“Black Enlightenment does not excuse or accuse a monolithized ‘West,’ but rather shows how European theory could not acknowledge its transformation by Africa rising. Unusual and meticulous documentation, brilliant textual readings. Highly relevant to our annihilation of white supremacy.”
~Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
“Offering careful and close readings of key texts written by eighteenth-century Black thinkers, Surya Parekh decenters Kant and Hume from the Enlightenment to emphasize questions around enslavement, freedom, and subjecthood. This strong and important book will touch and inform many fields in current scholarship around the Black Atlantic and the intellectual history of the Enlightenment and beyond.”
~Laurent Dubois, coauthor of, Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean
"Black Enlightenment offers a highly original argument. It deepens our understanding of the historical and rhetorical complexities of Enlightenment thinking about race by centering a robust reconstruction of the discourse that emerges in the eighteenth century between Black Atlantic writers and the texts and authors they wrote against and, therefore, inevitably with."
~Jordan Alexander Stein, Early American Literature
