“A Surreal World”: Enigmatic Hermeneutics and the Ethical Turn in Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays

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Notes

Notes

1 For Harris’s close association between “science” as he conceives it and the Enlightenment, see Pangburn Philosophy, “Sam Harris & Jordan Peterson – June 23, 2018,” YouTube, August 31, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch/v=jey_CzIOfYE. For his ethical reasoning with regards to US interventionism abroad, see Sam Harris, “The Limits of Discourse.” Last modified May 1, 2015. https://samharris.org/the-limits-of-discourse/#47.

2 I see kindred attempts, though by necessity more limited, in the materialist-oriented literary criticism of, for instance, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, which Sekyi-Otu refers to often, and related texts like Nicholas Brown’s Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature and Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.

3 Tejumola Olaniyan, “State and Culture in Africa: The Possibilities of Strangeness,” in State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 5.

4 The most representative of these debates and the thinking they engender can be found in Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2005); Eve K. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).