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Theorizing Black Statecraft, Samantha Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

A guiding principle of black political theory and postcolonial thought, to use Audre Lorde’s famous dictum: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As a result, scholars wanting to challenge and decolonize the canon and its concepts tends to disavow turns to the state in black politics because these efforts imply a form of false consciousness, blacks fighting for freedom and liberation are tricked or fooled by European concepts and ideas. They are conscripts, not agents. The disavowal of “statist impulses” across the history of black postcolonial politics in the United States and the Caribbean has the consequence …