Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory by Mark Christian Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory by Mark Christian Thompson Bill V. Mullen Mark Christian Thompson. Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory. U of Chicago P, 2022. 195 pp. Mark Christian Thompson's dense and provocative Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory puts forth a clear if difficult-to-prove thesis. Thompson argues that African American cultural criticism in the 1960s was marked by a turn "from sociology and anthropology to philosophy and critical theory" (1–2). The vehicle for that turn was primarily the merging of continental philosophy and Black Power in the thought and work of five canonical figures: James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Thompson's conclusion that these five cleared the ground for the birth of African American studies is his most convincing claim. His weakest is that European philosophy played a pivotal role in this process. Thompson's opening chapter demonstrates the peaks and valleys of his study. He makes an impressive case that Baldwin's homespun version of Black liberation theology is best understood as an engagement with language, specifically the English language, as a sign of both power and alienation for Black writers. Thompson endeavors to pair Baldwin's work with Hans-Georg Gadamer's writings to advance his claim. But Thompson bifurcates the chapter, dedicating the first twelve pages to Gadamer (and Jürgen Habermas) with no sign of Baldwin's thought or work. When Baldwin does appear, it is as a test case of Gadamer's ideas. The question of influence is therefore not fully addressed. Rather than the attempted merger of Gadamer and Baldwin, Thompson might have deepened his examination of Baldwin's relationship to European literature (which was substantial) and its corresponding role in his skepticism about some currents of Pan-African philosophy, such as négritude. Fortunately, the remaining chapters of the book are generally better at establishing a two-way dialogue between Black Power writers and continental thinkers. Chapter 2, on Malcom X, reminds us that Malcolm read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Spinoza while incarcerated, only to deem the majority of them foundational philosophers of Nazism. Yet Thompson also discerns a Black Power method within Malcolm's antagonism to European thought. Malcolm, he writes, "subverts 'the King's English' in a reverse discourse that realigns signified meaning to speak against the medium of its signification" (64), enabling him to fashion a self that can speak truth to all forms of power. Less convincing is Thompson's leap to the conclusion that Malcom's understanding of language and power is End Page 188 "Foucauldian." That argument would be better served as the subject of an entirely different chapter. Thompson's chapter 3 on Baraka is the conceptual centerpiece of the book. In his introduction, Thompson argues that Baraka's 1963 book Blues People: Negro Music in White America began the turn from Black sociology to Black philosophy and critical theory. Baraka is a convincing candidate for this role, having studied European Marxism, including the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and György Lukács, and tailored it to his own thinking. Here, Thompson argues that Baraka both rejected Adorno's dismissal of jazz and Lukács's theory of the European proletariat as the agent of history to center Blackness and Black subjectivity in his critique of western capitalist culture and modernity. Thompson also draws in Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison as counterpoints to Baraka's theory of "Literary Negro-ness." However, a caution against Thompson's claim that Blues People eschews "sociology and anthropology" (1) for so-called pure theory in its relentless class analysis of blues, and Baraka's pointedly anti-capitalist defense of Black cultural production from below. Thompson's chapter on Cleaver is a sometimes confusing cross-hatch on a confused thinker. Thompson argues that Cleaver's notorious and misogynistic theorizing of sexuality in Soul on Ice is "gleaned mostly from Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Plato's Symposium" (98)—though he doesn't give us textual tracings. More persuasively, he walks us through Cleaver's eclectic philosophical temperament via a reminder that, while incarcerated, Cleaver studied under Chris Lovdjieff, where...