By exploring the logical fallacies in the subject construction in the West through discussions of Hegel, Jefferson, and Arthur de Gobineau, Wright demonstrates that racist discourses are not cohesive and that the "counterdiscourses" that emerge in response to these philosophies are correspondingly varied.
Hegel, the African is outside history but paradoxically necessary in the formation of the Western subject as an Other for the European subject. For Thomas Jefferson, black diasporic subjects are a virus threatening to destroy the state, whereas for G. Wright explains that the black diasporic subject is constantly in a status as either an Other-from-within or an Other-from-without in Western discourses. Such an all-inclusive project could easily be unwieldy, but Wright demonstrates mastery of her subject matter and reveals how the integration of these textual histories is a necessary foundation for scholars of the Black Diaspora. Michelle Wright's ambitious texts is an introduction to racialized Enlightenment discourse on subject formation, an overview of the most important black responses to these philosophies, and a feminist intervention into theories of diasporic black identity.
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