influential in shaping twentieth-century ideas about Black subjectivity. She considers these treatises in depth and describes how the revolutionary Black thinkers W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Frantz Fanon countered the theories they promulgated. She explains that while Du Bois, Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon rejected the racist ideologies of Jefferson, Hegel, and Gobineau, for the most part they did so within what remained a nationalist, patriarchal framework. Such persistent nationalist and sexist ideologies were later subverted, Wright shows, in the work of Black women writers including Carolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde and, more recently, the British novelists Joan Riley, Naomi King, Jo Hodges, and Andrea Levy. By considering diasporic writing ranging from Du Bois to Lorde to the contemporary African novelists Simon Njami and Daniel Biyaoula, Wright reveals Black subjectivity as rich, varied, and always evolving.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0822332884/?tag=2022091-20
Wright, Michelle Maria was born on October 31, 1968.
Bachelor, Oberlin College, 1992. Master of Arts, University Michigan, 1995. Doctor of Philosophy, University Michigan, 1997.
McCandless professor English, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 1997-2000. Thomas E. Critchett visiting assistant professor English, Macalester College, 2001—2002, associate professor English, 2003—2005. Associate professor University Minnesota, since 2005.
Member editorial board Collegiate Press, San Diego, 1998-2000. Fulbright professor University Munich. since 2006.
( Becoming Black is a powerful theorization of Black subj...)
Panelist Metro. Regional Arts Council, Minnesota. Member Phi Kappa Phi.