David Farrell Krell, ‘The Bodies of Black Folk: From Kant and Hegel to Du Bois and Baldwin’, boundary 2, 27.3 (2000), 103-134 (pp. 103-104):
Posted by sphaleotas at February 17, 2007 08:18 PMThe bodies of black folk? The title is an impertinence. It ought to be a matter of the souls of black folk—precisely those souls that for entire epochs of European history have been denied spirit and intelligence. Yet have not these peoples also been denied their bodies, their multifarious bodies—bodies of the Earth and the world, bodies of nature, culture, and history? Have they not been denied their erotic and intelligent bodies, their free bodies? This essay consists of four parts. The first part, taking W. E. B. Du Bois’s sojourn in Germany as its inspiration, raises the question of studying abroad, particularly in Europe, for African Americans today. Such study was very important to the intellectual and artistic development of African American philosophers and writers during the past century, but today it is challenged by other pressing educational priorities and by other discourses. The second part turns briefly to Kant’s “physical geography” for a sampler of European wisdom touching the black African. The longer third part turns to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences for his general—and generally bleak—account of black Africa. The fourth part turns to a strange passage on Africa and the Africans in Hegel’s “Philosophy of Nature”—where I see something like the bodies of black folk entering on the scene in a way that disturbs the Hegelian system as such in its entirety, if one can say such a thing....