HistCon Speaker Series Spring 24: "Black Enlightenment" with Surya Parekh

Surya Parekh (Binghamton University) gives lecture "Black Enlightenment" followed by a Q&A. Recorded April 22nd, 2024. This talk is based on my recently published book Black Enlightenment (Duke, 2023). The book tries to reimagine the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. In this talk, I look at a historical coincidence that I explored in the book and discuss some of its implications. In January and February 1788, Black British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and white German philosopher Immanuel Kant comment on the same passage by a proslavery planter. Equiano severely criticizes the passage in several editorials to the British newspapers and Kant cites the passage positively in his last essay on race, published in two instalments. By looking at this juxtaposition of Equiano and Kant, I consider how a growing anxiety about Black citizenship in European polities in the 1780s – an anxiety that links white abolitionists, proslavery planters, and Enlightenment philosophers – is managed through a discourse that casts the general Black subject as “lazy” and unfit for politics while also recognizing exceptions. This is a discourse that continues to wield power today. ---------------------- Surya Parekh is Associate Professor of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University. He was an Africana Research Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State University in 2015 and Alain Locke Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn State in 2014. He graduated from History of Consciousness at UCSC in 2013. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke, 2023), and co-editor of Living Translation (Seagull, 2022) and Spivak Moving (forthcoming). He has published essays in CR: The New Centennial Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Postcolonial Directions in Education. He is currently working on a project that reimagines Comparative Literature for the Anthropocene. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit the History of Consciousness Department website: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/ See upcoming Speaker Series events: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/hisc_speaker... View past Speaker Series lectures: https://histcon.ucsc.edu/hisc_speaker...