Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech,Barbarism,and the Euromodern World

Abstract

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromodernity, contrastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution.

This essay offers a reconstructive reading of black liberation within the twenty-first century, reimagined in contemporary parlance as the Black Lives Matter movement. It was Anna Julia Cooper who once dismissed as a barbaric proposition, discourses on women’s rational faculties that contend “higher education was incompatible with the shape of the female cerebrum” (1988, 65). Her rejoinder was simple: “But these are eighteenth century ideas,” ones unsuited for the modern sensibilities of the nineteenth century, in which she wrote (1988, 66). W.E.B Du Bois, in the same vein, argued: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (1994, 9). Du Bois’ problematizing of the race problem, or more historically, the Negro problem, as being a constitutive feature of modernity or civilizational progress, renders analyses of anti-black racism incoherent or inchoate, if they elide critical conversations about what it means to be a modern subject in a seemingly modern age.

In what follows, I offer an interpretation of Black Lives Matter ¹ (BLM) as a form of political speech that opposes the Euromodern project of preempting and disavowing blackness. In the Euromodern world, to be black is to be a barbaric artifact of the past, warranting exile from the world of the present and, most crucially, the political sphere wherein the world of the future is produced. As such, I propose that implicit in the formulation that “Black Lives Matter” is the claim that black speech is understood as having an intrinsically political function. I begin by articulating a portrait of Euromodernity as reconfiguring an Aristotelian logic of politics, speech, and barbarism. I then develop an account of how Euromodernity’s rendering of blackness sediments as a form of racialized criminality and illicit appearance, necessitating colonial modes of control and incarceration. I then turn to elucidating Black Lives Matter as exemplifying and developing an Afromodern approach to political speech. Finally, I analyze this Afromodern approach as a mode of abolition-democracy whose revolutionary telos is one where Black Lives Matter can, in short, be re-interpreted as an attempt to abolish the Euromodern world such that Afromodern political speech can emerge. This democratic revolution of the human being forms the basis for the continuity of liberation projects, writ large.

Colonizing Political Speech: The Genealogy of Black Barbarism

The portrait of the black in the Euromodern world is one that resides below the line of the human being. To be human is always a disclosive affair. Aristotle (1995) in Politics declared, “man is by nature a political animal” (1253a1); it is speech that politicizes man. Without speech man is rendered outside the political (the sphere of the human); that is, apolitical “man” is oxymoronic and moreover, a threat to politics itself:

[M]an is the only animal who has the gift of speech….the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore, the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state. (1253a10;15)

The politicality of speech, or as I term it, political speech, is indispensable to the human condition (Chevannes 2023). For within speech, lies the capacity to reason; political speech “set[s] forth,” as a rational disclosure, “the expedient and inexpedient, the just and the unjust,” which, upon its elaboration becomes the sine qua non of human modes of association. Political speech becomes a disclosive human phenomenon; it is reclamation through revelation. Political speech is a claiming through disclosure. It allows for political contestation by inserting a word, or more acutely, a deed, as a necessary interruption to the status quo ante. It is having a decisive say in the constitution of political life. As a consequence, it functions as an ethical and epistemic mooring of self in the uncertainty of mundane life. Thus, in the constitution of the polity, speech becomes indispensable for it communicates the content of ethical life. For what is society if there are no shared values around which to subsist? Speech, consonant with the Aristotelian view, coheres as the essence of political living. Yet, a crisis quickly arises when such speech is a priori denied through its privatization, understood here as a narrowing enclosure around the ambit of the political. In one sense, it is a colonizing of political speech, a delimiting of its expressive contents.

Aristotle, in Ethics, introduces the question of the “brute,” one who is ruled by sensual excesses: “[S]elf-indulgence… attaches to us not as men but as animals. To delight in such things, then, and to love them above all others, is brutish” (2020, 48). The brute is seldom a man but regularly, a barbarian: “[T]he brutish type is rarely found among men; it is found chiefly among barbarians, but some brutish qualities are also produced by disease or deformity; and we also call by this evil name those men who go beyond all ordinary standards by reason of vice” (2020, 89). It is within the matrix of Aristotelian rationality that Frederick Douglass unspools the tragic nexus of brutehood and black selfhood, whereby, within the Euromodern apparatus, the two become inextricably enmeshed, “the grand aim of slavery, [is] always and everywhere…to reduce man to a level with the brute…the condition of a slave is simply that of the brute beast” (2003, 32; 302). Brutehood—an inured apolitical bestiality—is a naturalistic deviation from humanness. The barbarian necessarily becomes the brute because, like bestial animals, the barbarian lacks political speech and is therefore enslaved by vice. Such beings are thought to be “[c]lanless and lawless and hearthless…The man who is such by nature [barbarian] at once plunges into a passion of war” (Aristotle, 1253a2). This associatory linkage between barbarity and unintelligibility becomes more expansive to incorporate the spectre of violence, lawlessness and of course, brute force, in every imaginable sense. Passions supplant reason. Put differently, the barbarian is a member of those “races” who exhibit a poverty of rational faculties. Theirs is an existence already condemnable to valueless and violent ends. Barbarians, in effect, become speechless beings and thereby pronouncedly anti-political—a bestial rot on the architecture of the polity. Aristotle’s philosophic logics sediment an epistemological heritage for the continuity of the Greco-Roman line of analytical thought that hardens as the basis for a European rationality witnessed in the voyages to the New World and serve as the justificatory ground upon which the genocide and enslavement of Amerindian and black peoples would so inaugurate. These logics thus are at work in what Sylvia Wynter dubs the “racial longue durée” (2003, 263).

Within the Euromodern world, Blackness subsists in exiled quarters alongside the figure of slaves, fugitives, maroons, mammies, and contemporarily, prisoners. The falsity of European reason engendered uneven, ruptured social relations among human beings that culminated in a serial unfolding of Euromodern cataclysms, from chattel slavery and its trade, colonialism, imperialism, Apartheid and even now, the couplet of police brutality and black carcerality, all the while cohering themselves along racial axes embedded in European rationality. In this constellation of orbiting historical events, black lives, on account of racial difference, became primal barbarism: Europeans “contemptuously branded all other nations barbarians” (Rousseau 2002, 53). The linguistic archaeology of the barbarian excavates its Greek origins, bárbaros, denoting one who does not speak the language of the Greeks or the Romans. The barbarian is non-Greek or non-Roman and therefore “strange” or “foreign,” as (s)he is without the conceit of human reason. Non-European speech is quite literally reduced to “ba-ba-ba,” from the earshot of the Greeks and ergo, nonsensical. This unintelligibility is taken as indicating an absence of reason. Hence, intelligibility becomes a colonized domain. Euromodernity, then, is the political articulation of Eurocentricity. It is a governing system of racialist inducements, not simply of genocidal events, murderous as they were, but also of the reconstituting project of an Old World civilizing mission. The Euromodern telos, thus, re-patrols and re-polices those antiquated lines of licit and illicit, of public and private, and of civilized and barbaric.

In the epochal expansion of European civilization in the late fifteen century, through modes of conquest and colonization, a new classificatory schema of race erupted as a modern and Western phenomenon. Such modernism, articulable often in terms of the Enlightenment, would constitute the progression of letters, the arts and sciences, social norms, and political values that are wholly Eurocentric but reinscribed as a universal humanism. Along such charted trajectories of epistemic Westernization stood the musings of Spanish philosopher, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who penned the justification for the war against the Amerindians peoples of the New World. His rationalization of “Indian” barbarity grounds itself in Aristotelian ethics. Sepúlveda reasons: “Compare, then, these gifts of prudence, talent, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those possessed by these half-men (homunculi), in whom you will barely find the vestiges of humanity, who not only do not possess any learning at all…nor do they have written laws, but barbarian institutions and customs” (1961). The barbarian is a brute by the nature of him being a homunculi, a half-man denoting a subhumanity and its attendant subrationality. The rational interlocutor, the one endowed with political speech, is the civilized European. Under the European view, indigenous barbarians cannot speak and therefore, induce themselves in the slew of brutish excesses. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Spanish priest and historian, would counter Sepúlveda’s mediations on Amerindian subhumanity. But even Las Casas did not contest the prevailing Aristotelian view: “[B]arbarian in the loose and broad sense of the word means any cruel, inhuman, wild, and merciless man acting against human reason out of anger or native disposition…[H]e is called a barbarian who, because of the difference of his language, does not understand another speaking to him” (1992, 29–31). The relation between the lack of reason and embodied brutehood would signify one who has nothing to say because (s)he babbles incomprehensibly. Lacking political speech, the being lacks disclosiveness and thus, humanity. In the Euromodern world, the trope of the savage Indian would forge a formative basis for the racialization of barbarism, but does not complete it. The black would emerge as a prefigured extension of this calcified formula of subhumanity. Sylvia Wynter explains the anthropological arithmetic of a subtractive Euromodern humanism: “From the beginning, it would be the ‘Negroes’ who would be consigned to the pre-Darwinian last link in the Chain of Being—to the ‘missing link’ position, therefore, between rational humans and irrational animals” (2003, 301). The black would come to be emplotted at the bottom of the racialist Euromodern hierarchization of being; the black is, in a word, the consummate barbarian, one who is speechless and therefore, anti-political.

Yet, even La Casas, the defender of the Amerindians, nonetheless weaponized Aristotelian thought to condemn the Moors, alongside the Turks, who embody “the truly barbaric scum of the nations” (1992, 47). This Aristotelian logic would not simply constitute a historical footnote by way of the Sepúlveda-Las Casas dispute but would inform the grammar of Euromodern anti-black racism. As such, Orlando Patterson notes: “[F]or generations the dominant school of historical scholarship on slavery in America…had thoroughly persuaded itself and its audience that the great achievement of American slavery was the civilizing of the black race, its tutorship and elevation from savagery to civilization” (2018, 334–335). This commitment to historical falsification and the rigorous quarantine of truth in the Euromodern apparatus of knowledge-production became animated by the arrest of Afrocentric political speech, an effort to render the black an exilic object outside the bounds of modernity. Hence, U.S. President Andrew Johnson would claim: “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people….wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism” (quoted in Du Bois 1998, 341). As a historical matter, the relation between the barbaric and the black occasioned the criminalization of the latter. Carcerality would become, at worst, a new portal for political exile and at best, a modernized civilizing mission, today categorized and camouflaged as black “rehabilitation.”

Euromodernity and Black Criminality

Euromodernity is rooted in questioning whether subjects belong in a world of civilization and progress. As such, it draws a raced schema of the natural order of things, demarcating peoples meriting inclusion from those beings necessitating expulsion. On this score, Aníbal Quijano writes:

The fact that Western Europeans will imagine themselves to be the culmination of a civilizing trajectory from a state of nature leads them also to think of themselves as the moderns of humanity and its history, that is, as the new, and at the same time, most advanced of the species. But since they attribute the rest of the species to a category by nature inferior and consequently anterior, belonging to the past in the progress of the species, the Europeans imagine themselves as the exclusive bearers, creators, and protagonists of that modernity (2000, 542).

The black subject is a priori adjudicated to be anathema to the project of human civilization and thus, meriting exile from the circuitry of human associations. Lewis R. Gordon denotes Euromodernity to be a “constellation of convictions, arguments, policies, and a worldview promoting the idea that the only way legitimately to belong to the present and as a consequence the future is to be or become European” (2018, 20). This racial narrowing of the philosophical anthropology of the human being necessarily results in critical truncations. The Euromodern world, Gordon concludes, “places ‘European’ as a necessary condition of belonging, continuation, and selfhood—features of all Modernities—which, in effect, relegates those who do not fit either to the past or to kinds of nowhere and no-man’s-land” (ibid). This no-man’s land, the land of the black—Africa and its diasporic zones—becomes a site of political desolation.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad catalogues the criminalization of blackness as the preservation of the imposed subjectivist limit of the black as a primitive embodiment within the contours of Euromodernity. “[T]he statistical discourse on black criminality from the 1890s forward was a modern invention that encapsulated northern and southern [American] ideas about race and crime…Beginning in the late nineteenth century, statistical rhetoric of the ‘Negro criminal’ became a proxy for a national discourse for black inferiority” (2019, 5; 6). Therefore, in pursuit of the linearity of Sepúlveda’s ethno-philosophic logic that Amerindian barbarism legitimated just warfare, Euromodern reason pursued the justificatory means for the black to be raced barbarian such that black existence constitutes an assault upon modern civilization. Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, Apartheid, a militarized “War on Crime” (Soss and Weaver 2017, 570) and “War on Drugs” with its corresponding carcerality of black personhood (Alexander 2012; Dawson & Francis 2015, et al) would all develop as historical manifestations of this anti-black Euromodern grammar. The black subject is biologized as barbarian, unintelligible, and therefore, not only unhearable but meriting warlike efforts of muzzling and gagging. From the gaze of European reason, modernity becomes the basis for the hierarchization of being; therefore, its’ raced arithmetic measurable as various gradations of anti-black racism, whether they be scientific or systemic racism, can be understood as formulating a civilizational dislocation. Within Euromodernity, blackness becomes an anthropological miscarriage—a political stillborn, as it were, or as W.E.B. Du Bois reveals, “They [whites] deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth!” (1987, 923). Black political speech is thus aborted, and speechlessness totalizes black existence, sublating the conditions for a political future understood as a form of black futurity—disavowing Afromodernity. The Euromodern world pursues black expulsion as a form of what Aristotle calls “the natural outcast,” a species of anti-political, barbaric beings (1253a1). If Eurocentrism maintains, as Quijano puts it, “the idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe” (2000, 542), then the black is one who must be exiled from modern politics in order for this trajectory to be completed. Euromodernity becomes a suspension of black temporal agency and an attempt to occlude the conditions for world-creation. It is a privatizing, a colonizing of political speech such that the only articulable world lies memorialized in the white political imagination.

Although the construction of blackness as barbarism is first and foremost an effort to colonize political possibilities by negating black speech, this movement requires as well, a shift towards a claim about social, and not merely political, pathology. There is an effort to disqualify not only black discursive appearance but also black aesthetic appearance, that is, efforts to colonize, inferiorize, and/or eradicate black sociality and even, corporeality. The barbarian question, initially a political formulation, transmutes into a social problem: the mere presence of the savage. Savagery becomes the effect, not the cause, of barbarism. Blackness sublimates as crime, or as Frederick Douglass succinctly puts it, we “impute color to crime,” and as such, this criminalization of color manufactures exiles who are void of communicative agency and entrapped within the liminality of the illicit—barred, quite literally, from having a say in the constitution of political life (1955, 379). This is why Muhammad argues: “[T]he latest projection is that roughly one in three African American boys born in 2001 will eventually be incarcerated at some point in his life. By comparison…one in sixteen white boys of the same birth cohort will go to prison” (2019, 28). Such a barbarous pathologizing of the human being becomes reabsorbed in the modern state as imprisoned criminality and the carceral subject is one that is shut out, in every apparent sense, from the world of political others.

Within this Euromodern world order, carcerality becomes a metonymy for blackness, or as Marie Gottschalk concludes, “a stint in prison or jail would continue to be a rite of passage for many African Americans” (2015, 32). That rite of passage, not merely an ethno-theological ritual imposed upon the black, but also it becomes profoundly biologized as the essence of black being, “[f]or African-American youths in particular, the experience of arrest and jailing seems to have become something of a puberty rite, a transition to manhood” (cited in Soss and Weaver 2017, 581). This raced somaticizing of criminality as blackness exposes its lengthy genealogical threads, continuing the Aristotelian lineage that the barbarian is “lawless because he did not submit to the rule of law” (de Las Casas 1992, 33). This explains well the ready-made white justification for the extra-judicial police killings of blacks: (s)he did not comply. Black life, in this logic, always might have been salvageable if only it had managed to be compliant. But this representation of blackness functions a priori rather than a posteriori; the death of a black person is evidence enough of failure to comply, rather than something justified only through explicit evidence of non-compliance. Trayvon Martin did not comply; Eric Garner did not comply; Sandra Bland did not comply; George Floyd did not comply. To comply, of course, is to remain speechless—muzzled—in the face of black decimation.

In such a hyperpoliced zone, the black must stay in line. Michael C. Dawson and Megan Ming Francis observe, in “the killing of unarmed black youth by modern racist vigilantes such as [George] Zimmerman or the deadly school-to-prison pipeline, the state plays its own role in keeping blacks in their place” (2015, 45). This militarization of compliance breeds servility. That is, to “stay in line” or “stay in place” functions as a muting of black existence, as (s)he is met with full force of the law because the barbarian is a “criminal, since he cannot bring his acts into line with the dictates of reason” (de Las Casas 1992, 33). In the Euromodern world, the black is an errant embodiment—a living error, as it were—and as such, (s)he is already wrong, that is, the wrong human being or, as Sylvia Wynter labels it: “an unbearable wrongness of being” (2006, 113).

Euromodern reason couples itself with the infrastructure of the state, including its juridical architecture, or what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes as “the draconian law-and-order regime” (2016, 112). To be lawless instantiates a retreat from rationality, a flight from reason itself. To compel law and order settles as a civilizing project to denude blackness of any expressive modern agency, “[t]he barbarian world was Africa, and the civilized world was Europe” (Césaire 2000, 88). In the Euromodern world, Afrocentricity stands as anti-politics, a base threat to the existence of the polity itself. As such, the regime of law and order becomes a juridical instrument for black silencing. The consequences of such states of unfreedom, impede, if not amputate, the social and cultural appendages of black life: “Today, under the banner of ‘law and order’, the criminalization of blackness is found in more routine forms of race-based policing. Whether walking to school, returning home, or driving, blacks are more likely to be stopped and questioned by the police” (Dawson and Francis 2015, 36). Indeed, the very notion of “driving while black,” as well as the phenomenon of black parents deputizing themselves, as an act of generational survival, to have “the talk” to their dark-skinned offspring when interacting with law enforcement, confirm a crisis of politics such that black self-expression become stymied by the handcuffs of the Euromodern state. This denial of political speech attempts to eliminate a world of black cultural and social productions. Take, for instance, Ahmaud Arbery’s citizen arrest and public execution. His crime was embodied black publicity, not having a white justificatory reason for an illicit black public appearance.

When political speech becomes captive to the decadent logics of an essentialist racial schema, it enters the orbit of the colonial world, wherein knowledge generation gravitates around the Global North and casts a shadow on the colonized. Euromodern rationality becomes the citadel of human reason. Its sacred sanctum is absolute control, and law and order become its juridical articulation. Therefore, as a regulatory edifice, the latter subsumes and negates other forms of “illicit” appearances, including, but not limited to, the black subject. This colonizing of political speech induces a form of political death. Hannah Arendt theorizes the critical import of speech and action for political life: “[s]peech and action reveal this unique distinctness…they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men” (1989, 176). Arendtian “distinctness” becomes a rudimentary facet of human plurality, that is, the appearance of the human being in the public realm. This appearance allows for the performance of politics, whereby world-creation becomes possible. The absence of speech and action produces an abortive, death-bound ² project: “A life without speech and without action, on the other hand…is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (ibid). In the Arendtian tradition, a speechless life is actionless; politically, it is dead. In Euromodernity, this becomes manifest in forms of social death, as in Orlando Patterson’s formulation (2018), as well as civil death: “The carceral state has condemned millions of people in the United States to ‘civil death’, denied core civil liberties and social benefits because of a criminal conviction” (Gottschalk 2014, 290). Such “deaths” function to condemn the subject to permanent speechlessness. This is reflected in the etymology of incarcerate, from the Latin incarceratus, which means to “shut up in jail”—it is a bodied silencing, a constrictive enclosure around black communicative existence. This eradication of black speech is essential, rather than accidental, to the history of Euromodern incarceration. The nexus between carcerality and modernity is inextricably enmeshed in the vexed logics of race, for the advent and continuity of American policing is but a reanimated relic of the old slavocratic order, “[s]ince the origins of modern American policing and imprisonment, black people—free, enslaved, and self-emancipated—have consistently been the targets of unique forms of policing and confinement” (Hinton and Cook 2020, 265). Such a confinement explicates the conditions of exile that the barbarian must undergo, a life stripped bare of political freedom. The systematized disenfranchisement of the incarcerated stands as a modern re-inscription of an old slavocratic telos.

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was slain because of what law enforcement thought to be a real firearm. The “firearm” was, in fact, only a toy replica. Euromodernity proffers no presumption of innocence to the black because, in his exilic and exotic state, shrouded in barbarity, the black orbits outside the realm of those whom the juridical apparatus is devised to protect and serve. To conceive black people as human beings, whereby their presence no longer conjures the illicit, is to invite black speech and pry open what Arendt names the space of appearance, one where reciprocal recognition is attained: “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me” (1989, 198). An anti-black society attempts a foreclosure of such space through the black’s signification as an ethnicized barbarian: “This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian…do not live in it” (Arendt 1989, 199). The black becomes exiled from the political on account of her racialized barbarism. Euromodernity proffers a closed dialectics of the citizen and the barbarian, of free and unfree; it is a refusal, indeed, a silencing of dialectical possibility. Civilization, under European grammar, is a retreat from barbarous enclaves; it is a frantic escape from the wild passions of savage life that is, in reality, a human life disavowed. The absence of speech, therefore, socially engineers a death-bound subject who is exiled to the carceral sphere—the sphere of an exilic barbarism penally institutionalized as black.

Afromodernity and the Inauguration of Black Lives Matter

Generating radical change by decolonizing political speech allows for the possibility of a new social order. Such possibilities represent a transmutation from the old order of being to a new order of becoming. It is a historical rupture from the dictates of Euromodern reason and its genealogy of black barbarism. This is what Fanon considers the fecund possibilities inherent in new social relations among human beings, toward a new communicative humanism: “[L]et us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it” (2004, 239). This disinvestment and breakage from modernity as a wholly European spectacle forces a contestation of new indices of human development. It is (re)imagining and enacting state and subject formation beyond Euromodern methodologies. To begin, there must be, as Fanon concludes, a new architecture of the human, “for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must take a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (ibid). To create a “new man” is an expressive enterprise, it is a communicative reality. It is liberation from the prisons and prisms of barbarism. Afromodernity speaks to the possibility a new cartography of liberation and it does this, firstly, through historical reclamation. Michael Hanchard makes this reflection: “Intrinsic to Afro-Modern consciousness and politics is a concern for historical narrative…to project a history and to prove or acknowledge that the existence of people of African descent has been worthy of text” (1999, 250). Our concern here is the anthropological text—the discursive content of the human—as being narrativized by historical scripts of contingency, that is, being a political animal capable of speech.

To do this, one needs “to become conscious,” which is “the first step toward a genuine retrieval of self” (Diop 1974, XV). Such a retrieval is a progression towards an ascent to historical consciousness. Truth makes historical reclamation possible. This is why Fanon argued that “[t]ruth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation” (2004, 14). Truth becomes a disruptive intervention that obstructs Euromodern falsehoods and instead, recreates a new sense of being human. In a word, it possesses world-making properties. Stuart Hall reasons “how deeply intertwined in the history of Europe are the values of ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’” (2021, 381). Afromodernity is not preoccupied with decoupling European values of civilized and barbarian, which produces a closed dialectics, but rather contending with the open question of interrogating politics as a truth-telling enterprise and therefore, enabling the conditions for new formations and resignifications of self and other, of struggling for a discursive renewal of the black subject toward a de-carceral, de-barbarized self, or what Sylvia Wynter calls the “Black Human Other” (2003, 327).

Black Lives Matter is one of many contemporary movements for such a renewal. Black Lives Matter, though obtaining this explicit formulation only in the twenty-first century, can be understood as denoting a much lengthier historical lineage of protest. It is an open particularism from which springs a universal condition. Black Lives Matter becomes a social revolution with political and ethical implications as it attempts a decentering of the old racial economy and its agents of racial destitution. It is what Kwame Nkrumah adumbrates of the social revolution, “a revolution in which our thinking and philosophy are directed towards the redemption of society” (2009, 78). This epistemic redemption proffers differentiated avenues for thinking blackness anew, dislodged from the old order of knowledge. That is to say, BLM makes possible the continued emergence of black reason by excavating a universalism from below—one of an evolutionary dialectical relation between the universal and the particular to give rise to a third phenomenon: a new reality. An emerging black episteme maps its genesis in historicizing the black condition. This historical reclamation returns us to the dialectics of barbarism and civilization: “[t]he history of Africa, as presented by European scholars, has been encumbered with malicious myths. It was even denied that we were a historical people” (Nkrumah 2009, 62). Black Lives Matter, as discursive symbology, functions as temporal valence, an ongoing re-inscription of the historical account that disavows the so-called errancy of blackness—its incompatibility with modernity. Black Lives Matter refuses colorblind politics and its arm of racial eliminativism. It is an explicit conjuring of race across temporalities. In other words, BLM seeks to undo historical processes of temporal re-enslavement, as captured in Aristotelian logic: “these barbarian peoples are more servile in character than Greeks” (1285a16). BLM’s cultural memory of black power aesthetics becomes citations of its sustained historical re-enactments. Afromodernity is, at once, a rendering of, and contending with, the black as a historical agent. The resignifiability of blackness through an enacted temporal freedom gives passage to another revolutionary movement: building black futurity and with it, a new society premised on the ethics of truth. “To the extent that the teller of factual truth is also a storyteller, he brings about that ‘reconciliation with reality’”—such temporal reconciliation, among past, present, and future, ushers forth a black modernity on the tongue of the oppressed (Arendt 2006, 257). This narrativizing of the enacted scripts of liberation, tells a tale of emancipatory struggle to actualize a newly constructed social and epistemic edifice—Afromodern reason—from which to imagine and think anew, modern political life. It is an animation of political speech for world construction; it is a refusal to be silenced.

Cedric J. Robinson’s mapping of Europe’s civilizational rise illuminates a crucial criterion, “the social basis of European civilization was…[the] ‘barbarian’,” whose shibboleth stood as a “function of exclusion” (2000, 10). Colonialism, imperialism, and slavery became re-inscriptions of the Euromodern dialectic of barbarism:

the African was represented as chattel in their economic image, as slaves in their political and social image, as brutish and therefore inaccessible to further development, and finally as Negro, that is without history…Finally, in our own time, with the development of corporate structures and the myth of the intensively rationalized and rational society, Blacks became the irrational, the violent, criminal, caged beast. (2000, 187)

The historiographical coupling between the production of labor on one hand, as expressing a distinctive class logic, and civilizational development on another, is indeed an inextricable linkage, yet the Afromodern position, contrasted against, say, Black Marxism, holds that the dialectic of class struggle is but one of many central loci around which to understand the indices of anti-black racism, which spin along multiple, congregated axes of class, race, gender, and other social and political categories. This is not to say an Afromodern analysis treats the class question as epiphenomenal to analyses of race but rather conceptualizes it as one of many descriptive, rotating logics. In the end, the prefiguring of blacks as caged beasts who cannot speak, finds its contemporary re-absorption in the carceral refiguration of blacks as speechless caged criminals or, as Angela Davis posits, “[t]he naturalization of black people as criminals” (1997, 271). It for these reasons, to contest Euromodernity’s anti-black racism, Black Lives Matter wages war against the criminalization of blackness in order to inaugurate a new historical reality, an Afromodern turn that rotates toward the politicality of blackness as a form of democratic revolution. It is a radical rupture of the status quo ante through a desacralization of a symbolic economy of Euromodern monuments, including Confederate monuments and other anti-black symbols.

The Afromodern Turn: Black Lives Matter Toward Democratic Revolution

The Euromodern state is a neocolonial state, whose histories are enmeshed within genealogies of conquest, elimination, and subjugation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains: “Prisons are geographical solutions to social and economic crises, politically organized by a racial state that is itself in crisis” (2002, 16). The result leaves behind a “state [that] reproduces racial hierarchy through its capacity to wield despotic power over certain segments of society—whether the decree is to promote a Black woman, put her on workfare, or send her to prison for being a bad, drug-addicted, mother” (2002, 21). The racial state, according to Gilmore, is the culmination of “the development of the U.S. ‘herrenvolk democracy’” (ibid). George Padmore describes the “Herrenvolk philosophy” as “racial arrogance which has reached its apogee” (1956, 18). Herrenvolk derives from the Germanic language denoting “master race.” Therefore, the Herrenvolk democracy is an ethnocratic state entrenched in white supremacy, whose teleological imperative is imperialistic brutalization. U.S. Herrenvolk democracy indexed the height of Euromodern state formation. Du Bois diagnoses the American democratic project as suffering from the Herrenvolk doctrine because “[i]n every possible way it was impressed and advertised that the white was superior and the Negro an inferior race” (1998, 695), which meant the black was nothing but “a caged human being” (1998, 701). Black criminalization and brutalization were an American inevitability: “The murder of Michael Brown hit Black America, and especially African American political activists, as a recursive trauma” (Woodly 2022, 24). European modernity treats the black subject as a hyperpoliced corporeal site, “in modern Eurocentric societies no black bodies can be kept safe from the assault of negrophobic images and representations…in the eyes of the police…[the] black body became that of a wild ‘Hulk-like’ and ‘wounded’ animal whose gesture threatened the existence of civilized society” (Gooding-Williams 2006, 10). Therefore, against the recursivity of black trauma in a Euromodern world, the Afromodern turn stood as an indisputable contest for a democratic revolution, where “He will enter modern civilization here in America as a black man on terms of perfect and unlimited equality with any white man, or he will enter not at all. Either extermination root and branch, or absolute equality. There can be no compromise” (Du Bois 1998, 703).

The democratic revolution, then, is predicated on an absolute, transcendental equality of the human being. It is an abolition of the bestial cages of carceral servitude. As such, the revolutionary content of Black Lives Matter holds the possibility of reorienting the figure of the black subject as a disclosive being, freed from the bars of criminality and with it, an unmuzzling of black subjectivity. In animating political speech within the body politic, there is an assertive demand for institutional transformation and the revolution of democratic norms. Take, for instance, BLM activists’ disruptive suspension of social and political norms. Activists have taken to highways, streetways, restaurants, and other private/public localities to upend the engine that drives the Euromodern capitalist locomotive. “Shut it down!” chants function as discursive desacralizations and epistemic eruptions of the business-as-usual ethic that have come to define a Euromodern economy of black dehumanization. In so doing, BLM occasions a shift in the symbolic universe, as it distends, destabilizes, and deorbits the logics of America’s capitalist post-racial arrangements. Dawson and Francis observe the obfuscatory instruments of this racial, neoliberal order, “[n]eoliberal ideology, by stressing the virtues of free markets and excessive consumerism, redirects attention away from the havoc caused by the intertwined history of white supremacy and capitalistic economic structures” (2015, 32). BLM’s discursive and actional interventions unveil, and potentially, deracinate anti-black racism masquerading through post-racial narratives of economic normalcy.

These “Shut it down!” democratic disruptions occasion a tectonic shifting within the symbolic universe of black representations—of barbarity, carcerality and criminality—to a new lodging of radical truth toward a democratic revolution. To be sure, it is also an Afromodern reconfiguration: Black Lives Matter or nothing does. Russell Rickford proffers this elaboration, “Black Lives Matter activists have used a host of disruptive techniques to advance their cause. Their mainstay has been occupation…They have organized ‘die-ins’, marches, and rallies in multiple cities viewing creative disturbance as a means of dramatizing routine attacks on black life” (2016, 36). Disruption contests the Euromodern hold of publicity as political spaces mapped along the old racial geography of rationally civilized and criminally barbarous. Against this backdrop, Black Lives Matter foregrounds not a reversal of Euromodern logics but an explosion of them—an inauguration of a new cosmogony of ethics and reason from below—it is the expressive values of, and from, the margins. Put another way, it is subaltern values. In this space of political realignments, Afromodern praxis—understood as revelatory political action, one that communicates the material substance of human life and its demand for a politics of belonging, negotiation and ultimately, citizenship—serve as the brick and mortar of a new architecture of a modern black revolution. In such a protean space, a new reason conceives itself as an Afromodern reason, black reason with a modernist self-articulation and justificatory practice, affording a historical ground for the mattering of black lives and futures, which, then, lodges itself within the consciousness of the subject. The result, at last, leads to mass social and political protest, the possibilities of which are world changing, “the [BLM] movement may well pose a deeper challenge to existing social and political arrangements, prefiguring a more humane future and forging a theory and practice of mass struggle for our time” (Rickford 2016, 40). Afromodern reason offers a new historical analysis for black political life. As an epistemic symbol, a resuscitation of a black mode of being political, the raised Black Power fist become one of its most visible and audible symbolic markers of a revolutionary movement. Hoisting the clenched fist presents a movement of power resuscitation, “we know that structures change under conditions of power redistribution—i.e., during times of crisis” (Gilmore 2002, 17). The call for black power is a call to action by coalescing possible fragmented, splintered representations of selfhood. It is a revalorizing of black political life by recentering Afrocentric sensory, cultural, and symbolic productions. Afromodern praxis gives way to human possibility, of transformation and of resituation. The raised fist, an aesthetic emblem of a black humanism, is not a phenomenon unique to the immediacies of our current political moment but animates a communicative relation with the genealogy of black historical actors, past and present.

Black Lives Matter serves as an interlocutor of temporal dimensions—a going back to hear, in order to see forward. Moreover, BLM’s historical consciousness also occasions a new temporal reality. Its chant of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” represents an unambiguous restatement of the black’s besieged humanity—a disavowal of an imposed barbarism. This deploys a de-exoticizing of blackness such that political speech inheres in the public domain, accessible to all subject-actors. Yet, histories of black exoticism, a locus of existential silencing, are ritualistic. If, as Martin Luther King Jr. avows, “a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard,” then at minimum, riots attempt to reconstruct and revivify a once mummified interior, what King calls a deadened “sense of nobodyness” (2010, 127; 119). Black Lives Matter and its riotous methodologies of contestation, be they inside or (often) outside the formal corridors of politics, enacts a forceful insertion of itself into the political, demanding a new social production of human relations by exploding the normative ideal of the black as a barbarous criminal. Juliet Hooker proffers a communicative, as well as a psychosocial, valence for BLM riots as democratic relief: “[r]iots (for lack of a better term) might thus constitute a form of democratic repair for African Americans, not because they are a solution to structural problems and institutionalized injustices, but because they allow black citizens to express their pain and their losses visible to a racial order that demands that they sacrifice both” (2016, 464). It is this communicative sacrifice, a political silencing, that black rioters systematically disavow. Riots, then, become material and symbolic dials of democratic anguish. Their enactment is a non-negotiable movement toward a forceful redistribution of power. Within the Afromodern imaginary, riots signal the longue durée of black resistance politics and its liberatory potential. It is a precursor to democratic revolution; this is why Du Bois posits, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk” (1998, 30). Euromodern state-building is Herrenvolk democratization. The myriad citations of dead black bodies at the bayonet of the police state lay as proof. Black Lives Matter is one of many historical interventions to rescue democracy from its Euromodern incarceration. The Afromodern alternative registers as a resuscitation of democratic politics. As such, a democratic revolution mounts itself, partly, on the back of mass protest, which becomes the modus operandi of the Black Lives Matter movement, which witnessed, in the summer of 2020, a global insurrection of a new valuation of being: blackness qua humanness. In the final analysis, BLM proffers a new political alternative to social life enforced in Euromodernity. Thus, a mandate to “Say Their Names!” generates in the saying, in the naming, a new discursive corridor. This heuristic of re-humanization, embedded in the cultural memory of the dispossessed, grounds anew, narratives of truth-telling within Afromodernity. As such, naming, as a recovery of truth, functions as an undoing of colonial half-truths and untruths. Black political speech transcends, or orbits beyond, Euromodernity’s ontological condition of singularity, that is, “the old monologue of the colonial situation,” engendering an ongoing, dialogic black liberation (Fanon 1965, 95). The Afromodern turn settles as a set of enacted emancipatory commitments toward a revolutionary democratic scaffolding of a new society; it is a Du Boisian absolute egalitarianism.

Christopher J. Lebron underscores the resituation of the black subject as a human subject through modes of resistance that have come to characterize BLM’s political engagements, “#BlackLivesMatter activists…[are] resisting narratives of deviance that justify and exculpate murderous violations of blacks’ civil rights” (2017, 23). Those “narratives of deviance,” that is, a barbarous raced criminality, are not dissimilar from the ones Ida B. Wells militated against, “the world has accepted the story that the Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him”—this monstrous portraiture makes of the black an anti-modern, barbaric deformity (2016, 73). Yet, in Wells’ discourse, we locate epistemic resistance, one that labors for a de-carceral blackness. To do this, she mandates a fidelity to truth as a restoration of political society and a turn to a new civilization. Lawrie Balfour uncovers the critical purchase of such an approach, “Wells advocates both an active conception of democratic citizenship and collective responsibility for protecting the rights of black citizens” (2015, 683). Black Lives Matter’s narratives of truth enact a violent disruption of the barbarous caricature of the black criminal, which serve as a reconstitution of not only black citizenship, but democratic citizenship, broadly conceived. Black Lives Matter destabilizes raced logics by renouncing black barbarism and its once congealed criminal and exilic condition. BLM approaches Afromodernity as not a sacrifice of truth but an agonal bearing of it. Therefore, the praxis of black liberation, grounded in rituals of unpunctuated contestation, is one that is communicable precisely in view of its evidentiary demonstrations, or what Wells formulates as black disclosure: “in his own defense, he [the black] must disclose to the world that degree of dehumanizing brutality which fixes upon America the blot of a national crime” (2016, 77). Afromodern praxis discloses itself as a uniquely transformative moment, opening a field of horizon. Such disclosure becomes reanimated as a mattering of black lives. BLM, in its official declaration, contend:

As human beings we usually fight for the things that move us out of complacency. We fight for clarity and truth telling. We fight for a world that we want our children to live in. A world we want our communities to thrive in. In the last 6 years many of us faced down tanks, rubber bullets, were forced to do jail and prison sentences, have been surveilled, lied on, called terrorists, been given false labels by the FBI, and some of us have lost our lives. (Black Lives Matter 2021)

Black Lives Matter disputes, disrupts, and discloses the falsities of Euromodern machinations through an adherence to a radical truth enterprise. From this orientation, there is a deconstruction and then, a reconstruction of political life. BLM brings to the fore a shifting dialectics—not that for the black to be modern, the white must become barbarian. Rather, it is an introduction of a new juxtaposition, a re-narrativizing of history through contrasting terms, what Césaire understood of American whiteness as being the “modern barbarian” (2000, 76). Black Lives Matter, as a movement, is not merely one of protestation but of contestation. To contest is to agonally struggle. It is a wrestling against the pre-givens of reality; it is a questioning of faux prescriptions. To protest requires only objection or even, suspension. Therefore, not all protests are, themselves, contestations. The delimitations of protest, contrasted against, say, contest, turn on the axis of systemic displacement and with it, the capacity for structural replacement. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor makes this plain, “Protests can expose these conditions [of social and political atrophy] and their relationship to the policing state; protests can draw in larger numbers of people; protests can compel public figures to speak against those conditions. Protests can do many things, but protests alone cannot end police abuse and the conditions that are used to justify it” (2016, 189).

Contestation for Black Lives Matter begins by utilizing, whilst challenging, political institutions such that “the next stage will involve progressing from protests aimed at raising awareness or drawing attention to the crisis of police violence to engaging with the social forces that have the capacity to shut down sectors of work and production until our demands to stop police terrorism are met” (2016, 220). Those “social forces” are the anti-political infrastructure of the Euromodern state apparatus, including its ecology of economized capitalistic and socio-cultural reproductions. Black contestation as liberatory struggle animates humanistic relations, for it engages the white other in a struggle with, or against, reality and thus, opens itself to dialectical possibility. By claiming the streets or even occupying them, as many Black Lives Matter activists do, they shift, or greater still, reterritorialize localities of relevance—it is a disclamation of a colonized grammar of white proprietorship and a reclamation of a new discursive order of human relations that disavow the barbaric criminal.

This transmutation from thingification ³ to humanization is as Charles R. Lawrence III surmises to be the crux of any meaningful revolutionary moment, “Black Lives Matter is about saving all our lives, about reconstituting our nation, by creating a revolution against law and culture that value property over humanity” (2015, 404). Consequently, Black Lives Matter rejects refunding the police for defunding it—others go further still, toward police abolition. Indeed, abolition-democracy is as Du Bois affirms, a radical resituation because it demanded “freedom” within spaces of unfreedom (1998, 182). A democratic revolution puts in civil matrimony, two fundamental concepts: freedom and citizenship, whereby the latter provides the political means for the expression of the former. Jane Anna Gordon illuminates these inseparable relations, “abolitionist democracy made a deliberate project of transforming former masters and slaves into independent citizens with the capacity to have meaningful say in the affairs that determined their daily lives” (2020, 78). In other words, a democratic revolution whose sine qua non is abolitionism necessarily becomes a communicative enterprise. Therefore, without freedom, there can be no communicative existence as such, where all peoples are disclosed as political subjects. The Afromodern moment historicizes a new political reality, a new society through modes of abolitionist contestations, whose longitudinal effect enables a political life of contingencies, of possibilities. Political speech functions as communicative exchanges among temporal relations of past, present, and future selves. This generative space voices a reconstructed black selfhood. Black Lives Matter, then, is not an isolated movement of African Americans, but in its Afromodern register, becomes communicable as an Africana struggle: “Black Power is part of the world rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, of the exploited against the exploiter. It operates through the African continent, in North and South America, the Caribbean, where ever Africans and people of African descent live” (Nkrumah 1973, 40). Nigerian Lives Matter, for example, becomes one of many Pan-African instantiations, amendable to native conditions particular to the Nigerian—or more broadly, an Africanist—critique of neocolonial occupation. In its even broader Afromodern inflection, the movement calls for a humanism beyond the pillars of blackness, including other colonized people-groups such as Natives, who rearticulated their call for humanization against state violence as, “Native Lives Matter” (see Rickford 2016, 38). In the final analysis, this makes the liberation struggle both a political and social practice—social because the result is a shifting, changing culture; cultural evolution becomes a vector for the political reorganization of society.

Afromodernity insists upon the possibility of black liberation. Gooding-Williams posits, “the Afro-modern tradition is bound together by certain genre-defining thematic preoccupations—for example, the political and social organization of white supremacy…and the possibilities of black emancipation” (2009, 3). Black emancipation functions not as a romantic, pre-given liberatory vindication, rather it is an agonal movement, a struggle, a contest for ontological (re)articulation; Afromodernity stands as a commitment to political possibility. Black Lives Matter, as movement toward a radical reconstruction of democracy, attempts an overthrow of a Euromodern racial liberalism and may well be somewhat emblematic of what Charles W. Mills calls a quest for “black radical liberalism [that] seeks to transform liberalism to make it responsive to the realities of the black diasporic experience in modernity” (2017, 203). Though, I contend BLM moves even beyond the threshold of a reconstructed liberalism but toward a new, inaugural modernist reality: Afromodernity. It is precisely these conditions of possibility that agonally birth what Deva R. Woodly insists is a sui generis political paradigm: “The ideas present in this movement [BLM] are offering the substance, the matter, that can help us craft a new era, to sail from the shoreline of modernity into a contemporary epoch that has not yet been named, to construct a polity in which human thriving makes sense” (2022, 216). Perhaps that unnamed “contemporary epoch” is Afromodernity. Put simply, unlike Euromodernity, Afromodernity conceives of radical possibilities beyond itself. It is transcendental field of horizon because of its ethic of ongoing critique, which makes of it a decolonial modernity.

In dialectical terms, two opposing movements, Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, wrestle for political viability. The former restores freedom to political speech, for it begins at black particularity toward the end of human universality: unless black lives matter, “all lives” cannot. Euromodernity seeks to colonize the grammar of communicative existence and so pursues the converse. It begins with universalism but ends in particularism. “All Lives Matter,” unmoored from the demonstrable truths of lived experience, collapses into an empty universalizing abstraction such that the normative Euromodern hegemon remains intact—stable, operative, and ongoing. BLM in its Afromodern register, attempts to embrace contestations performed within and beyond itself. This ongoing movement of critique naturally gives voice to intersectional identities subsumed within it, be they black women, black queers, the disabled black, inter alia. Stuart Hall argues for an open-ended, interrogative politics: “A critical politics against racism, which is always a politics of criticism” (2021, 372). Dialectical change generates the conditions for radical transformation articulable as Afromodernity. A democratic revolution begins with an open dialectic, where Black Lives Matter thinks through, and speaks to, its own internal and external contradictions so as to meet the evolutionary demands of a people whose historical consciousness calls for nothing less than a movement for human liberation.