2023/09/18 by Fall, Alioune
#Afropolitanism #Black Atlantic #Diaspora #Global Blackness #Modernity #Pan-Africanism
paper · doi:10.57832/3dz0-1684
Racial discourses of the Enlightenment have, for a long time, been subjected to criticism within the Black intellectual tradition. While certain Black theorists of race such as W.E. B DuBois, Edward Wilmot Blyden, have responded to racist ideations of humanism via discourses such as Pan-Africanism, others like Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Paul Gilroy have taken a much more critical stance regarding the expression of racial identity as a counter discourse to European modernity. In fact, they even question the racial foundations of this form of Black radicalism which, according to them, articulates the limits of approaching identities through the racial paradigm. This philosophical conversation creates two different currents in the Black intellectual tradition: a racialist school of thought that ontologizes Blackness to express a pan-Africanist discourse that liberates the Black subject from white hegemony and an anti-racialist school that denounces anti-Black racism by presenting European modernity as a cultural syncretism that transcends racial particularities. Both of these philosophical interventions on race, racism, and (Anti)Blackness influence contemporary articulations of postcolonial Black subjectivities which underscore an Afro-Atlantic experience, a rootedness in Western modernity, and a discourse of self-hood. I argue, therefore, that it is theoretically unfounded to concur, as Cheryl Sterling argues in “Race Matters: Cosmopolitanism, Afropolitanism, and Pan-Africanism,” that discourses of global Africanness like Afropolitanism, the Afro-Chic or Afro-futurism are exclusionary, and elitist therefore not pan-African. Africanness should be understood in the contemporary global context in its performative dimension as an expression of cultural difference that celebrates a rootedness in the Afro-Atlantic experience, an engagement with European modernity via the nation-state, and an articulation of self-worth that reimagines the future of people of African descent. In this lens, a Pan-Africanist understanding of these global iterations of Africanness lies in its reinvention as a humanist discourse grounded on these three principles: Black liberation and self-determination, postcolonial subjectivity, and (trans)national affiliation. These three principles show that manifestations of Blackness in the postcolonial era transcend Black people’s collective identification to a singular African root as it was advocated in Blyden’s iterations of a return to a Black Africa. It is rather a continuous exploration of the dignity of people of African descent whether in Africa or the Black diaspora, a reimagination, beyond the “racial contract”, of institutions of power such as the nation-state which constantly smother the prevalence of Black life, and an acknowledgement of the transformative dimension of Afro-Atlantic identities which value people of African descents’ experiences within and beyond the nation-state as they embark on self-restorative journeys in the African continent.