Genealogies Beyond Modernities

Abstract

AbstractThis essay is a response to six essays, and Derrick Spires’s introductory essay, gathered under the title “Genealogies of Black Modernity.” I argue against the usefulness of “modernity” as an organizing concept for the histories, global networks, publishing ventures, and scholarly initiatives explored in these essays, suggesting instead that we attend to the genealogies of a complex emergence for which we do not yet have an adequate descriptive framework. This is an emergence that challenges our usual approaches to historical periodization, our established concepts of collective achievement, or our habitual ways of framing a scholarly mission. The essays gathered here do not offer any simple vision of a coherent scholarly mission beyond the need to be attentive to a project of historical recovery that is always in danger of conceptual marginalizations. I explore the implications of archives that both reveal and obscure the operations of white supremacy, and I consider historical recovery projects that are overburdened by the racial politics they mean to address. Taking seriously the determined inclusiveness of the Black studies project, beyond class divisions and traditional markers of historical significance, I consider the ethical demands of a scholarly project devoted to recovering a history, and a historical process, that represents the imagined community these scholars are committed to serving.Accounting for the lower frequencies of the white supremacist project of modernity, it’s possible that we’ve underestimated the radicalism of the Black studies project as it pertains to those of us in literary and cultural studies.