Counting Cadillacs

ABSTRACT

This set of four interlinked reflections responds to prompts by editor Armond Towns. I argue that epistemology follows from politics and communication follows from community, suggest that studies of race and communication require fresh philosophies of biology and history, and call for a rededication to our core work as scholars-to think big, analyze opacities, aim for ambitiously small targets, and carry on the great critical traditions of liberationist thought.

KEYWORDS:

• Classification
• critical thought
• Hegel
• hope
• liberal universalism
• pragmatism
• race

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest. No funding was received.

Notes

1 On the Cadillac as a historic object of Black engagement with luxury culture, see Todd Boyd, Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made the World (New York: Phaidon, 2024), 00:12.

2 See Faye Ginsburg, “The Canary in the Gemeinschaft? Disability, Film, and the Jewish Question,” in Deus in Machina, ed. Jeremy Stolow (Fordham University Press, 2013), 159-80, esp. 160-63.

3 See Lundy Braun, “Spirometry, Measurement, and Race in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60:2 (April 2005): 135-69. See also my “Spirometer, Whale, Slave: Breathing Emergencies c. 1850,” SubStance 52:1 (2023): 85-91.

4 Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

5 Deja Dunlap, “It’s time Yale address the race issue in the engineering department,” Yale Daily News, 2 April 2024 https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/04/02/dunlap-its-time-yale-address-the-race-issue-in-the-engineering-department/

6 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “What Does it Mean ‘To Look like Me?’” New York Times, 21 September 2019.

7 See “Making Up People,” Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002), 99-114, and “The looping effects of human kinds,” Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 351-94.

8 Richard O. Prum, Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2023).

9 See John Jackson and David Depew, Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2017).

10 Pooja Priti Sen, The World Builders (Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 2024).

11 “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), 123-51, at 124.

12 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011).

13 Miri Davidson, “Sea and Earth,” New Left Review (4 April 2024), https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth

14 For one piece in her growing body of work, see Moira Weigel, “Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School,” B2o (10 July 2020), https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/

15 My favorite take on the Great Migration is found in the beautiful, biographically based poem sequences in Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon UP, 1986).

16 Fred Moten, “Letting Go of Othello,” The Paris Review (1 November 2019), https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/01/letting-go-of-othello/

17 Isabel Wilkerson’s compellingly written book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), deploys most of these, for instance.

18 Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (New York: Oxford UP, 2016).

19 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010).

20 Octavio Paz, “El trez y el cuatro,” El laberinto de la soledad (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2003), 549-59.

21 “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos,” Annals of Scholarship 8:2 (Spring 1991), 251-86, at 253.

22 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 146.

23 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989).