Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature

In Being Apart, LaRose Parris draws on traditional and radical Western theory to emphasize how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africana thinkers explored the two principal existential themes of being and freedom prior to existentialism’s rise to prominence in postwar European thought. Emphasizing diasporic connections among the works of authors from the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent, Parris argues that the ontological and phenomenological ruminations of writers such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Kamau Brathwaite not only challenge the assigned historical and epistemological marginality of Africana people but also defy current canonical demarcations.