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The committee’s nomination for the 2008 Porter Prize is Cecil Foster’s Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom.
Blackness and Modernity is a work that traverses the fields of cultural sociology, anthropology and social philosophy in its interrogation of the relationship and interaction between blackness as both an embodiment of material-somatic inequality and exclusion on the one hand, and a metaphor or relay of social and cultural movement and change on the other.
Foster recuperates the Hegelian tradition of speculative dialectics as his method of analysis into the relationship between these two levels, or registers, of blackness. This results in a work that departs radically from the kind of linear argumentative development we normally associate with sociological thought. Blackness and Modernity is a work of discourse in the literal sense – fluid, motile, allusive, and helical. It is a genuinely contemplative work that represents the culmination of a long and no doubt challenging and difficult process of intellectual inquiry.
The author will present the Porter Lecture at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association .
Cecil: Is this what you were thinking – Blackness and Modernity – when we were hanging out in Irvine Hall at UWI in Jamaica back in the 70s? Great book!