black Foucault: An Intellectual Reparations Project

ABSTRACT: Through the collaboration of two black queer-feminist theorists this paper challenges to reread Foucault in the context of black studies by pairing his genealogical method with Du Boisian genealogy in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). Through Nahum Chandler’s deconstructive reading of Du Bois and blackness in X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2013), we present Du Bois as a dark figure that both usurps and disrupts the genealogical line of filiation that links Foucault to Nietzsche. The discontinuities produced in Du Bois’s genealogical charting of his own racial inheritance align him, strangely, with a Foucauldian method that also focuses on breaks and ruptures. Conclusively, a Du Boisian genealogy that engages blackness allows us to focus a critical lens back on Foucault in the context of a modern antiblack world. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of genealogy forwarded in History of Madness in 1961 and later reiterations of this method in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1977) and “Lives of Infamous Men” (1979), we argue that Du Bois is an absence that makes the history of genealogy possible. We posit that the silence of historical time about Du Bois’s idiosyncratic genealogical tracing of a concept of race produces a lacunary reserve that suspends meaning in the history of philosophy’s account of genealogy. The silence of historical time produces a break where Du Bois stands in as a disruption to the line of filiation between Nietzsche and Foucault. We conclude by arguing a black feminist genealogy is a post-moral method that thinks with the voids that annotate and arrange black life. Ultimately, we investigate the lacuna of race in Foucault’s genealogical method to argue the privilege of the black to the archive.