ABOUT THIS BOOK

In The Door of No Return, Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response and questions the overarching ethos that will be the guide to a beneficial resolution.

Using critical theory and philosophy, Sawyer decouples Black identity and Black philosophy from White and Western frames by building on Toni Morrison’s ideas of Black Thought and encouraging an understanding of Black Self-Consciousness and Black Self-Identity on Black terms. The Door of No Return uses music, literature, visual art, and a variety of physical disciplines to imagine a world that differs from one that confounds the positive formation of Black Self-Consciousness under the coercive regime of white supremacy and Anti-Black racism.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Michael E. Sawyer is Professor with Tenure of African American Literature & Culture, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X, An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis, and Sir Lewis.

REVIEWS

“This work, stunning in its lucidity, develops the notion of a Black Aesthetic through an engagement with Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a range of scholarly and popular forms of Black thought. Accepting the importance of Afropessimist insistence on the pervasive reality of anti-Blackness, Sawyer nevertheless finds the thresholds and liminal spaces that open up both imagination and a transformative futurity. Generous and attentive in his readings of a range of texts, songs, theories, and fictions, Sawyer opens a world and lets us think, perhaps for the first time, about what that world has been, is, and will be. Speculative, capacious, careful, compelling, and brilliant, The Door of No Return demonstrates a Black Aesthetic that creates paths and redraws the maps of space and world, as if for the first time.”—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

“The Door of No Return is the Black radical expression that passes any form of an impasse and breaks any foreclosure to dwell in improvisation. It is in this sense that we must accept this offering as an invitation to listen differently, to congregate otherwise, to be out of/there. Michael Sawyer must be commended for gracing us with this performance of Black thought.”—Tendayi Sithole, Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Prefatory Note

Acknowledgments

Note on Language and Terms

Introduction

Part I. Cognition

Part II. Consciousness

Part III. The Bearable Rightness of Being-as-Black

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

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