D. Nandi Odhiambo Minoritarian and Black Reason

Annotation

The Minoritarian and Black Reason: A Philosophico-Literary Investigation addresses the question, how can we understand and relate responsibly to others who differ from us in our everyday concerns? The work looks at theories about difference in a variety of philosophical texts and novels from the early modern and modern periods to examine their various approaches to the problem of representational language. The author discusses how these distinct methods of thought present the Black-figure, and critiques how imagined blackness or Black reason willfully looks away from the African presence. Central to this inquiry are key concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a description of the minoritarian as a non-representational method that discloses affective intensity in naked life (zoe), beings of the sensible (sentiendum), and personae. So, it is presented as a third term in an ungrounded field of experience composed of assemblages or social networks. Hence, the book deconstructs a unified structuralist ontology to propose a line of flight from a model of logic used to objectify and reproduce identities of people from a varied sphere of political rights (bios).