Hegel's Dialectic and Africana Philosophy
Dissertation, (
2018)
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Abstract
Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s dialectic plays a crucial role in some of the thought of the most
prominent Black thinkers. The role it plays has received little attention. In this dissertation, I
begin to fill this lacuna in Africana Philosophy by examining the arguments of William Edward
Burghardt Du Bois in “The Conservation of Races,” Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks
and The Wretched of the Earth, and Cyril Lionel Robert James in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. I
argue that forms of praxis are the result of their engagement with Hegel’s dialectic: reflexive
practice, absolute praxis, and organic praxis respectively. I show that in each of these cases
Hegel’s dialectical approach to history (dialectical thinking) was essential to their own attempts
to understand the possibility of a positive transformation of the pervasively racist world they
inhabited.