The Personal Is Theoretical and the Past Is Present: Blurring the Lines in Contemporary Anti-Racist Writing

Abstract

This article studies the anti-racist writings by contemporary scholars Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., George Yancy, and Claudia Rankine. It uncovers how they include personal narratives in their works in order to theorise the workings of white hegemony in the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue, they productively blur the lines between the personal and the theoretical as well as between the past and the present. Consequently, they problematise the notion of abstract theorising, the myth of continuous racial progress as well as conceptions of postracialism.

Keywords

• anti-racist criticism and embodiment theory
• theoretical inquiry and life writing
• conceptions of time and progress