Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination

<I>Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Racial Nationalist Imagination</I> is a critical study of one of the most prolific and knowledgeable black-world intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on his writings it shows the contradictions ambiguities complexities and paradoxes in Blyden's powerful black racial nationalism. Blyden was a modernist who called upon African Americans to uplift Africa; yet he was a defender of Africa's culture and customs. He was the most sophisticated critic of Eurocentrism; yet he was an avid Anglophile. He was a Protestant who admired Islam's civilizing role in Africa. Blyden was the first black intellectual to advocate for the symbiosis of Africa's triple heritage: indigenous Islamic and Western. His voluminous writings laid the groundwork for some of the most important ideas of African and black diasporic thinkers of the twentieth century including Frantz Fanon Amilcar Cabral Chiekh Anta Diop Leopold Sedar Senghor Aimé Césaire and Walter Rodney.<BR>Though Blyden is often overlooked in the history of modern black thought in this book Teshale Tibebu brings him out of oblivion and engages the reader in an extended systematic evaluation of his written works.<BR><BR>Teshale Tibebu is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of <I>The Making of Modern Ethiopia 1896-1974</I> <I>Hegel and Anti-Semitism</I> and <I>Hegel and the Third World: The Making of Eurocentrism in World History</I>.