Paradoxes of Blackness

The life of Afro-American intellectuals is governed by a web of contradictions. Simply put, there is this central contradiction: while black
intellectuals work within the aesthetic limits of a pariah-like ethnicity, this ethnicity’s cultural forms are used and exploited—both intellectually and commercially—by the dominant white culture.

The black intellectual’s quest for self-identity might have been easier, one wryly reflects, had the cultural and aesthetic bound...