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In its integrationist, separatist, and emigrationist components, Black nationalism emerged from the racial fracture that W.E.B. Du Bois defined in the prophetic image of the "color line": "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."(1) Well before Du Bois, Martin Robinson Delany, one of the pioneers of the movement for Black repatriation to Africa, had already emphasized the extent to which the racial question would mark humanity in the centuries to come:
It would be duplicity longer to disguise the fact that the great issue, sooner or later, upon which must be disputed the world's destiny, will be a question of black and white, and every individual will be called upon for his identity with one or the other. The blacks and colored races are four-sixths of all population of the world: and these people are fast tending to a common cause with each other.(2)
In the face of the insurmountable breach that racism had opened in the heart of American society, Martin Delany posited the necessity of an intra-racial solidarity that had to result in the birth of a Black nation. Through their land of origin, Africa, Black people could put an end to their condition of servitude and achieve the status of an autonomous and recognized entity.
The present article attempts to open a new path of interpretation of Delany's work by examining the question of "separatism" from an ontologico-historic angle. We shall try to show that the irrepressible quest for a land as expressed in his various writings is first of all determined by the acute consciousness of the drama of the break with Africa. In this sense, Delany's nationalism is situated within the philosophical paradigm that Lewis R. Gordon has called "Black revolutionary existentialist thought."(3) This thought postulates that the African-American "being" is the locus of an aporia due to its expulsion from history. The Black individual can only recover his or her essence on the basis of a questioning of his existence as an ahistorical subject. Thus, revolutionary ontology is first of all a project: that of the restoration of the...