Opening Quotes from Walker Lecture

“Striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness.  By saying this I do not mean to suggest that taking on either or both of these unfinished identities necessarily exhausts the subjective resources of any particular individual.  However where racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses orchestrate political relationships so that these identities appear to be mutually exclusive, occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination.”

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself; as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks

“Under any circumstances, men and women trained to consume at elite grammar schools and lycées the cultural and moral lessons of Pericles and Euripides, of Livy and Dostoyevski, Matthew Arnold and Flaubert in English, French, Greek, and Latin, are apt to feel some distance fro their less educated brethren.  Indeed, like many traditional intellectuals, they are likely to feel ‘above,’ cut off from, or a separate class from the community to which they belong and are destined to serve only insofar as they lead.”

Paul Idahosa,  James and Fanon and the Problem of the Intelligentsia in Popular Organizations