Literary Genealogies and the Kinship of Black Modernity

Abstract

Abstract This brief essay is a reflection on the genealogical as a metaphor for modernity’s teleologies. Considering genealogy not as a biological lineage but as a network of kinship relations, we can better understand the collective—and often teleologically recursive—means by which modernity is imagined and reimagined. Understood via this metaphor of relation, we can see how modernity is not simply a progressive line of descendancy, but a complex web of influence. Our methodologies for tracing modernity’s genealogies must therefore think beyond what is inevitable and toward the deliberate and multiplicitous practices contributing to its reproduction. These methodologies must often follow circuitous routes that defy normative disciplinary taxonomies and frameworks. Moreover, the process of tracing modernity’s genealogies is ongoing, perpetuated always to the present moment as its study is also a mechanism for its perpetual reproduction. Black genealogical reproduction is an involved process in modernity, encompassing mechanisms from the bodily to the aesthetic to the technological, resisting normalized teleologies of descent, and extending its branches into complex webs that emerge within Black futures and help to produce them.