discussion by asserting that 'blackness is neither a scientific nor a biological discovery, nor is it the creation of black peoples'. She locates its origins in the ideas of eighteenth-century white European politicians and philosophers who, as they created these categories, simultaneously created equivalences between blackness and inferiority. She pursues some of the historical ways in which scholars and movements have contested these definitions over time and have sought consistently to redefine blackness for positive application. Her discussion takes us through the ideas of those who showed how the black body has been racialized, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon to Hortense Spillers, the latter also locating the black female body as a site of contestation. Wright examines and challenges the logic of 'post-blackness' in its short-lived 'postracial' articulation and concludes that blackness today exceeds all definitions.