Lord–bondsman dialectic

The existence of black as absence needs to be understood, for example, if we're studying the history of American literature, as the means of constructing whiteness, of that which liberates whiteness from the forms of constraint under which it's been chafing at the bit.

Morrison, of course, develops this argument beautifully, and she quite clearly takes it from the fourth chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind as a way of understanding the master-slave dialectic.

In other words, it's clear as Hegel develops That's the idea that master and slave are absolutely necessary to each other in a structure of mutuality.

The master isn't the master, can't define himself as free or superior without the existence of the slave.

It shares, however, with structuralism a theoretical predisposition.

Baba, if you look at page 1879, openly criticizes the premise of binarism of this kind, not just any binarism, but he actually does go directly back to Hegel.

In other words, he identifies the source of thinking of this kind, bottom of 1879, right-hand column, when he says, It is this ambivalence, that makes the boundaries of colonial positionality, the division of self-other, the question of colonial power, the differentiation of colonizer-colonized, different from both the Hegelian master-slave dialectic or and he goes on to mention other things, but I just want to focus on this as a moment in which Baba is distinguishing himself as clearly as he can.

from the project of Said.