Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora (original) (raw)

Abstract

P eople of African descent have often been depicted as the antithesis of Western modernity and modern subjectivity. There is an ample, if sometimes frustrating, literature written by both Western and non-Western scholars that attests, purposely or not, to this depiction. I am not interested, however, in adding to this vast heap of documentation in an effort to prove or disprove the absolute villainy of the West; nor am I preoccupied with displaying the unqualified humanity of people of African descent. This article seeks to respond to the following question: How and in what ways have African-descended peoples been modern subjects? My interest in the relationship between the discourses, institutions, norms, and practices of modernity and people of African descent has been motivated by the belief that virtually all discussions and literatures pertaining to people of African descent, ranging from black nationalism to Pan-Africanism, to anticolonialism and civil rights, are undergirded by premises of and reactions to some notion or practice of modernity. Whether in the form of the nation-state or universal ideas about human rights, black nationalism, and racial as well as other modes of collective identity have invariably reacted against or innovated upon discourses of modernity. Virtually all transnational black movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have utilized ideas about racial selfhood and collective identity, capitalism and socialism, justice and democracy that emerged as the economic, political, normative, religious, and cultural consequences of the epoch in which they lived. Unlike the Middle Ages, wherein neither peasants nor serfs could use 245

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