ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION THE COLONIAL SOCIETIES OF the New World, such as the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, were and still are immigrant societies. This influx of people from different regions of the globe made these societies multicultural in nature. Hence, in both their colonial and postcolonial periods, they were confronted with the problem of transforming immigrant populations, whose identities were inscribed in autonomous or national cultures, into subnational races or ethnicities. In contrast, the national cultures of the imperial societies of old Europe were undergoing processes of transnational expansion that would make them appear universal in nature. It is between these two processes of subnational ethnogenesis in the colonies and transnational universalization in imperial Europe that I want to situate the problem of whiteness and Africana phenomenology. In particular, I will link these two processes to Hegel’s phenomenological account of the nature of the modern European self and to the responses of a number of Africana phenomenologists to the supremacist needs of this self. My analysis suggests that these needs are in a resurgent phase that is casting a very disquieting shadow over black identities in the post-affirmative action era.
