This edited work explores convergences between the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and African American thought.

In "Look, a Negro!," political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around issues of race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child with the words "Look, a Negro!," his book is an insightful, rich and unusually wide ranging work of social criticism.
These essays engage the themes that have centrally occupied recent discussion of race and racial identity, among them, the workings of racial ideology (including the interplay of gender and sexuality in the articulation of racial ideology); the viability of social constructionist theories of race; the significance of Afrocentrism and multiculturalism for democracy; the place of black identity in the imagination and articulation of America's inheritance of philosophy; and the conceptualization of African American politics in post-segregation America.
"Look, a Negro!" will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and critical race theorists, students of cultural studies and film, and readers concerned with the continuing importance of race-consciousness to democratic culture in the United States.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:0415907357

In arguing that Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism--that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values--the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.
Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. "Zarathustra" is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions.
Through a close reading of "Zarathustra," the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence (according to Nietzsche, the "fundamental conception" of "Zarathustra"). Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs.

In arguing that Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism--that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values--the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.
Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity (the repressive culture of the "last man") by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. "Zarathustra" is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions.
Through a close reading of "Zarathustra," the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence (according to Nietzsche, the "fundamental conception" of "Zarathustra"). Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs.

In "Look, a Negro ," political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around issues of race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child with the words "Look, a Negro ," his book is an insightful, rich and unusually wide ranging work of social criticism.
These essays engage the themes that have centrally occupied recent discussion of race and racial identity, among them, the workings of racial ideology (including the interplay of gender and sexuality in the articulation of racial ideology); the viability of social constructionist theories of race; the significance of Afrocentrism and multiculturalism for democracy; the place of black identity in the imagination and articulation of America's inheritance of philosophy; and the conceptualization of African American politics in post-segregation America.
"Look, a Negro " will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, and critical race theorists, students of cultural studies and film, and readers concerned with the continuing importance of race-consciousness to democratic culture in the United States.

"The Souls of Black Folk" is Du Bois s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy? Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois s interpretation of black politics.

For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing self-realization that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller s social thought, the German debate over the "Geisteswissenschaften," and William Wordsworth s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs "Souls " defense of this politics of expressive self-realization, and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in "My Bondage and My Freedom." Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to "Bondage" and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from "Souls," Gooding-Williams lets "Souls" serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.