This piece briefly revisits SOCIAL TEXT’s promise and vantage as a forum for emergent critical scholarship on the challenges of repoliticizing post-civil rights political subjectivities and the relevance of public intellectuals within the promise of black politics in the wake of Barack Obama’s historic ascension to the presidency of the United States. Parsing cultural strains of racial triumph and vexation, of political elation as well as mourning, that mark the Obama phenomenon, the piece underscores the urgency of critically interrogating the post in “postracial.”
