# Fetters on belonging: rethinking the master-slave dialectic  
For scholars of the African diaspora, the Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage, in its reworking from Césaire and Fanon to Susan Buck-Morss and Michelle M. Wright, shapes their conceptualizations of the master-slave dialectic as a material and metaphysical one in which blacks work for the wealth and well-being of the white/settler/master/fully modern/transparent subject. ${ }^{10}$ Wright underscores the fundamentality of the dialectic for black being, identifying 'a twentieth-century intellectual tradition of African diasporic counter discourses' that define 'Black subjectivity as that which must be negotiated between the abstract and the real or [...] between the ideal and the material' (Wright, 2004, p. 3). The tradition of defining black subjectivity as identified by Wright emerges from this excavation of the Other. However, Hegel's dialectic, read across his phenomenology and history, produces the black other and a vanishing native subject.