Acknowledgments; A Note on Transliteration; Abbreviations Used in Citations of Kant's Work; Foreword; 1 Introduction: Critique of Incorporation; Part I. Writing Being: The Slave Narrative as the Original Text; 2 Critique of American Enlightenment: The Problem with the Writing of Culture; 3 Writing Culture in the Negro: Grammatology of Civil Society and Slavery; 4 Critique of Genealogical Deduction: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the (Dis)Formation of Canon Formation
Summary
Judy offers an alternative interpretation of literacy that challenges traditional Enlightenment discourses claim that literacy and reason are the privileged properties of Western culture. Judy argues, on the basis of his readings of autobiographical African-American Arabic slave narratives, that through the production of the Arabic text, the African slave already had all the elements that the West attributes to "reason" before his original introduction to Western culturea literacy that already mediated between Africa and Europe
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 291-331) and index
