X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

The acclaimed scholar and author of Beyond This Narrow Now presents a provocative new reading of W.E.B. Du Bois with far-reaching implications. X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought offers an original account of matters African American, and by implication the African diaspora in general, as an object of discourse and knowledge. It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, and sociology) and the various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. With special reference to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Chandler shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the social and historical problematization that underwrote twentieth-century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity—referring to their antecedents in eighteenth-century thought and forward into their ongoing itinerary in the twenty-first century. "Nahum Chandler is one of the very few truly indispensable thinkers at work in the study of the African diaspora, which is, as he so brilliantly shows, the study of the modern world." —Fred Moten, Duke University