Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death

This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex White man.” For Du Boi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Andrew Santana Kaplan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Columbia University Libraries 2023-11-01
Series:Black Theology Papers Project
Online Access:https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/btpp/article/view/12518
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Summary:This paper considers John Brown as a paradigmatic respondent to James Cone’s and Frank Wilderson’s charges for Humanity to “become Black.” More precisely, this paper takes Du Bois’s reading of John Brown as a meditation upon what Nahum Chandler describes as the “soul of an ex White man.” For Du Bois, Brown’s taking up of the “Negro question” proceeded to shape his entire existence. By drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s messianic conception of “form of life” and Afropessimism’s elaboration of the “Negro question” through the paradigm of social death, this paper offers a reading of Du Bois’s Brown as a form of life toward social death
ISSN:2641-2799