ABSTRACT
The relationship between the West and the rest in political thought has been one of the constructions of the world in which the latter have been located outside and thus, literally, without a place on which to stand. Hidden parenthetical adjectives of “European,” “Western,” and “white” have been the hallmarks of such reflection on political reality and the anthropology that informs it. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, posed this insight into the condition of black folk at first through the subjectivist formulation of how does it feel to be a problem. His own meditations on problematization had begun a few years earlier when he composed The Study of the Negro Problems, namely, that groups of people are studied as problems instead of as people with problems. “[Society,] unlike biochemical processes,” wrote Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, “cannot escape human influence. Man is what brings society into being”.
