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A great deal of that research was conducted by Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London and one of the pioneers in this field. Here, in her chapter entitled The African diaspora in South Asia: A theoreticalperspective, she examines the '[d]ispersed communities of Africans in Asia [...] both historic and contemporary', through which she sees a triadic relationship between Africa as homeland, Africans and their descendants and an adopted residence or home abroad. Identifying migration streams and points of origin and destination is fundamental to this study. Scholarship on the communities of Sidis, or Afro-Indians, throughout India has advanced in recent years. For the author, the migration, diaspora and identity of Afro-Asians are entangled and should be considered together. While the lack of Afro-Asian voices and the disenfranchised status of Afro-Asians have led to 'the assumption that diasporic consciousness was lacking', field research and conferences, such as that of The African Diaspora in Asia (TADIA) Society (2006), are breaking with this tradition and revealing a desire to connect. Thus, she concludes that 'Afrodescendants are claiming their heritage and negotiating a new identity as they emerge from the peripheries'.
Beyond speculative work on and occasional glimpses of Africans in China, Li Anshan's Blacks/Africans in China: bistorical process and diasporic experience provides a study of the African presence in China from antiquity to the present. The author spends some time looking at how the various identities, such as Kunlun or Sengzhi, have been languaged and indicates that ethnocentrism has been a constant throughout human existence. His discussion covers the African presence in China, from the Han dynasty ( $206 \mathrm{BCE}-220 \mathrm{CE}$ ) to the current time. First, he looks at the ways in which Africans have been represented in archaeological evidence that suggests the possibility of contact between
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Africa and China even before the Han dynasty. He examines some of these representations in arts, such as wall paintings, throughout the other dynasties, including those of Ming and Tang. He identifies Kunlun represented as positive figures in some collections of tales. Forms of employment and status are also a significant source of inquiry, with evidence pointing to the existence of blacks as merchants, businessmen, actors, musicians, porters, soldiers, and animal trainers, as well as enslaved persons. During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), African soldiers were captured in a battle against the Portuguese occupation of Macao and were among the Chinese army led by Commander Zheng Chenggong. Turning to the contemporary period, he deals with the diasporans working in China, including artists, traders, students, and diplomats, and even working on a television show. A number of communities have developed, especially in cities such as Guangzhou (formerly Canton), an international port since ancient times. He concludes by stating that the African diaspora should be put in the context of economic globalization and transnational migration. 'The diasporic economy has a dual character, high mobility and diversity and a high possibility of residential segregation'. The most recent group in China consists of African students who are not classified as immigrants, although some do become residents. Naturally, the focus on Chinese sports following the Olympic Games of 2008 led to further interest in black representation.
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Moving further around the globe to Australia and the Pacific, we are presented with another set of realities. Being black in Australia, by Karina Smith and colleagues from Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, discusses 'contested and changing meanings of blackness through the history, politics and social formation of the Australian context in which the term "black" has been used as an instrument of coloniality and, at the same time, as a way of resisting and challenging the hegemony of whiteness'. The essay examines the construction of Australia as a white nation based on the terra nullius concept, the colliding definitions of blackness of the Aboriginal Australians and the more recent African and African-descent migrants who also define themselves as black, namely the Caribbean community 'rediasporized' from Europe and the Caribbean. The authors conclude that 'blackness is bound up with resisting whiteness, asserting a presence in Australian society, and creating positive black spaces'. At the same time, solidarity is not automatic, as each community has a different historical trajectory and significant cultural differences, and Aboriginal Australians, though Indigenous people, 'do not yet have sovereignty as the traditional owners of the land'.
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# Global africanity and the African diaspora: epistemological considerations
In an essay entitled "From Pax Africana to Global Africa" in The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui (1998), Darryl C. Thomas demonstrates that "Global Africa" starts to arise for Mazrui in 1974, when he reaffirmed the clarion call by Du Bois for African and Third World peoples 'to escape death and isolation, and to nurture the latent African genius' (p. 84). According to Locksley Edmondson's personal communication, Mazrui coined the term even earlier, during their days together (1967-1970) at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, as they sought to build an African international relations project from their location in East Africa. Here, the idea of Global Africa encounters the theoretics of pan-Africanism, of which Mazrui identified five dimensions: sub-Saharan, trans-Saharan, transatlantic, Western hemispheric and global (p. 85). According to Thomas, Mazrui would continuously refine the scope of Global Africa and go on to use it as a framework for his television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage (1986). ${ }^{4}$ Mazrui would subsequently define Global African identity to include Africa and its diaspora in his 'Africans and African Americans in changing world trends: globalizing the black experience'.
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Thus, the definition of Global Africa can be attributed to Ali A. Mazrui, in his attempt to find theoretical language to address issues of diasporization arising from the Howard University school, which had always been a site for the study and articulation of the concept of the African diaspora. While African studies at Howard University were initially spearheaded by William Leo Hansberry, other scholars, such as Joseph E. Harris at Howard's History Department also subsequently worked on the African diaspora in Asia. 'Global Africa' and 'African diaspora' were therefore terms used simultaneously from the start, or used at times dialectically, the former specific to political science and international relations, the latter used more in the humanities and in anthropology. Before Mazrui, the idea of building a global freedom struggle preoccupied all early pan-Africanists, who would actually use the language of globality. It is also possible, at this point, to cite David Walker, who wrote Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those
[^0]
[^0]: 4 Significantly, Ali A. Mazrui was editor of UNESCO's General History of Africa, Vol. VIII, Africa since 1935 (Heinemann/UNESCO 1993). This volume, in its section on pan-Africanism, contains essays by Joseph E. Harris, "Africa and its diaspora since 1935" (pp. 705-23), and by Locksley Edmondson, 'Africa and the developing regions' (pp. 829-70).
of the United States of America (1829), which technically had a Global African framework, even though it did not use current language.
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of the United States of America (1829), which technically had a Global African framework, even though it did not use current language.
Likewise, it is important to note that African-centred scholarship, such as that carried out in collaboration with Ivan Van Sertima also used the Global Africa framework. Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (1976) and Edward Scobie's Global African Presence (1994) are two such examples. P. Chike Onwuachi, Director of African Studies at Howard University in the 1970s, defined the African world as a scholarly paradigm to capture a global African presence. In that same Howard University community was Chancellor Williams, author of The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. (1976). The definition of globalization as it pertains to African peoples in their relationships with Asia was renewed during twentieth-century debate, particularly following the Bandung Conference, a large-scale meeting of Afro-Asian states held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. In effect, there was therefore a definitional shift from the political intent of pan-Africanism to that of global diaspora, to refer to the Global African now living diasporically. ${ }^{5}$ According to Darryl C. Thomas, a graduate student of Mazrui at the University of Michigan in the 1980s (interview with author in 2017), Mazrui referred to this concept more frequently from 2000 with the increased migration of Africans to North and South America including the Caribbean, as well as to Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
Michael O. West's Global Africa: the emergence and evolution of an idea (2005), though dated in its assertions of what constituted the African diaspora, refers to a relationship between the two constructs - Global Africa and African diaspora - and offers the following definition:
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the Global Africa idea holds that Africans and people of African descent worldwide share a common set of historical experiences, most notably, slavery, colonialism, racial oppression, and their many consequences. Politically, the global Africa idea assumes that these shared ordeals constitute a template on which Africans - at home and abroad, on the African continent and in the diaspora - should unite to effect their mutual liberation (pp. 86-87).
While West was unable to move beyond a definition limited to enslavement, he offers a periodization beginning with the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)
[^0]
[^0]: 5 In Bye-Bye Babar, writer Taiye Selasi floated the term "Afropolitan" to refer to a more mobile generation of Africans with the skills and resources to travel and work in a variety of global centres and to interact culturally with a number of African and African diaspora sectors (Selasi, 2005). This essay generated a great deal of discussion (see for example Dabiri, 2014).
and culminating with the first pan-African Conference of 1900; a second moment, from 1900 to 1945, which was fuelled by World War I and which centred on denouncing colonial projects on the continent; a third moment, from 1945 to 1963, which was the major push towards independence; and a fourth moment beginning in 1963 and reaching up to the time of his writing, when a series of Black Power movements sprang up across the globe and would include a series of congresses in order to assert black empowerment. The problem with periodizations such as the ones offered by West is that, while convenient for historians, they miss the overlapping tendencies and a variety of other uncontainable permutations. Above all, they have to be continued into the present day, by, inter alia, accounting for the twenty-first century political assertion of the Black Lives movements in the wake of the extrajudicial police killing of young black men and women (Taylor, 2016).
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Joseph Harris, who provided one of the first mappings of the African diaspora, insisted that, among other things, the African diaspora has to be studied in its global dimensions. His essay "Africa and its diaspora since 1935" in the General History of Africa, Vol. VIII (Mazrui, ed. 1993), and his Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (1982), the product of a Howard University conference on the subject, are some of his contributions to the field of African diaspora studies. ${ }^{6}$ In this regard, contemporary scholars, such as Michael A. Gomez, who edited the first conference papers of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), as well as Diasporic Africa: A Reader (2006), and has also authored a number of works, including Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (2004), have contributed towards a massive body of work covering a range of fields, geographies and disciplines, some of which are represented here. While initially, anthropologists did much of the documentation of the cultural existence of African diaspora communities, historians such as Gomez have been central to delineating the nature of these movements and their local and global histories. Fields such as political science and economics have not been as substantially represented in this largely interdisciplinary project but are represented in this volume.
[^0]
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[^0]
[^0]: 6 On the Howard School of International Relations, see Susan Pedersen's review "Destined to Disappear". Howard University and scholars in the African diaspora continued the focus on diaspora studies and it re-emerged as a critical factor once the area studies African project disappeared. Eric Williams and Ralph Bunche, among others, were important contributors. Black internationalism also re-emerged as a critical factor and, with the publication of Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, it was becoming clear to Ali that the prospect of a shared humanity and empathy of people in the North towards the South was becoming increasingly untenable, with the new focus on civilization and culture reinforcing the racial hierarchy.
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# Developing future diasporic paradigms
The need to clarify the conceptual differences between the keywords 'diaspora' and 'transnationalism' occupies Harry Goulbourne's "Transnationalism, diasporas and the African diaspora: some theoretical considerations". In his chapter, Goulbourne examines these differences and provides figures that describe the transnational continuum and apex. He addresses how 'attempts to understand the growth of transnational communities across the globe are often interspersed with aspects of, or overlap with, our understanding of what constitutes the African diaspora'. He uses the Atlantic African diaspora as a case study for delineating the overlapping communities, asserting that, 'while there may be numerous transnational communities - both historical and contemporary - not all develop into diasporas, and while all diasporas are transnational communities, not all transnational communities are diasporas'.
The Economics of the transatlantic African diaspora, by Joseph E. Inikori, co-editor of The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (1992), demonstrates the impact that transatlantic slavery had on the economies of Africa, besides its large demographic shifting of African populations to the Americas. In other words, the 'employment of enslaved Africans in the Americas to produce commodities for Atlantic markets, in competition with West Africa's economies, raised the competitiveness of the Americas at the expense of West Africa [...] By the time transatlantic export of captives ended in [the] mid-nineteenth century, West African economies had fallen considerably behind those of the Americas'. The continued impact of enslavement is expressed in the ongoing economic difficulties for continental African nations and African-American families across the diaspora. These constitute the 'continuing legacy of slavery' and 'post-slavery institutionalized racial discrimination'.
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While voluntary, forced, and induced migrations of Africans (Boyce Davies, 2008) have created communities of African-descended populations everywhere in the world, the study of their histories, survivals, cultural formations, reinterpretations, transformations, current economic and social realities, commonalities and differences continues to fuel the field of African diaspora studies. Central to all of these examinations, although less a focus historically, is how blackness and/or Africanity is defined. Contemporary theoretical discussions are moving beyond any overarching definition of blackness and Africanity, even as the search for commonalities and relationships continues as
a series of political projects. The research is revealing specificities of place, ethnic variations, linguistic variability and meaning, and continuing intersections with other related identities, thereby producing new formations. A few trends are observable in the recent scholarship, among them: how race and ethnicity inflect diasporas; the shifting meanings of blackness historically and in the contemporary period; and the ways gender, class and sexuality intersect and thereby expand and redefine our understandings of diaspora.
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Various newer approaches to the study of diasporas have begun to proliferate. Kim D. Butler (2005), though a historian, eschewed the idea of carrying out the large chronological schematizing attempted by historians of a prior generation, such as Colin Palmer. She proposed shifting the defining element of diaspora studies away from the group itself and instead taking a methodological and theoretical approach to the study of the phenomenon of diaspora in human history. In other words, rather than being viewed as ethnic relationships, alternatively, diaspora may be considered as a framework for the study of a specific process of community formation, by addressing the following: (1) reasons for, and conditions of, the dispersal; (2) relationship with the homeland; (3) relationship with host lands; (4) interrelationships within communities of the diaspora; and (5) comparative studies of different diasporas. This kind of refining and redefining of a discourse allows us to see the different genealogies of African diaspora scholarship and how they manifest in various fields, but above all, how they appear in interdisciplinary African diaspora scholarship.
Recent thinking on diaspora is beginning to fill a number of exclusionary gaps relating to gender and sexualities, thus expanding the dimensions of how we think about diaspora and our consideration of who is left out. Nevertheless, there remains space for not yet fully explored subjects, such as diaspora and indigeneity, an important yet under-theorized discussion that is also addressed here and that promises to be a growing area of scholarship in the foreseeable future.
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What about the possibility of studying indigeneity and blackness relationally in the Americas? Shona N. Jackson's Reflections on Indigeneity and African belonging in the Caribbean and the Americas argues that, ironically, blackness was instituted in the New World with the assumption of native absence. Thus, we are faced with a conundrum, namely, that 'the presumed lack of Indigenous presence in the Caribbean islands allows blacks an unquestioned native status, while in North, South and Central America the considerable presence of Indigenous Peoples has precluded formal discussion of black native status, except where the intersections of black and Indigenous lives during and after slavery force the issue'. Still, according to Wynter, black people's presence in the landscape
of the Americas, through labour, has both transformed their relationship to the land and indigenized it, but has also 'transformed the condition of forced diasporization into a new, native status'. For Jackson, therefore, it is a 'modern labour episteme that undergirds black belonging'. And significantly, 'the wellbeing of the white/Northern/First World is fundamentally predicated upon the death and privation of blacks and Indigenous Peoples'. This for her requires an 'epistemological turn' to understand how 'peoples coercively brought into a territory in which Indigenous Peoples existed now hold identities through which settler colonial power works' effectively to 'extend the colonial subordination of Indigenous Peoples'.
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In this regard, a study of the genealogies of scholarship which attempt to account for and clarify the black experience has been undertaken in Black studies epistemologies in the United States of America by Charisse BurdenStelly. As indicated at the start of this introduction, in terms of academic projects, black studies in the United States was a launching point for these discussions and remains a site where this discussion continues to be formally held. Black studies epistemologies are thus the intellectual space from which the advancement of knowledge of related fields emanates. The epistemological movements have moved through cultural nationalism and pan-Africanism, through black feminism and Afro-pessimism, and now Afro-futurism, which, though science fiction-oriented, has provided a necessary imagining of future possibilities. Major moments have included the widespread dynamization brought about by the Ryan Coogler film Black Panther (Marvel Entertainment, 2018), which combined both Afro-futuristic and traditional representations of Africa. The problem with Afro-pessimism, as Greg Thomas (2018) indicates, is that it remains unable to advance a discourse which makes more visible the 'blackness of blackness or the transvaluations of manifold black liberation movements' (pp. 291-92).
One of these important epistemological turns has been offered through a variety of black feminist assertions, ideas and political movements outlined in Transnational feminist epistemologies for Global Africa by Amina Mama, a former co-editor of Feminist Africa, which is based in South Africa and publishes gender studies scholarship relating to the continent and to the African diaspora. She asserts that African scholarship has to 'go global' in two ways: 'In addition to including the diasporas, it must also include women in a manner that redresses the neglect of African women's involvement in all aspects of history and the distortion of histories of sex and gender relations in all African societies'. To accomplish this, she examines gender in African history, pan-Africanism and
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feminism, transnational feminist links and new questions for feminist research in Africa. She concludes that 'the iterations of global feminist epistemologies across Africa and diaspora have led to exemplary post-independence historical studies that demystify the manifestations of gender and sexuality in African communities around the globe'. While gendering the African diaspora is a project yet to be fully explored and remains a vibrant area of inquiry, work tentatively pursuing these questions has been carried out, including that done by Tina Campt and Deborah A. Thomas in Gendering diaspora: transnational feminism, diaspora and its hegemonies (2008).
An important new strand of scholarship complicating conventional gender distinctions and the normatively heterosexual vision of sexuality is captured in Black/queer/diaspora at the current conjuncture by Jafari S. Allen, an editor of the special issue on the diaspora of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and in Thomas Glave's Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles (2008). Allen's 'Intellectual genealogies of black/queer/diaspora studies' asserts very early that 'while actual migration, whether forced, chosen or coerced, continues to be a major factor in making the black world, the diaspora is so deeply constitutive of the fabric of blackness that it is also experienced among individuals who will never leave their own town, but who nevertheless powerfully imagine their own black/queer "other" identity'. Sokari Ekine's and Hakima Abbas' Queer African Reader (2013) provides the continental side of a conversation on this issue with African diasporan writers in the Americas. Thus, the black queer diaspora constitutes an important strand of contemporary African diaspora scholarship. Allen provides both genealogical matrices and current inflections that define black queer subjectivity and futurity.
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Finally, the need to provide new readings of racializations in the ArabMuslim world, which are often unavailable for comparative analysis, is addressed here by Salah Trabelsi in Genealogy of a discriminatory rhetoric in the classical Arab-Muslim world. His main objective is to answer the question: How did classical Arab writers describe the African world and what descriptions did they produce about the black man?
Trabelsi makes a significant contribution to the field by showing how the construction of the blackness-enslaved nexus of the Atlantic had been previously articulated, with aswad (black) coming to replace the noun ' $a b d$ (slave). Likewise, he shows how, combined with the ethnic referent of Zendjī, (plural Zunūdj and feminine Zendjiyyāt), ethnic identity began signifying enslavement. His articulations of the economic nature of Arab slavery are also worth noting, as they link to other African diaspora texts, such as Eric
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Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (1944), thus describing a global systemic order of dehumanization of the black subject for economic interests. Trabelsi discusses the primary texts supplying the material for his analyses, beginning with the writings of a tenth-century (CE) Arab geographer who travelled the world to locations including the Maghreb, the Sahara, Egypt, and southern Africa. His taxonomies began by distinguishing 'people by their customs and modes of governance', but 'ended with territories inhabited by blacks being seen as the representation and quintessence of the most radical kind of otherness'. These negative representations would be challenged by classical poet and scientist al-Jāhiz (c. 776-868, Basra, Iraq). He is identified as having developed a theory of evolution before Charles Darwin and expressing viewpoints in defence of black people that were deemed scandalous, even though he was himself of African descent. Trabelsi here fills an important research gap in terms of pejorative identifications of blackness in the period preceding fifteenthcentury transatlantic slavery. It is important to put this work in conversation with essays in the first section, specifically, Jesse Benjamin's 'North Africa and the origins of epistemic blackness' and Amon Saba Saakana's Conceptualizing colour representation in antiquity: from Kmt and the Greco-Roman world to the Middle Ages. It definitely also provides an important historical backstory to the twentieth-century definitions of blackness in the Americas, as offered by Michelle M. Wright and Agustín Laó-Montes. Common ground is the economic benefit for those who construct these definitions of otherness and the ways in which resources (physical and natural) were appropriated.
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Debates and discussion on global or transnational blackness and genealogies of epistemological readings of these realities have the function of challenging older paradigms, such as those relating to: the necessity, or possibility, of physical or emotional return to Africa minus the historical romantic trappings; the relationships between the African diaspora and the continent; the socioeconomic realities and inequities experienced by black communities; the unaddressed relationships with Indigenous communities; and the historical resonances of the definitions of blackness itself. For Fred Moten (2013), blackness is not wretchedness, damnation, absence or nothingness, but radical rejection of these, along with a parallel capacity to live and desire, away from 'social death' to life and, therefore, a preference for 'black optimism' (p. 742).
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# Epistemological lessons for the future
'What if blackness is the name that has been given to the social field and social life of an illicit alternative capacity to desire? Basically, that is precisely what I think blackness is. I want it to be my constant study. I listen for it everywhere' (Moten, 2013, p. 778).
Conducting a range of new and continued research projects in connection with the following is suggested:
- The layered meanings of race as expressed by the study of blackness in Australia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean
- A forum on the history of the identification of racialization in the period preceding transatlantic enslavement, including an examination of the nature of the relationships between North Africa and the southern Sahelian regions
- Continued studies of the economies of blackness in corporeal, national, and transnational terms
- Advancement of new paradigms addressing the Indian Ocean, the black Mediterranean and the black Pacific as diasporic fields
- The permutations of raciality and racialization in various historical periods and locations
- New conceptual and global fields to account for and continue the study of marginal others, especially in relation to the diaspora
- The relationships between indigeneity and diaspora using relations other than absence/presence and in a variety of locations
- The emerging diasporas on the African continent itself and how these redefine singular ethnic-racial and national identities
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# References
Allen, J.S. 2012. Black/queer/diaspora at the current conjuncture. GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 18, Nos. 2-3, pp. 211-48.
Ambroise, J. R. and Broeck, S. 2016. Black knowledges/black struggles: An introduction. Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology. Liverpool, UK, Liverpool University Press, pp. 11-20.
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# CHAPTER 1
## BLACKNESS BEYOND THE UNITED STATES
Understanding New Diasporic Definitions Michelle M. Wright
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## Introduction: new definitions
When discussing 'new definitions' or different definitions of blackness, we must first dispense with one long-standing myth: that blackness is a biological determination. While the members of any human collective from one geographical region may share some physiological characteristics, these markers quickly become obsolete once we move from a small collective to the much larger category of race. There is no one physical (or cultural) trait shared by all black people, whether we are speaking of skin colour, facial features, body type, hair type, or a propensity towards a particular medical condition.
Indeed, blackness is neither a scientific nor a biological discovery, nor is it the creation of black peoples. With the rise of the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century, those white Europeans employed by or profiting from the trade often wrote or spoke about black Africans as a repugnant, inferior breed of human being. The racial category of blackness (or of the 'Negro', as it was first termed) was formally codified towards the beginning of the eighteenth century by white European and American politicians and philosophers. As I have argued in Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004), and as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have detailed in Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997) and Figures in Black: Words, Signs
and the "Racial" Self (1987) respectively, otherwise respected thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel made a number of outrageous and fantastical pronouncements on black inferiority and the lack of civilized history in Africa under the guise of 'objective observation' - and this despite the fact that none of those authors ever visited the continent. ${ }^{1}$
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'New' definitions of blackness, therefore, in many ways must still respond to these originary myths of biological inferiority and incapability because they are still often believed (and applied) by powerful individuals and institutions that enjoy a global reach - and can thus deeply affect black lives and black communities across the globe. These new definitions are thus steeped in a rich tangle of intellectual genealogies that must be discussed alongside them to explain when, where and why these definitions came into being and why they enjoy such favour or disfavour among black diasporic and black African communities, institutions, activists, artists, academics - and even some politicians - the world over.
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# Black in time: defining blackness through modernity
One of the most influential texts to successfully challenge the prevailing white view of black inferiority was written by American sociologist, activist, journalist and editor W. E. B. Du Bois. For over 100 years, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) has been and remains a canonical text that has influenced black thinkers not only in the Americas, but also in West and East Africa and Europe. In it, Du Bois famously argues that the 'problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line', thus moving what was considered a marginal problem specific only to a handful of nations onto the global stage. Above all else, Du Bois opines that the oppressive and degraded circumstances under which so-called objective white observers see blacks living in the West and in Africa are not in fact the result of an inferior biology, but of white prejudice and exploitation. In one of the most famous anecdotes from Souls, Du Bois relates how, as a little schoolboy in a majority white school in New England, he was a happy, successful and engaged participant until a white newcomer rejected his friendship, thus introducing him to a world in which a black person's comportment and ability can be overshadowed by the white obsession with skin colour. Through this recollection, Du Bois subverts a belief long held by anti-black racists that blackness is antithetical to progress and the modern world.
[^0]
[^0]: 1 Aimé Césaire offers a cogent critique of these deeply illogical racisms and the devastating consequences they have had on Africa, Asia and Europe in his classic long essay Discourse on Colonialism.
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This relationship between blackness and modernity (education being one of the foundations of progressive white civilizations, according to Jefferson, Kant, Hegel and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 'Enlightenment' thinkers) informs a number of new definitions of blackness, including those developed through Afrofuturism and Afropessimism, which are perhaps the two most recognized ideologies in the activist, academic and artistic worlds of the black and African diaspora today. The formative link between black identities and the 'modern world' reached public recognition in the early twentieth century through a concept elaborated by black American educator Alain Locke, namely that of the New Negro (an idea to which many black Caribbean thinkers contributed, including Jamaican novelist and poet Claude McKay), and through the artistic and activist movement dubbed Negritude. This movement, which began in the 1920s and reached its heyday in the 1930s, was founded by Senegalese poet, World War II veteran and future President of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor, Martinican poet and later President of the Regional Council of Martinique (as well as World War II veteran) Aimé Césaire, Martinican essayist, poet and novelist Édouard Glissant, and French Guianese poet and politician Léon Damas. While crediting the Harlem Renaissance (especially writers like the modernist American poet Langston Hughes) for much of its inspiration, these four founders nonetheless differed greatly in their definition and exploration of the term, which, at its heart, insisted on black pride over shame and on the right of all black men to claim their birthright as citizens and active participants in the 'modern' world.
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While he never labelled himself a Pan-Africanist, Senghor had a vision of Negritude which often coincided with the earlier but still vibrant and powerful ideology of Pan-Africanism, which was founded in the late nineteenth century by Liberian educator and diplomat Edward Blyden. For both men believed (as did the American physician and journalist Martin Delany and clergyman Alexander Crummell) that Africa was the true homeland for all black Africans and peoples of African descent, united by a common ancestral culture and languages that were at least equal to, if not superior to, those of white Western civilization. Interestingly, this concept of a shared cultural homeland was first attributed to the white German anthropologist Johann Herder, but unlike Herder, one-time Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois elaborated on it with a dynamic anti-colonialist and/or anti-imperialist agenda taken up in the PanAfrican Congresses of 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1945 (and then carried on, after his death, in the 1974 and 1994 gatherings) seeking to provide black African nations with political and economic independence.
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# Success or failure? Defining blackness through Afropessimism
This view of blacks in the diaspora having more in common with Africa than their compatriots of different ancestries strongly informs Afropessimist thought, which also has some roots in the theories of Martinican psychoanalyst and intellectual Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon argues that the culture and, especially, the language of the colonizer can only lead to further oppression, not liberation, when employed and deployed by the colonized. The term 'Afropessimism' gained prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was used by intellectuals such as Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey (Africa Betrayed, 1992) as a way to critique and emphasize the weakness and corruption riddling postcolonial African nations and pointing to a bleak future. Unfortunately, within the realms of economics and political science, this critique, aimed at discussing the material obstacles postcolonial African nations faced, also became an opportunity for some white critics, such as Paul Johnson, to return to the worn stereotypes of black Africans' biological inferiority rendering them incapable of self-governance (Colonialism's Back - And Not a Moment Too Soon, 1993). For contemporary figures such as the American academics Frank Wilderson (Incognegro, 2008) and Jared Sexton (Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism, 2008), the work of Fanon, Ayittey, and other early Afropessimists is an important touchstone towards arguing that blackness will always find itself exploited and oppressed by whiteness and thus always hindered from progressing.
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While Sexton and Wilderson do not address Fanon's strict gender politics, wherein black men are the normative representatives of blackness whom black women must always follow and support (Dubey, 1998; Wright, 2004), in her essay Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987), American academic Hortense Spillers famously produces the black female body as the normative body that is the "natural" target for the colonizer's discourse and anti-progressive exploitation. According to Spillers, because the black female body is the literal biological source of the black race, it is the most frequent target of attack. In making this claim, Spillers does not rebut or reject Fanon's or any Afropessimist scholar's masculinist logic, but simply makes a case for the centrality of the black female (heterosexual) body.
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Trinidadian and American academic and activist Carole Boyce Davies also presents the black female body as normative to blackness, but in her scholarship (Black Women, Writing and Identity, 1994, and Moving Beyond Boundaries: Black Women's Diasporas, edited with Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, 1995) produces a vision of diaspora in which black women, queer and straight, are linked to communities all over the globe through shared cultural practices, political beliefs and intellectual concerns. Davies, like American and Caribbean activist and poet Audre Lorde, cannot be linked with an Afropessimist tradition, however, even though both intellectuals' assessment of the power of white racism and its effects is unstinting. Instead, Lorde and Davies both point to a black feminist cultural history of resistance and of sustaining practices within hostile racist environments that enable the survival of black diasporic communities. Dutch and Surinamese scholar and activist Gloria Wekker has argued (The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora, 2006) even further that black women across the diaspora can and do make their own communities, communities that, while not rejecting men, nonetheless possess their own uniquely gendered characteristics. Similarly, black German scholar, filmmaker and activist Fatima El-Tayeb argues (European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, 2011) that black Europeans, straight and gay, can and should make common political cause with other racial minorities in Western Europe because they are all defined as 'Other', or wholly foreign and hostile to dominant white European mores.
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White European governments (especially those in Western Europe, which from time to time have been forced, by sheer force of numbers, to acknowledge the presence of black denizens within their borders) are still loath to acknowledge the need to address Western Europe's founding role in the transatlantic slave trade, its invention of anti-black racist ideologies, the racist political, social and economic violence and damage wreaked during its colonial rule in Africa, and the ongoing presence of right-wing racist groups and sentiments within its political centres. The study and representation of black Europeans in academic and political institutions are so scarce as to be taboo, yet acts of violence against black Europeans are a growing constant in the quotidian, as are negrophobic and negrophilic representations of blackness in Western European mass media.
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# The importance of place: defining blackness in Europe and Africa
Perhaps because of their diverse roots, anti-racist activists in Europe do not wholly agree in their aims or analyses. After all, black Europeans can claim a broad range of familial, historical and cultural influences: North African, West African, East African and Caribbean origins; Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Africanist religions; leftist, centrist and conservative political orientations - as well as a broad variety of European, African and Caribbean languages and dialects. As one can imagine, Maghrebi populations in France, for example, can feel more immediately threatened by Europe's long-standing Islamophobia than black Britons who hail from the Anglophone Caribbean. The black German movement is notable for scholars such as Peggy Piesche and Maureen Eggers (Mythen, Masken und Subjekte Kritische Weisssein Forschung in Deutschland, or Myths, Masks and Subjects in Critical Whiteness Studies, 2009), whose scholarship compellingly links anti-black racism to misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia and class prejudice. At the same time, this 'large umbrella' approach is relatively rare in activist politics as a whole, much less within the black and African diasporas.
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Further along the spectrum of definitions of blackness, where blackness is defined through its global, non-race-specific intersections, we find Black Cosmopolitanism, which is also an umbrella concept, and subsequently developed to very fine degrees by a variety of contemporary thinkers and writers. For example, Ghanaian academic and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) that all black communities and individuals must understand themselves as 'global citizens' who, while distinct in their cultures, religions, ethnicities and nationalities, are nonetheless linked by a common ancestry and history - even while some are admittedly less empowered than others. In a slightly different vein, the novels of Nigerian novelist and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, especially Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Americanab (2013), focus on how black Africans at this moment in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century must inevitably navigate between their local African ancestral homes, their national cultures and the long economic and political arm of global 'superpowers' in order to survive. Strikingly, Appiah and Adichie tend to locate black cosmopolitans almost wholly in urban areas, as does American academic Bennetta Jules-Rosette. In Black Paris (1998), Jules-Rosette argues that certain black diaspora literatures written from and focusing on the black experience
within large urban centres must be analysed within their own paradigm (such as 'Parisianism'), because defining blackness outside of the richly complex multicultural space of major cities is at best distorting, if not impossible.
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# From place to space: defining blackness through shared geographies
In fact, defining black identities in Europe has spawned a wholly separate subfield which argues that shared histories and geographies create shared communities that can legitimately be understood as nations in their own right. While the most influential theoretical work is The Black Atlantic (1992) by British professor Paul Gilroy, which argues that the 'Black Atlantic' is a black community-cum-nation composed of African American, black British and anglophone black Caribbean communities that are linked through their shared border of the Atlantic Ocean and its attendant history of enslavement and resistance. ${ }^{2}$
While a vast number of cultural and scholarly projects inspired by The Black Atlantic have followed, and continue to follow, Gilroy's project has been critiqued from a range of viewpoints, shedding some light on the different ways black identities in the diaspora are understood and defined by artists, activists and scholars (and thus worthy of an expanded discussion in this article). In The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy's Legacy, British scholar Lucy Evans neatly summarizes the three main types of critic: (1) those who seek to 'broaden the borders' of the Black Atlantic to include not only more black communities in nations that border the Atlantic, but also communities found nearer to the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean (see Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio); (2) those, such as Simon Gikandi and Natasha Barnes (both located in the United States of America, although Gikandi is an Africanist born and raised in Kenya), who voice concern over Gilroy's emphasis on the Atlantic slave trade as the sole foundational event linking and defining Black Atlantic cultures and consciousness (see their special issue of the journal Research in
[^0]
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[^0]
[^0]: 2 Logically speaking, Gilroy's focus on a shared Atlantic border and history of slavery should also incorporate the Lusophone and Hispanophone black communities of the Caribbean, as well as of Central and South America. However, although he does not explicitly reject this possibility, neither does Gilroy include those communities, whether implicitly or explicitly.
African Literatures); and finally, (3) those, such as the Africanist scholars Charles Piot (Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy's Black Atlantic, 2001) and Dagmawi Woubshet (The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, 2015), who question the logic of Gilroy's use of Africa as a space forever locked in the past and ignored in its present incarnations despite its continuing, vibrant engagement with and influence on contemporary black diasporic communities.
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While the contributors to Problematizing Blackness (2003), edited by Percy Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier, also seek to expand and subvert dominant definitions of blackness in the United States, they would not define themselves as part of the 'post-black' movement. Instead, like Hintzen (born in Guyana) and Rahier (born in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and raised in Brussels), these scholars, all of whom teach in the United States of America but were born in Africa and raised either there or in Europe, relate how they had to learn what 'blackness' meant to African Americans in the United States; this is an ironic state of affairs, considering that so many definitions of black American identity almost always point to Africa as the originary 'source' of their culture, rituals and social practices (what one of the contributors, Carolle Charles, dubs 'being black twice'). Yet the point that is made by contributors such as Olúfémi Táíwò (This Prison Called My Skin), Sarah Manyika (Oyinbo), and Carolle Charles (Being Black Twice) is that, far from having a universal definition, Middle Passage blackness carries many assumptions that are tied to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, or Middle Passage. At the other end of the spectrum, American and Caribbean anthropologist Jemima Pierre argues in The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (2012) that, far from being a 'nonracialized space', Europe's African colonies were racialized to such a degree that postcolonial Africans are actually familiar with a similar, if not the same, paradigm of blackness that operates in the 'Black Atlantic'.
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While the role of and relationship to Africa inform many debates on defining black diasporic identities, Gilroy's book and the volumes that followed in its wake have also given rise to a new discussion on defining blackness in the West. Specifically, many scholars question the tendency to focus on Middle Passage blackness (see James Smethurst's 'Internationally Known': The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop, 2011, and my essay Middle Passage Blackness and Its Diasporic Discontents, 2013). These articles, among others, also criticize those who define blackness as the product of Atlantic slavery and the struggle for civil rights - thus ignoring an increasing number
of black people in the West who were either born and raised in Africa or born in the West to two black African parents who emigrated there long after the slave trade. The debate over these definitions of blackness largely boils down to which history one is using to define blackness - or whether one is using a history at all, as is the case in some discussions on post-blackness and Afrofuturism.
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# Looking beyond in the present moment: defining blackness through Afrofuturism
While many conservative intellectuals and politicians in the West have seized upon the term 'post-blackness' to claim that we are living in a 'post-racial era' (that is, in a time where racism and racial discrimination no longer exist in any meaningful way, or only exist in the paranoid minds of minorities), the earliest and most famous use of the term, by American art curator and art historian Thelma Golden, had quite different connotations. In the exhibition catalogue for the show Freestyle hosted by Golden's Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, Golden argued that the black artists exhibiting wanted to be understood first and foremost as artists who worked in and through black paradigms. Honing this definition further, in Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity (2010), American journalist Ytasha Womack argues that twenty-first-century African Americans have expanded their cultural expressions and politics 'beyond' those of the previous generation and, contrary to conservative claims that post-blackness means the end of race and racism, are not seeking to eliminate previous definitions of blackness, but instead to expand on them.
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Defining blackness beyond the Middle Passage (or, put another way, to include those whose ancestors were not enslaved in the Americas) is the quest of Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a decades-old vision of blackness first developed by American jazz musician Sun Ra; it constructs blackness within and beyond world histories, thus defining blackness outside of its more immediate histories of slavery, colonialism and postcolonial political oppression and economic exploitation by drawing on images of interplanetary travel by 'Afronauts' (black space travellers), ancient Egypt (especially under the Nubian pharaohs) and alien encounters. The term itself was coined by the white American journalist and writer Mark Dery in his essay Black to the Future (1994), in which he noted the explosion of African American fiction using futuristic and time-travelling tropes. Expanding Dery's definition by engaging with the creative work of
musicians such as George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic and Janelle Monáe and of visual artists such as Rashid Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, leading American Afrofuturist scholar Alondra Nelson memorably defined the central tenet of Afrofuturism as a 'utopic striving' for a better future in the here and now (Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions, 2000). Although the work of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu and of British-Ghanaian filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun is not explicitly located as part of this movement, their artistic creations have nonetheless been described as Afrofuturist and/or Afrosurrealist, which defines blackness as a surreal state of being, especially within dominant white (European) environments.
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Left to the margins in many of these definitions, from Pan-Africanism to Afrosurrealism, are black queer individuals who in fact share the same socioeconomic spaces and are of course part of these communities. While, as noted above, black feminists have consistently and successfully carved out spaces that define blackness outside of masculinist norms, most scholars, artists and activists still tend to seek to explore and define blackness through heterosexual black bodies. Indeed, two of the few thinkers and writers on the African/black diasporas to explore queerness apart from Peggy Piesche and Fatima El-Tayeb are black Scottish poet, novelist and short-story writer Jackie Kay (Trumpet, 1998) and black Jamaican poet and short-story writer Thomas Glave (The Torturer's Wife, 2008).
In striking contrast to this impressive array of theorizations, the sciences, specifically biology and genetics, have moved 'backwards' in time (or perhaps not moved at all since the invention of "race science" in the eighteenth century). As analysed and explained by American scholar Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (1997), not only is there a common misconception in scientific communities (which assume that racial difference was a scientific discovery) that race is biologically and/or genetically determined, but also the sale of certain medications as racially specific or the offer of a genetic ancestral profile can reap impressive profits - despite the lack of any evidence that 'race genes' exist. Equally frightening, this biological essentialism appears to be informing State policy - as revealed in remarks by President George W. Bush on 28 February 2002 at the National Summit on Retirement Savings, when he argued that fewer resources could be spent on African American communities because African Americans were genetically predisposed to die at much younger ages than their white counterparts.
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# Conclusion: finding the when and where of blackness for inclusive definitions
In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015), I argue that the increasing diversification of black communities in Africa and throughout the globe makes it all the more important that scholars, politicians and activists develop more accurate and inclusive ways to analyse and represent black identities. West, North and East African immigration to Western Europe, China, the United States of America, Canada and Australia, for example, remains largely ignored in dominant discourses on blackness that imagine blackness as located only in Africa (implying that black Africans who settle outside of Africa cannot be considered denizens, much less citizens) or the United States. At the moment, the specific needs of these communities, their religious beliefs and cultural practices, political aspirations and health needs are either lumped in together with those of 'African Americans' (i.e., blacks in the United States who trace their African ancestry through transatlantic slavery) or those associated with a random stereotype of black Africans.
So what is there to gain from theorizing blackness as homogenous, with no respect for these crucial differences across Africa and within the black/African diasporas? In her 1988 essay Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography, Gayatri Spivak offers the term 'strategic essentialism' to explain why a relatively diverse socioeconomic and/or political minority might represent and analyse itself as homogeneous. Spivak argues that because this group is homogenized by bigoted discourses, there is a shared experience of oppression best combated with an organized, unified response.
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Yet the conceptualization of unity is hardly a neutral action uninformed by common assumptions - most especially the assumption that cisgender men are more naturally suited for leadership and resistance than women. ${ }^{3}$ Indeed, most collectives that understand themselves as racially/ethnically, religiously and/or nationally comprised tend to equate unity and independence for their collective with a heteropatriarchal order. From a practical standpoint, this type of unity disempowers more than half of the adult collective (cisgender women and, often, queer members of the collective) and thus reduces the likelihood
[^0]
[^0]: 3 The term 'cisgender' was developed by transgender activists who seek to remind us that, like race, gender is far from a fixed biological fact that is easily defined and discerned. 'Cisgender' refers to those bodies that maintain and still identify with the gender they were accorded at birth, as opposed to those that have chosen another gender, or no gender at all.
of successful and lasting outcomes. While considerably more difficult, elective affinities (not in the sense used in Goethe's famous novel, but in the sense of the term in chemistry) in which individuals and collectives are encouraged to build alliances around a shared concern for certain issues (rather than a shared racial, ethnic, religious or national identity) offer the opportunity for those peoples to truly and authentically express and act on their beliefs, as well as build impressive coalitions to effect change - whether that be around poverty, judicial and/or economic reform, political corruption, education, civil rights, citizenship, or so forth.
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At heart, what is at stake here is understanding blackness as a complex identity that carries different meanings depending on its time and place. Rather than attempting to determine exactly who possesses an "authentically black" socioeconomic and/or political background, for example, we can and should address differences between different black individuals with an eye to aggregating around shared concerns and causes. In other words, we might all be better off changing the question from 'What is blackness?' to 'When and where is blackness??
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# References
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Adichie, C. N. 2013. Americanab: A Novel. New York, Random House.
Appiah, A. K. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York, W. W. Norton \& Company.
Ayittey, G. B. N. 1992. Africa Betrayed. New York, St. Martin's Press.
Ayittey, G. B. N. 1998. Africa in Chaos. New York, St. Martin's Press.
Barnes, N. 1996. Black Atlantic - Black America. Research in African Literatures, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 106-7.
Boyce Davies, C. 1994. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London and New York, Routledge.
Boyce Davies, C. and Ogundipe-Leslie, M. (eds) 1995. Moving Beyond Boundaries: Black Women's Diasporas, Vols. 1 and 2. New York, New York University Press.
Charles, C. 2003. Being Black twice. P.C. Hintzen and J.M. Rahier (eds), Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States. New York, Routledge, pp.169-80.
Dery, M. (ed.). 1994. Black to the future: interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, pp. 179-222.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1994 (orig. pub. 1903). The Souls of Black Folk. New York, Dover Publications.
Dubey, M. 1998. The "true lie" of the nation: Fanon and feminism. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 1-29.
Eggers, M. M., Kilomba, G., Piesche, P. and Arndt, S. (eds). 2009. Mythen, Masken und Subjekte Kritische Weisssein Forschung in Deutschland. Berlin, Unrast Press.
El-Tayeb, F. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
Evans, L. 2009. The Black Atlantic: exploring Gilroy's legacy. Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 255-68.
Eze, E. C. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishing.
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Eze, E. C. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishing.
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Fanon, F. 2004 (orig. pub. 1961). The Wretched of the Earth. R. Philcox (trans.). New York, Grove Press.
Gates, H. L. Jr. 1987. Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self. Oxford, UK, New York, Oxford University Press.
Gikandi, S. 2014. Afterword: outside the Black Atlantic. Research in African Literatures, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 241-44.
Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Glave, T. 2008. The Torturer's Wife. San Francisco, Calif., City Lights.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1902. Philosophy of History. J. Sibree (trans.). New York, P.F. Collier and Son.
Hintzen, P.C. and Rahier J. M. (eds). 2003. Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States. New York, Routledge.
Jefferson, T. 1995 (orig. pub. 1781). Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press.
Johnson, P. 1993. Colonialism's back—and not a moment too soon. New York Times Magazine, 18 April, Section 6, p. 22.
Jules-Rosette, B. 1998. Black Paris: The African Writers'Landscape. Urbana and Chicago, Ill., University of Illinois Press.
Kay, J. 1998. Trumpet. London, Picador.
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Pierre, J. 2012. The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press.
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Sexton, J. 2008. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
Smethurst, J. 2012. "Internationally known": the Black Arts Movement and U.S. poetry in the age of hip hop. N. Cary (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 638-54.
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Spivak, G. C. 1988. Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography. G. Ranajit and G. C. Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford, UK, and New York, Oxford University Press, pp. 3-33.
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Wekker, G. 2006. The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. New York, Columbia University Press.
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Woubshet, D. 2015. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore, Md., John Hopkins University Press.
Wright, M. M. 2004. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press.
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Wright, M. M. 2004. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press.
Wright, M. M. 2013. Middle Passage blackness and its diasporic discontents: the case for a post-war epistemology. E. Rosenhaft and R. Aitken (eds), Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century. Liverpool, UK, Liverpool University Press, pp. 217-33.
Wright, M. M. 2015. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
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# CHAPTER 2
## CONCEPTUALISING COLOUR REPRESENTATION IN ANTIQUITY
From Kmt, The Greco-Roman World to The Middle Ages<br>Amon Saba Saakana
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## From Greek to Latin: the Moor in perspective
In this essay I apply a linear approach to the understanding of ethnic identification based upon historical documents. I rely upon the records of the literature to define identity. Thus ancient Egypt is a colonial invention herein ejected in favour of Kmt (the State) and Kmtan/Kemite/Kmtu (the people). I utilise both the historical and art history approaches, as iconographic evidence is abundant and the artists testify to their perception of the subject of their art. Any other approach is a translation, subjected to personal interpretation, and thus prejudiced.
The popularity of key adjectival words in the history of African representation locks the reader's perceptions into specific mental spaces. In relation to the African Moor, cultural theorists have offered explanations of specific instances of representation, but very few have provided a holistic perspective which located and derived key meanings from them. In order to better understand the meaning applied to the word 'Moor', one must begin by tracing its etymology. I begin with the Middle Ages and the presence of the African Moors in popular discussion of their expulsion from Christian Spain.
Barthelemy (1987, p. 8), a cultural theorist, locates the etymology of the word 'Moor' in the Greek maupos, 'a proper noun that identifies the inhabitants
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Barthelemy (1987, p. 8), a cultural theorist, locates the etymology of the word 'Moor' in the Greek maupos, 'a proper noun that identifies the inhabitants
of ancient Mauretania, the area that now makes up Morocco and Algeria [...] the fact [is] that maupos was used as a synonym for black' (1987, p. 8). He links the Greek word with the Latin maurus, which he says also 'came to mean black' (1987, p. 9). Further, quoting an author who says that although the word and its derivatives meant 'dark' or 'black', Barthelemy says that '[i]t was, therefore, not possible to mistake a Negro and a Mauretanian', and that this confusion arose from the author of Mandeville's Travels, who 'spoke of the Moors as black' (1987, p. 9). In a scholarly analysis of the historical development of the word 'Moor', Snowden (1970, p. 259, footnote 12) refers to Juvenal 5.53, Isidore 14.5.10, the translation of which reads: 'Mauretania derives its name from the color of its people, for the Greeks render nigrum as $\mu a u o o v[\ldots]$ Maurus appears at times to have been a poetical equivalent of Aethiops'. The latter statement appears tautological, as the etymology of the word, Greek in origin, literally means 'burnt face', a designation of blackness, which is certainly not poetical. Based on all the associations cited by Snowden, the word 'Moor' would appear to have been derived from the Greek root maupos, from which developed the Latin maurus. It should be noted here that black-skinned people were frequently found in Greece in the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and that numerous icons were made of them, in ceramic and other materials. According to Snowden,
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the ancients recognized that these peoples differed in pigmentation and took considerable pains to record observed differences. Ethiopians may have looked alike to Philostratus but not to most Greeks and Romans. Even Philostratus himself described Memnon as not really black because the pure black of his skin showed a trace of ruddiness. When Statius spoke of red Ethiopians, he was perhaps revealing the accuracy of the Roman's knowledge of the Ethiopian type. Negroes of red, copper-colored complexion are known among African tribes (1970, p. 3).
This summarizes the historical intrusion of the word 'Moor' and its derivations (moreau, morien, Maurice, morisco, etc.) into European vocabulary before and after 1492, when the Moors were expelled from Christian Spain, which came to identify the African as a black or tawny Moor. The word 'tawny' implies a lighter colour, although some scholars associate this word with whiteness. Interestingly, as early as the sixteenth century, both secular and religious public festivals re-enacted the Reconquest by Christian Spain, particularly during Christmas, by portraying the Moors as black in Tortosa, and using the terms 'Moor' and 'black' interchangeably (Ruiz, 2012, pp. 38-39).
It is thus recognized that people have skin colour of differing gradations which can be described as black, brown, dark brown, light brown, dark, and so
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It is thus recognized that people have skin colour of differing gradations which can be described as black, brown, dark brown, light brown, dark, and so
on. Just as there is a preponderance of adjectival descriptions for the variously hued skin of people today called European; indeed, the word 'Mediterranean' now simply means, roughly, 'permanently suntanned, with various degrees of pigmentation', with all those of darker complexion assumed to be inhabitants of southern Spain, Cyprus, Greece, southern Italy, or Hungary, for instance. The term 'Moor' indisputably expresses a 'black' origin stemming from the African presence in Greece from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE. Before that, the first generation of Greek writers all referred to the Kemites as aethiopes, meaning 'burnt-faced' or 'black-faced'. Far too many Greek gods are described as Ethiopian or Egyptian in origin: Athena, Memnon, Andromeda, Cepheus, Perseus and others were recognized by Greeks in antiquity as having AfricanAsian origin and complexions that were variations of black (Snowden, 1970, pp. 144-153).
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# Founding fathers of Kemetology paint Kemites as mixed or white
Sir William Flinders Petrie, the foremost nineteenth-century Egyptologist and archaeologist, was the first to assign, simultaneously, an outside origin and a mixed African-Libyan origin to Kemet: ‘The Egyptians were largely formed from Libyan immigrants to begin with; the basis of the race apparently being a mulatto of Libyan-negro mixture, judging from the earliest skeletons at Medum' (Flinders Petrie, 1974a, p. 63). In another work, Petrie ascribed each new introduction of ceramic design styles to the 'entry of a fresh civilisation, and probably a fresh race' (Flinders Petrie, 1974b, p. 16; emphasis added). This monumental imagining of a 'fresh race', 'a dynastic race', 'a new race' - in short, a non-African 'race' - is too ubiquitous to warrant detailing (Wilkinson, 1996; Maspero, 1920; etc.). Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum in the earlier part of the last century, clearly showed the development of his thinking as he gained wider access to records and cultures as his research progressed. In an 1893 publication, he repeated the dogma laid down by ethnologists and anthropologists according to which the Egyptians belong to the Caucasian race (Wallis Budge, 1893, p. 51). In the same publication, however, he soon goes on to compare the Kushites to descendants of the biblical Ham (Kem) and says that their 'bodily appearance is the same, though their skin is a little darker, and at the outset they appear to have had a religion and speech akin to that of the Egyptians' (Wallis Budge, 1893, p. 52; emphasis added). Though this dispels any notion of a Caucasian
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'race' having any central role in the genesis of intellectual history in Kmt at the predynastic or dynastic stages, it nevertheless attempts to perpetuate the historical hoax which invents a Hamitic race whose complexion is dark but whose noses are aquiline, and so forth. This European-invented 'race' caused Iris Berger (1980, p. 68) to observe that ' $[t]$ his highly racist view credited all achievements of African civilizations to light-skinned northern outsiders'. As Wallis Budge progressed in his educational development, he was able to make cultural comparisons with Kmt and the rest of Africa, where he found comparable living customs at the time he conducted his research (1890s-1920s) (Wallis Budge, 1893, p. 52). James Henry Breasted (1909, p. 25) went one step further, locating a 'composite' origin of Nile Valley civilization in North Africa/Libya (peopled by fair-skinned Caucasians) and East Africa (peopled by the Galla, Somali and Bega).
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# The turning tide: another view
After reconstructing the historiographical reflection of European apprehension towards the black African, presented only as a marginal figure in the historical records of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the last 20 years we have arrived at the developmental stage. In this stage, the reinterpretation of sites, iconography, and material and ideological conditions influencing the times is being brought to bear to distinguish reality from ideological invention. Thus Dietrich Raue (2008, pp. 2-4) asks a question that is far from rhetorical, under the subheading 'How Nubian can a Naqada culture be to be still called Naqada culture?'. He challenges the need to make arbitrary distinctions between what is Kmtan and what is Nubian at the first cataract at Elephantine. He also insists that the 'full publication of old excavation finds from Shellal and Qubaniya is urgently needed, since the description of the finds of the region as "A Group" or "Naqada" remains unsatisfying'. 'Naqada' and 'A Group' are archaeo-anthropological markers used to define an unknown quantity, to intentionally dissociate black African Nubians from the genesis of the cultures resident in their territory. Thankfully, the work of Dagnell, Gatto, Hendrickx and others has dispelled this long-held delusion.
The narcissism of some Europeans with regard to ethnic identification should not obscure the fact that they identified key facts about and stages in the development and growth of the Kmtan State: its date of origin and chronology, scientific achievements, scholastic precedents, judicial system, gender equity, and so on. In the continuing development of enlightened consciousness regarding
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not only the European/Mediterranean/African origin debate, but also the nature of cultural contacts and the specific phenomenon of colonialism, Maria Carmela Gatto, using logic to confront static cultural paradigms, has shifted her theoretical position to accommodate cultural and social complexity. This is not a new phenomenon: sound theorists from the politico-anthropological to psychoanalytical schools, such as Antonio Gramsci, Cheikh Anta Diop, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frantz Fanon and Wilhelm Reich, devised alternative theoretical paradigms to combat the dominant traditional colonialist view, but the phenomenon is new to Egyptology. Because of its peculiar history, the South American school, with its ideological and methodological approach, is far more liberated in terms of ideological grounding. To close this segment, I quote Gatto extensively below:
The definition of frontiers was for a long time based on a colonialist viewpoint with the expectation of sharp boundaries visible in cultural markers. Moreover, the colonists were seen as cultural innovators and the natives as passive recipients (Lightfoot and Martinez, 1995). This is often still the way we define the frontier between Egypt and Nubia and interpret the interaction between Egyptians and Nubians.
The reconceptualization of frontiers as zones of cultural interface and fluidity in group affiliations is a new perspective in anthropological theory (Lightfoot and Martinez, 1995). The assumption is that frontiers are socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created and transformed. The fluidity of group affiliation in boundary areas may thus produce integrated new entities. In the present case, we should expect that the Egyptian and Nubian groups modified, created and syncretized emblemic elements, or cultural markers, to produce an integrated new entity in their culture contact situation (Gatto, 2009, pp. 124-127).
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# Reconceptualizing cross-cultural influences: Kmt and Greece
The highly skilled Kmtan artists used living human models to create enduring images which stare at us; these images serve as primary evidence for evaluating the specific ethnicities and nationalities with which the people of Kmt came into contact from the predynastic to the Pharaonic period. The characteristic costumes, hair styles, type and texture of hair, shape of nose, and so on are presented with such an eye for detail that we are left with no doubt that these outstanding artists were portraying phenotypical features that
they had observed. Before delving further into this arena, however, we should examine the report of an ancient eyewitness and compare it with one of the rapidly amassing modern scientific revelations about the technical, aesthetic and established canonical traditions which produced the variety of art in the ancient political entity called Kmt.
Diodorus Siculus, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote and published a book on ancient Egypt. By then, Egypt was a country which had been colonized, principally by the Greeks in a process initiated by the multiculturalist Alexander of Macedonia in 332 BCE. However, Kmt's reputation as a centre of science, religion and the arts had not been dimmed, and, according to Davis (1979, footnote 3; emphasis added), 'The journey to Egypt is a central theme in the ancient biographies of several Greek philosophers and men of culture. References to this abound in the classical literature.' Diodorus lists 13 prominent figures in Greek intellectual and political history (including Homer, Solon and Plato) as having visited and/or studied in Kmt (Diodorus, 1985, p. 125). He goes further by naming two famous Greek sculptors:
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Telecles and Theodoros, the sons of Rhoecos, who were the most renowned of the ancient sculptors, are also reputed to have spent time with the Egyptians. [Beyond inserting this information which can be dismissed at the level of rumour, Diodorus goes on to supply precious information of practice which certainly authenticates his claim.] They carved the wooden statue of Pythian Apollo for the Samians, of which it is reported that half of the image was fabricated by Telecles in Samos, and the other half was completed by his brother Theodoros at Ephesus [...] Now this way of working is never practiced by the Greeks, but it is the rule of the Egyptians, for among them the proportions of the statues are not determined by the appearance of the eye, as among the Greeks, rather [...] they determine all the relative proportions, from the smallest to the largest, by dividing the scale of the complete body into twenty-one and a quarter units, whereby they derive the entire symmetry of the image (Davis, 1979; emphasis added).
It is important to comment in passing that the accuracy of many writers of antiquity has been doubted by modern scholars for a variety of reasons, which are probably underpinned by considerations of 'race'. Moret (1927, p. 432), for example, dismissed Diodorus' eyewitness account as exaggerated. But the period of relevance for Greek art was the period of its cultural contact with Kmt from the eighth century BCE, when Greeks were used as mercenaries in the State army and when they were also involved in trade, although confined to one particular location, Naukratis. Over successive epochs, the grid system for determining proportions varied: in the Old Kingdom it consisted of 18 squares
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based on horizontal lines; this became 20 during the New Kingdom Amarna period, 24 during Kushite rule, and, ultimately, 21 in the first century BCE, as Diodorus testified. Referring to the grid system during the Amarna period, Robins says, 'there are 20 squares instead of the traditional 18 squares [...] The height of 20 squares is confirmed by measurements on the figure in the tomb of Mahu that preserves some grid traces' (Robins, 1994, p. 123). Elsewhere, she states that the artists' primary concern was to use 'established conventions to encode the information about the world that they wished to convey'(1994, p.3).
Although there is no doubt as to the status of Telecles and Theodoros as great Greek artists, the Roman Pliny stated that the Athenian Apollodorus 'was the first to give his figures the appearance of reality' (Davis, 1979, p. 125), drawing from the same Egyptian source. Verification of the reputed knowledge of the Kemites is supplied by Plato (1977, p. 132): ancient Greeks were an 'unlettered mountain race' (i.e., they had no writing); Solon, one of the great Greek sages (seventh and sixth centuries BCE), who were defined as men of politics and not of wisdom, went to Kemet to learn about ancient Greek history from the Kemite priests. In a manuscript Plato inherited from his own father, he equates the attempt at the reformation of the Greek State with the 'infliction of exile and death' (1973, p. 122). To these nascent Greek philosophers, Kemet thus appeared a miraculous State.
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# Self-representation in Kemite art
Interestingly, this grid system was scientifically devised by the Kemites in pursuit of a symmetry which is perfectly represented by a circle in two dimensions and by a sphere in three dimensions. Conceived thus, with pi $(\pi)$ as a universal constant associated with all perfectly circled objects, it becomes apparent that this operating concept was certainly functional in the Kemites' grid system, which went from 18 squares in the Old Kingdom (2600-2137 BCE) to 20 in the New Kingdom to 24 under Nubian rule. What connects all the grid systems is the numerator 3; thus, since the Kemites were the first to square a circle and the first to postulate pi $(\pi)$ (Obenga, 1990), it can be inferred that Plato's notion that art is number perfectly corresponds to the Kmtan model. The Kemites were concerned with harmony and symmetry probably because they understood the creation of the universe (the sep tepy, or 'first occasion') as an issuing from one source of energy; in other words, for the Kemites, the universe was kept in balance by one force. The use of the grid system can therefore be assumed to have been based on
this universalizing concept. By squaring a circle, the grid system was thus invented (Dada Imarogbe, personal communication, 1 December 1995).
Conceptualizing the artistic standards, conventions and traditions according to which the ancient Kmtan artists developed their genius and extended it to the rest of the world, Wolff states that the intention of his book was 'to point continually to artistic experiments, to peculiarities of form, and to certain motifs that spread from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the West' (Wolff, 1972, p. 5). According to Bogoslovsky's description, the Kmtu took a methodical and clinical approach to the creation of a work of art, considering the following before initiating its actual creation:
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1 - general dimensions of the tomb as a whole and the dimensions of its chambers and passages; 2 - the purpose of separate chambers and passages, their names and their corresponding shapes; 3 - the subjects of the pictures and their composition in general. The purely artistic decoration works were minutely planned (Bogoslovsky, 1980, p. 91).
Bogoslovsky also shows that the lead draughtsman demonstrated his thorough understanding and knowledge of the work to be carried out by stopping and correcting the artists when the work went wrong. Because of the draughtsman's involvement in the minute and effective execution of works of art, Bogoslovsky asserts, '[s]uch organisation of work of the draughtsmen makes it appear that all decorations of a tomb are made by one single artist' (p. 93; emphasis added).
Here it becomes apparent that the artists of Kmt must have undergone rigorous and systematic training in order to attain the required level of professionalism. In this extract from his reflections, one such professional artist makes plain his knowledge of anatomy, motion, and portraiture:
I know the attitude of a man's statue, the gait of a woman [motion], the carriage of ... the bent (altitude) of one being beaten ... I can make an eye look at another [portraiture]; I know the frightened look of men being awakened, the swing of the (spear) throwing arm [anatomy], and the stoop of the runner... This has been revealed to no one, except to myself alone and my eldest son, when the God (the King) ordered that there should be someone (?) to whom it should be revealed. I have seen things produced by his hand [while] in the post of Director of Works, in every precious stone, from silver and gold to ivory and ebony (Moret, 1927, p. 436).
The artist clearly stated his knowledge of three important elements of the basis of education. He also asserted that he received not only instructions but also practical examples from his king. From the outset, a royal or noble patron supported the artist. In addition, the Kemite priest held the function of chief
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craftsman and tutor (Aldred, 1980, p. 23). By the Middle Kingdom (from 2050 BCE), for instance, the sculptor Irtisen immortalized himself through the writings in his tomb, extolling his knowledge of traditional methods of art (Aldred, ibid.). Irtisen also alluded to being privy to information only he and his eldest son shared. Traditionally, throughout Africa, from antiquity to the present, certain professions are passed down from father to eldest son and from mother to eldest daughter. Thus, educating a son as an artist was dependent not only on formal schooling, but also on hereditary systems of transmission.
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# The Other as seen by the Kemite in literature
It is therefore interesting to compare Kmt's perception of the Western Asiatic within this framework. The hieroglyphic sign for 'highland' and 'desert' was the same; the mountain in Kmt which surrounded the valley was of red soil - desert - and the Western Asian was viewed as coming from the desert. Thus, according to John Wilson (2000, p. 65), 'the Egyptian pictorially grouped the foreigner with the beast of the desert and pictorially denied the foreigner the blessings of fertility and uniformity'. This is not to say, however, that the Kemites denied settlement to these peoples; rather, they restricted them, like they did all foreigners, to certain settlements. Libyans were settled in the western desert and Western Asians, in the delta region and the eastern desert.
The association of topographical descriptions with human characteristics does not enter a people's consciousness and language without some basis; in Kmt's clear-cut philosophical view of the world, the belligerence and semiimpoverishment of Western Asian peoples were features which conformed to its description of them. The Western Asian was seen as a beast of the desert because of his hostile attacks upon the land of Kmt. (The Amarna Letters illustrate the political validity and consequence of Kmt's relations and the resultant evolution of Kmt's protective colonial policies: royal intermarriage of the Asian king's daughter with Kmt's king in a system of plural wives, and assimilationist colonial policies pursued by Kmt which ultimately terminated in Asian revolt and plunder.)
Thus with the persistence of these attacks, the desert inhabitant was characterized as beastly. This is reflected in the writings of Merikare, who perceived the Asian as a nomadic plunderer: 'He does not live in a single place, but his feet wander. He has been fighting since the time of Horus, but he conquers not, nor is he conquered [...] He may plunder a lonely settlement, but
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he will not take a single city [...] Trouble thyself not about him: he is (only) an Asiatic' (Wilson, 1977, p. 39). Unfortunately, Merikare could not have foreseen the Asian will to conquer Kmt completely in 640 CE However, associating the desert with the foreigner/beast is not set in stone; Wosir (Osiris), upon his death, as the personification of the peace of the desert may appear both contradictory and non-exclusive.
The literary and artistic attestations to the apprehension of ethnicity and nationality are fully supported by the evidence reproduced here. The Kemites were familiar with a variety of human types and had the precision and training to reproduce them pictorially and in writing. In Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten (Lichtheim, 1976, p. 98), the king poignantly, through the unification theology of a One God, describes humanity's variety of ethnic identities and of skin pigmentations:
Their tongues differ in speech,
Their characters likewise
Their skins are distinct
For you [Aten] distinguished the peoples
(emphasis added).
In deconstructing the above lines, one must take note of precise definitions and use of vocabulary. Akhenaten uses the word 'tongue' to reflect the variety of languages which are spoken by different peoples. He recognizes the basis of national character; he recognizes that there are distinguishing features of a personality which stem from the specific social histories, climate and development which have shaped and moulded a particular national group. This does not presume that national character is static and unchanging, but it is an allusion to a nebulous, perhaps subtle differentiation between peoples of different nationalities based upon notionally observable idiosyncratic traits. Not satisfied with defining these attributes as perhaps subservient to the major distinguishing feature of skin pigmentation, Akhenaten acknowledges the phenotypical differences in humanity while also accepting their genotypical origin in an Almighty Source, here defined as the Aten.
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It should come as no surprise that Akhenaten observed these differences so accurately. He is known as the king who introduced the innovation of portraying the royal family in human situations. Aldred (1991, p. 303; emphasis added) states that "[h]is family life with his chief queen, Nefertiti, and her daughters, has been disclosed with an intimacy and a bumanity that is hardly found again
[anywhere] in antique art'. Akhenaten's overriding philosophical orientation moves towards the irreducible plane of cosmic philosophy. There is a recognition that since the source of energy is the source of life, all matter is interrelated and that all the various life forms (whether plant, animal or human) which emerge from the one cosmic source share a common origin (De Lubicz, 1985, p. 6) in the Aten. Perhaps for a variety of reasons, however, the king's monotheism led him to commit acts of intolerance and destruction against any other proclamation of a sole God as creator.
It is nevertheless interesting that in Akhenaten's scientific understanding of the universe, the light of the sun was the source of God, even though he had inherited a tradition which taught that the creation of the world, which included the sun, came from a source antecedent to the sun, Nun. We can thus infer that Akhenaten waged a battle against the inherited theology perhaps for selfish reasons, since he promoted himself as the means through which God is mediated. This status is only partially acknowledged in the position of the per aab (pharaoh), particularly in his role as titular chief priest in specific temple rituals.
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In view of Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten, in which ethnic differences are clearly affirmed, it is pertinent to raise the question of the colour scheme which the Kemites used in their statuary and paintings. The general opinion is that the people of Kmt were of a reddish complexion, which usually implies separation from the indigenous African populations resident in the black land for more than 25,000 years, who would be characterized as uniformly black in complexion. Before exploring this comparison further, we might look at the way different societies see themselves and others. The colour red is the most precious for Chinese peoples, who ascribe devilish connotations to the colours white and black. These connotations are not poetic or romantic; they actually relate to human beings. For the dominant Europeans, white was the colour both of purity and of precedence, while black had the connotation of being devilish. This also related to people and not to simple colour schemes unrelated to material reality. For the Kemites, the colour black expressed goodness, fertility and beauty, and the colour red related to the desert and the foreigner. White represented spiritual purity, not ethnic purity; for the purpose of depicting clothing, it was the colour which best represented transparency.
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# Conclusion: epistemological lessons
The dominant view is that where colours were used in iconography and the representation of the name of Kmt , black did not refer to people as a phenomenon, but to an abstract principle related to the fertility of the black alluvial soil. However, as scientists and technicians, the Kemites would have known, through their contact with other African and Asian societies, that red earth also produced abundant agricultural harvests, so this notion can theoretically be abandoned. If we are to use the dominant mode of theorizing, then we can legitimately ask: since the colour red was specifically assigned to real people, why should it be different for the colour black? The answer perhaps lies in the political hegemony slowly gained by the red and white peoples of the earth after the colonization of Kmt by the Greeks in the fourth century BCE and in the history of colonialism which has marked Kmt's subsequent evolution into a vassal State as Egypt from the seventh century CE.
Without pursuing this notion to its most logical conclusion, it is comparatively easy to state that the Kmtu would have portrayed the aboriginal peoples of South Africa collectively known as the Khoisan as reddish-brown in colour. If we look, for example, at the picture of Nebamun hunting birds in the marshes (British Museum number 37977), it is obvious that the artist painted what he saw: a man of a reddish-brown complexion accompanied perhaps by his wife and child, painted in dark brown. The important mediating factor, however, is that facially, and thus ethnically, they all appear to be of the same stock. This is like assigning a single colour to Arabs or Muslims today, even though the persons in either group have skin which is, variously, white, black, brown, light brown, red-brown, and so on. These kinds of artificial dichotomies serve no purpose other than to perpetuate the notion that the origin of Kmt's civilization lies in a mythic or, at best, dubious 'race'.
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The most enduring representation of the Kemites' conceptualization of colour and nationality can be found on the walls of the tombs of Seti I and Rameses III. Here, the four races of humankind are represented: Semites and Asians are both portrayed as white-skinned, while Nubians and Kemites are portrayed as having jet black skin (cf. Diop, 1991, p. 66; Grantham, 2004). Grantham rehearses the story that Champollion's work was falsified by his older brother, Champollion-Figeac, who censored the former's letters posthumously. Breasted and Yurco maintained the fiction of the images under review by rearranging their order, changing the colour and, most significantly, intentionally translating
'Nahasi' (a Nubian national identity) as 'Negroes', thus linking modern, formerly enslaved Africans to the Nahasi. The only area of contestation of these depictions is whether they were painted in the New Kingdom. But there are far too many iconographic representations from the predynastic period ( 5000 BCE) to the dynastic ( 3150 BCE) period for this assertion to be dismissed. Since Diop's anthro-archaeological and craniological science postulations of 1974, and through the development, study and publication of modern genome science, it has been possible to locate the ethnicity of the Kmtu at various times throughout the predynastic and dynastic (3100-332 BCE) periods.
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The results of dental morphological studies of 996 samples by Professor Joel Irish (2006) show greater affinity with 'those populations from greater North Africa and, to a lesser extent, western Asia and Europe'. The revised perspective of Frank Yurco reveals a reverse opinion on Kmt's people: 'Certainly there was some foreign admixture [in Egypt] but basically a homogeneous African population had lived in the Nile Valley from ancient to modern times' (1996, p. 65). Kalanzi reports (Daily Monitor, 24 May 2016) that the results of DNA tests on Rameses III and his son genetically linked him to the Y-chromosome (passed from father to son) group E1b1a, a classification directly related to Niger-Congo speakers. In the city of Amarna, famous for the reign of its founder, Akhenaten, whose facial features unambiguously expressed African prototypes, royal mummies were DNA-tested to reveal an origin in the Great Lakes region (East and Central Africa) (Kalanzi, 2016). These tests not only confirm the findings of Cheikh Anta Diop, who separately argued in defence of the indigenous origins of the civilization, but also confirm the consistent assertion of the literature of the Kemites that they came from the South (i.e., south of their borders). As in all new sciences, there are areas of contestation regarding scientific method and approaches, but the scientific principles of DNA science represent a monumental breakthrough for the biological identification of the ruling elite of Kmt throughout its history.
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# References
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Flinders Petrie, Sir W. M. 1974b. (orig. pub. by British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1920/1). Prehistoric Egypt. Warminster, UK/Calif., Aris and Phillips/Joel L. Malter \& Co.
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Irish, J. 2006. Who were the ancient Egyptians? Dental affinities among Neolithic through postdynastic peoples. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Vol. 129, Issue 4, pp. 483-641.
Kalanzi, D. S. 2014. Ancient Egyptian pharaohs related to Ugandans: DNA. Daily Monitor, August 16.
Lichtheim, M. 1976. Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II: The New Kingdom. Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press.
Maspero, G. 1901. The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldea. London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
Moret, A. 1927. The Nile and Egyptian Civilization. London/New York, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner \& Co./Alfred A. Knopf.
Obenga, T. 1992. Ancient Egypt $\mathcal{E}$ Black Africa. London, Karnak House.
Plato, 1973. Phaedrus and Letters Vll and Vlll. Trans. W. Hamilton. Middlesex, UK, Penguin Books.
Raue, D. 2008. Who was who in Elephantine of the third millennium BC? British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 9 https://www.academia.edu/4944833/ Who_was_who_in_Elephantine_of_the_third_millennium_BC
Robins, G. 1994. Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art. London, Thames \& Hudson.
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Robins, G. 1994. Proportion and Style in Ancient Egyptian Art. London, Thames \& Hudson.
Ruiz, T. F. 2012. A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Princeton, USA, and Oxford, UK, Princeton University Press.
Schwaller de Lubicz, R.A. 1977. The Temple in Man. New York, Inner Traditions.
Snowden, F. 1970. Blacks in Antiquity. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Spencer, A. J. 1993. Early Egypt. London, BMP.
Wallis Budge, E. A. 1893. The Dwellers of the Nile. London, The Religious Tract Society.
Wilkinson, J. G. (orig. pub. 1853) 1994. The Ancient Egyptians: Their Life and Customs. London, Senate.
Wilson, J. A. 1977. The function of the state. Frankfort et al. (eds), The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.
Wolff, W. 1989. The Origins of Western Art. New York, Universe Books.
Yurco, F. 1996. An Egyptological review. M. R. Lefkowitz and G. MacLean Rogers (eds), Black Athena Revisited, pp. 62-100.
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# CHAPTER 3
## NORTH AFRICA AND THE ORIGINS OF EPISTEMIC BLACKNESS
Jesse Benjamin
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## Introduction: North Africa in the relational vortex of modernity
The conventional Eurocentric story of the origins of modernity, and its entire racial epistemology, is generally decontextualized and stripped of its relationality with North African cultures and civilizations and the entire world system to which said cultures and civilizations were fused. Just as Walter Rodney encapsulated both relationality and agency in the title of his landmark volume How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), the emergence of white, Christian Europe and its hegemonic Western epistemology must be approached relationally, and with attention to agency and power (Césaire, 1955; Diop, 1987; Du Bois, 1935 [1992]; Fanon, 1966; Said, 1978). North Africa was far more central to the rise of the fundamental concepts of modernity and their development and proliferation than most narratives concede. The cultures, societies and States of northern Africa were historically important and deserve renewed attention in their own right (Carew, 1995). In relation to nascent European city-States, they represented one of several key conduits of social and economic connection into a worldwide system of contiguous regions and civilizations encompassing all of Africa and Asia and beyond: in other words, the 'Old World'.
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In the early thirteenth century, for example, Ibn Battuta travelled the entire world from his home base in Tangier, Morocco, including multiple hajjes to Mecca, circumnavigations of West Africa, the Red Sea and Arabia, the entire Swahili Coast, the Levant, the Indian Ocean, most of South and Central Asia, and China (Hamdun and King, 1994). He also travelled through Iberian Al-Andalus, shortly before his fabled trip to Timbuktu and the Empire of Mali. There was an inherent and widely generalized fluidity in the construction of social identity and culture in the millennia leading up to the point of colonial disruption and reorganization (Ahmad, 2006; Mudimbe, 1988; Said, 1978), which allowed travellers like Benjamin of Tudela, Ibn Battuta and thousands of others involved in commerce, trade, the production of knowledge, and myriad other interchanges to negotiate their identities and occupy multiple layers and cultural inflections simultaneously. Designations such as 'Moor'/'Moorish', 'Habesha', 'Zanj' (Benjamin, 2008), 'Abyssinian' or 'Sud'/'Sudan' all indicated multivalent, geographically dispersed, and flexible yet regionally associated identities epitomizing what de Moraes Farias (1985) explained were the normative 'mobile classificatory labels' of non-Western epistemologies. However, the rigid fixing of identities around invented boundaries produced by reductive Manichaean binaries, and the intense suppression of its own interrelatedness outwards to the rest of the world, are fundamental to Western thought and appear consistently. This spatio-temporal regime then allows multiple seemingly immaculate conceptions of thought, industry and state to emerge in its likeness, as if without history or created whole, thus confirming its own greatness through discovery/invention/industry/virility/rationality. The suppression of African and all non-Western histories is central to this epistemology, as is the imagined unilineal evolutionary grid underpinning it - creating manifold volatilities that persist in culture and politics today.
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In the minds of the conquering crusaders of the Reconquista, North Africa and the contiguous 'Middle East' occupied central roles in the earliest formulations of what was to become Western epistemology, and thus in the subsequent proliferation of meanings of blackness globally. At the dawn of modernity, North Africa and its peoples were represented as primary forms of an emergent notion of racial otherness, constituted in relational differentiation from proto-European, Christian whiteness - a formulation that has fluctuated and deepened, but remained axial until the present. The initial disruption of the societal norms of North African and wider African/Old World civilizations by the violent dispossessions of the Iberian Reconquista culminated in the late fifteenth century (Shohat, 1992; Wynter, 1995). Coupled
with a newly emerging monocultural theocentric epistemology and the rise of modern biocentric racial categories and 'coordinates' in the world, these conceptualizations played a crucial role in the later rise of Europe both as an entity and a concept (Mignolo, 1995). Mediterranean and Afro-Asian societal concepts and practices were denied, suppressed, appropriated and incorporated into this new colonizing society, and extended, formalized, transformed and intensified into what rapidly became transatlantic and global concepts of modern racism, centred on plantation-based racial chattel slavery and other extractive capitalist relations (Galeano, 1973; Shohat, 1992). Shortly after the Reconquista and the rise of the Spanish and Portuguese global empires, northern Africa found itself to be one of many fast-proliferating zones of contact between the growing capitalist empires of Western Europe and the places they were 'discovering' and trying to plunder or colonize.
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# Moorish North Africa and the rise of Western epistemology
Significant advances in understanding the origins of modern concepts of race have been made in recent decades, with a growing consensus locating their origins in the Iberian Reconquista and the almost simultaneous conquest of the New World using the same emergent epistemic concepts (Shohat, 1992; Wynter, 1995; Carew, 1995; Mignolo, 1995). Islamic Iberia and contiguous North Africa, both with close ties to the vast system of Old World civilizations, were important cultural confluence zones between the Mediterranean and Africa, and soon, too, was the Atlantic world. Using geniza and other historical documents from Jewish Mediterranean communities, Schorsch (2004) shows that categories of blackness clearly already existed in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultural, theological and juridical thinking, well before the Atlantic passage. However, blackness was not yet regularized as having negative connotations, though it may have been trending in that direction in some of the Mediterranean regions; nor was blackness a fixed category with a stable meaning or definite geographic ascription. Rather, it was a highly variable category, to the extent that it surfaced in writing or discourse at all, and was more often ascribed positive attributes than negative attributes (Muhammed, 1985). De Moraes Farias (1985) helps explain that pre-Western and non-Western epistemic categories conceived of identities more as mobile classificatory units of analysis that shift over time and appear in multiple places, alongside other fluid and changing categories. Terms such as 'Moor' in North
Africa or 'Zanj' in East Africa and the Indian Ocean were neither routinely given negative or positive associations, nor entirely tied to specific places; and frequently those categories overlapped across the enormous expanse of the African continent, southern Asia, and throughout the Indian Ocean.
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Great care must still be taken by scholars to remove later anti-black accretions, most of which originated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the meaning of terms associated with black and African peoples and cultures. These more recent, colonial layers of meaning are anachronistically projected and historiographically written back into the past by modern societies presenting themselves as normative. For example, while it is common in late modernity to speak of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Judeo-Islamic tradition was in fact far more historically substantial across both space and time, but mostly developed in an African context that has come to symbolize the conceptual opposite of Western society and its version of civilization, one of its core legitimating pillars. The societies that span southern - especially Iberian - Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, reaching south into and beyond the Sahara, constitute a sort of fluctuating grid of hierarchical relational racial points in a system that is itself immersed in a similarly fluid and interactive global system of parallel coordinates. During the time of the kingdom of Al -Andalus, the grid was largely non-hierarchical, and it tilted toward what we now call Africa and blackness, towards the southern Sahara and the empires of Central Africa, the Indian Ocean and southern Asia. With the Reconquista and the rise of Europe and its empires, identities were epistemically/conceptually frozen, ordered in an increasingly extreme hierarchy of race and class, and their orientation was inverted. Imperial Spain and Portugal, and later Holland and its neighbours, claimed centripetal primacy, with the strata to the south at a proportional disadvantage. Eventually, even southern Europe and its immigrants were racialized by their northern European heirs. North Africa continued to reflect a border of "otherness", even as it was pulled north
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, even southern Europe and its immigrants were racialized by their northern European heirs. North Africa continued to reflect a border of "otherness", even as it was pulled north, and designated separate from the rest of Africa by virtue of attachment to the equally colonial conception of a distinct 'Middle East' and by its supposedly whiter racial location vis-àvis 'black' or sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, contemporary use of the term 'North Africa' cannot be fully extricated from the coloniality of its racial/geographic origins and significations. It is therefore used here provisionally, in the service of deconstruction.
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# Rise of the self/other matrix of relational difference
As European feudalism and the aristocracy receded, its limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) concept shifted from justifying a supposedly divinely ordained blue-blooded landed gentry to the more familiar, modern biocentric concept of race, fixed in and on the body, and almost immediately signifying blackness and relational non-Whiteness specifically. Thus was set in motion the grid of modern "ethno-racial coordinates" to which Cheikh Anta Diop referred (1981 [1991]): a matrix of possible racial locations along a black/white continuum into which other non-white people could be figured, usually closer to the black end of the spectrum, always differentiated in a multivalent way (Wynter, 1979). This grid has operated in incredibly complex and varied ways across the ensuing five centuries, but the basic Manichaean schema has remained remarkably stable and powerful to the present day. During the Reconquista, a kind of monoculturalism was conceptually and conscientiously imposed for perhaps the first time, in the modern sense of a fixed hierarchical grid of relational identifications. It became so normalized that today only multiculturalism and diversity, which are factually closer to the historic and human norm, need to be explained and defended (Lorde, 1984), or in many cases are rejected outright (the 'culture wars' in the United States of America, for example), while - literally - Aryaninflected monocultural aberrations remain largely invisible and unnamed and are the discursive norm against which the literal Other is identified and defined.
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As Shohat (1992) relates, the list of the Holy Inquisition's enemies/Others at the birth of modernity's conceptual apparatus consisted of a broad and profoundly dehumanizing theological category, the 'agents of Satan,' i.e., Jews, Muslims, Moors, women, witches, infidels, heretics, even the left-handed (the 'sinister'). These became the original Others of modernity, drawn from existing internal and external terminologies of relational differentiation and dehumanization, geopolitical anxieties and failed Crusader grudges. While the dominant "self" identities of Western thought now militated in favour of invented fixity and reductively Manichaean polarities, the Others were by definition overlapping and interchangeable, these very properties serving to further corroborate their difference. Most witches were women deemed dangerous because they possessed knowledge or were independent of male kin; most Jews and Muslims were theologically rendered proto-racially different at the level of blood and the body; and the vast majority of Jews and Muslims were also deeply socialized into and indistinguishable from Moorish, in other words African, cultures.
Under the Inquisition, individuals might appear to be 'agents of Satan' along several axes of difference at the same time. The mobile categorial flexibility of the Other signified its dangerous alterity and non-humanity, as a literal holdover from the prior system, a threatening presence alternative to the new order if it could not be rendered savage and uncivilized to the point of expendability. Thus, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquistadors in the Americas 'found' and persecuted varieties of peoples they deemed Moors, and the Moors were also broadly identified as the obstacle to finding their mythic representative in Ethiopia, Prester John.
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The West was founded under a Christian theological epistemology that believed in a hierarchical Great Chain of Being, Lost Tribes, the Curse of Ham and Cush, Original Sin, and a host of narratives that could be teleologically bent to the new bourgeois, racial, colonial agenda. This became the template and vehicle for the first 300 years of modern Western epistemology until it was displaced by the still hegemonic secular, scientific rational epistemology, but it has never really diminished in terms of its significance on the world stage. Because even the fixed dominant categories in this new matrix of difference fluctuated and were arbitrarily socially constructed and subject to the whims of power, relying on essentialized physiognomic criteria along invented axes of relational self/other difference, evasions of, and resistances to, this whole system have been ubiquitous, constituting literal and figurative maroon spaces, internal ruptures and destabilizations.
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# North Africa in a pan-African world historical perspective
Although Iberian city-States were able to dislodge Al-Andalus from southern Europe, the ancient African civilization to which it was connected continued to persist and generally flourish, even in the face of belligerent new northern neighbours (Carew, 1995). So too did the worldwide network of nations and civilizations of which it was an integral part, to a large extent at least: until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the bulk of the African continent, when the tripod-mounted machine gun was deployed, and the early to mid-twentieth century for most of the so-called Middle East and much of Asia during the late colonial inter-war years (with exceptions that included the much longer colonization of the Indian subcontinent). While the Mediterranean, Atlantic and American worlds experienced a colonial rupture of immense epistemic and politico-economic proportions in the late fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, in most of Africa and Asia this rupture was more episodic, indirect or ephemeral for the first 300 years of modernity (despite the devastating disruptions of chattel slavery on the continent) and only began to take fuller hold in the past century or two in the Middle East, East and Central Africa, and the Indian Ocean/Asian worlds (Rodney, 1972). Northern Africa represents a zone of confluence between these two broad patterns in which elements of both may be discerned, but where the general tendency is more in line with the latter than the former, albeit with the key exception of Algeria.
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The Ottoman Empire in south-western Asia; Berber and Arab civilizations across northern Africa; the vast connected Swahili civilizations of the East African littoral; Aksum, Lalibela, Amhara, the Oromo and the many other nations and States in Ethiopia; other regional State and empire formations in contiguous regions such as Egypt, Sudan, and Mali: all buttressed resistance to immersion and encapsulation within the growing capitalist world economies of the New World and the Atlantic. We must be careful not to impose hegemonic European outcomes retroactively, dating them back to the advent of the European presence in Africa and the Indian Ocean, as even some of our best critical scholars sometimes do. The incursions of early colonial expansion certainly caused occasional disruptions throughout parts of the Old World, but rarely the kind of total, hegemonic colonial reorganization at the level of gnosis described in Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa, which is generally a product of the past one or two centuries in most regions of the Old World, though sometimes less.
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This is significant, as it means that the depth of colonial reorganization and destruction and any critical attempts to 'return to the source' as a form of resistance and affirmation are within closer reach than many realize. Non-Western, non-biocentric, non-racial societal formulations that parallel contemporary concepts of multiculturalism and diversity-positivity are therefore not that far removed from contemporary languages, institutions, memories, and imaginations. Nevertheless, the totality of colonial reorganization, even if 'only' between 60 and 200 years old throughout the majority of the region under discussion here, was devastating and disruptive, and should not be underestimated. One of the tasks of decolonization at this stage is to rewrite more thoroughly the colonial historiographies and their popular cultural and discursive corollaries, and to insist on more accurate historic break points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, replacing the widespread assumption that the ruptures occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this way, the scale of recovery and decolonization is properly attenuated, and we do not
inadvertently naturalize more recent phenomena and histories and amplify their power and their hold on the present.
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inadvertently naturalize more recent phenomena and histories and amplify their power and their hold on the present.
The Spanish and Portuguese empires were based on classic 'primitive accumulation', theft and expropriation of people, labour and resources, and especially of indigenous American and African societies. The Spanish were more successful in disrupting and colonizing core States in the New World than the Portuguese were in most of Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, together with their numerous contemporary European city-States and burgeoning empires, codified slavery and plantation capitalism as the core of the international capitalist economy, instituted the first stock exchange, and cultivated insurance industries and other modern banking practices. Throughout the expanding global capitalist system, Africanity and especially blackness were consolidated as the basis of racial chattel slave status in both Dutch and other imperial realms. This remained true and even intensified during the combined British and French imperial periods, which saw the extremes of the transatlantic chattel slave system. Later in this combined period, with partial and self-interested abolition under way in the Atlantic to make way for the more economically efficient exploitative system of colonialism, chattel slavery was still expanding under European proxies into eastern and some northern and north-eastern parts of the African continent. After a brief and devastating period of expanded racial/chattel slavery throughout the nineteenth century, the so-called 'scramble for Africa' laid the groundwork for colonization at the turn of the century, and for subsequent 'scrambles' for southwest Asia (at Sèvres) and the rest of hitherto uncolonized Asia.
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Shared anti-colonial struggles can also be traced back to each of these imperial eras, culminating in the twentieth century with massive anti-colonial wars and collective transnational efforts, among them the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and the Non-Aligned Movement that peaked in the 1970s. This anti-colonial solidarity has generated numerous intersections of peoples and struggles, and North Africa has often played a prominent role, from hosting the Black Panther Party, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other radical forces (Daulatzai, 2012; Feldman, 2015) to symbolizing resistance in its highest forms, as in the case of the actual and filmic Battle of Algiers. Algeria, in parallel with Haiti and India, was a white settler colony of the greatest material and symbolic significance to its hegemonic occupier, France, and its liberation - followed by massive counterinsurgent imperial reprisals - had worldwide systemic consequences still felt today (Mamdani, 2004).
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At some point in middle and later colonial history, with the colonization of historiography itself at its height, and concomitant with the post-nineteenthcentury rise of secular science as the hegemonic basis of late-modern Western epistemology, Africa's presence was rigidly demarcated and reduced. It was in both the topographical and the discursive senses cut off from adjacent and contiguous continents and oceans (the Mediterranean and Red Seas, Arabia, the whole Middle East and Asia, the Indian Ocean, southern Europe, and the Atlantic world). This process ran parallel with the axiomatic goal of Hegel and others to deny African history and deny Africa rationality and agency in world history (Eze, 1997), in order to relationally bolster and enable the colonial-imperial basis of the supposedly civilized and superior West. Further, whole portions of territorially African space, according to the new concept of planetarily discrete continents, were also excised by being redefined as externally oriented or originated. Ethiopia became Arab-derived, as did Egypt, Sudan and the whole of North Africa, now sectioned off as parts of the 'Middle East'; Somalis in this context claimed or were ascribed more Arab origins. The Swahili Coast was reoriented toward its numerous real external Indian Ocean origins and identities (Shirazi, Omani, Hadrami, Arab, and so on) during the post-1830s rise of racialized European-governed plantation chattel slavery, contributing to the erasure of its more prodigious African points of origin and connection. Internal contradictions that were either wholly manufactured or hardened and exploited were a mainstay of colonial practice, in the well-known and broadly applied tactic of 'divide and rule', and also in what Mamdani (2012) has described as the invention of two profoundly asymmetric juridical and administrative spheres that demarcated citizenship, rights and power in the middle and high colonial periods and their aftermath.
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Thus, North African societies and societies in contiguous portions of West and north-eastern Africa are plagued with ethno-racial hierarchies, invented or heightened, and often central to the dynamics of specific colonial occupations. As pastoralists whose mode of production is based on desert or semi-desert animal husbandry usually supplemented with small agricultural practices, water harvesting and trade, Berbers, Tuareg, and Bedouin usually find themselves statically codified and racialized as uncivilized and racially inferior, even though they can often articulate some of the lengthiest regional and cultural genealogies. Everyone in North Africa is sandwiched within racial continua that are central to, but still exceed, their fields of existence. Institutionalized forms of antiblackness in Libya, both before and then at significantly heightened levels after the 2011 invasion by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), have
been documented. Anti-blackness is found alive and well in all of northern Africa, under the most preponderant epistemology in human history, though it is heavily contested, as it is almost everywhere in the world today. Egyptian society exhibits virulently racialized anti-Nubian, anti-Sudanese (especially migrant labour), and anti-Bedouin repression and oppression, among other prominent instances of socially produced difference-based inequality. Similar issues exist within American-empire-friendly Morocco, and its occupation-like relationship with the Western Sahara.
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Today, every country in the region shows evidence of deep manifestations of Wynter's 'bourgeois mode of being' $(1979,1995)$, which is inherently race- and class- based. Every country exhibits substantial degrees of racialized behaviour toward peoples living to the (real or figurative) south, both within their national borders, and between their borders and neighbours in the Sahara and in West and southern Africa. Phenotype and regional perception, language and culture play major roles in these manifestations of racialized hierarchy - formulations of North/South unevenness are far from being abstractions here. Each of these countries have citizens and non-citizens who are almost universally racialized to varying but almost inescapable degrees, by the vast majority of those living to their (real and/or figurative) north, both within their territories in most cases, and especially between their national borders and those of Europe as a whole. Across centuries of structured political-economic inequality and epistemic colonization are laid the incendiary contemporary racial realities and discourses surrounding forced and coerced migrations, statelessness, refugees fleeing wars, transborder flows of people - what the language of Western epistemology juridically fashions on a transatlantic basis as 'illegal aliens', 'illegals', 'terrorists', 'non-citizens', with an endless linguistic litany of dehumanizing racial terminologies across all idioms and vernaculars. Race and anti-blackness remain central 500 years later with an alarming degree of consistency, even when account is taken of the constant variations, spatio-temporal re-articulations and seemingly omnipresent resistances.
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# Sankofa/resistance: the persistence of blackness and Islam as definitive of Otherness
These conflicts, proliferating in almost all countries as the nation-State structure itself wavers and is challenged (as in the Arab Spring and African Spring movements), continue to call into question the efficacy and legitimacy of the West as a concept. The resulting population transfers, coupled with
historically unprecedented extremes of inequality and impoverishment, and the broader issue of African and Asian refugees and migratory displacements into Europe that have undeniably reached full-blown crisis levels for the world system all reveal the continued centrality and importance of these regions as border zones, and as primary sites of relational identity formation for white imperial subjects in various locations and for the whole Western order writ large. This region's ancient and illustrious Judeo-Islamic tradition remains largely suppressed, almost tacitly illicit in the racialized Western epistemological order of the past half millennium, even though it is of far greater global historical consequence than the now vaunted Judeo-Christian edifice upon which current world powers claim to stand. Though universalized as ancient and natural, the recently hegemonic Judeo-Christian concept can be traced to post-World-War-II American geopolitics and empire building, with minor, earlier origins in nineteenth-century British and French oriental/imperial politics and discourse.
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The ethnic codification of alterity that launched Western epistemic constructions of the white/black, as well as the more generalized, always asymmetric Self/Other infrastructure of the colonial difference machine, is still very much in play, as we can see from a quick review of changes in the past century. Some of the longest-suffering Others of the modern racial system (whose suffering was concurrent with the suffering of black persons at the Iberian root of the modern epistemological order) were, after the Holocaust, largely and hegemonically accorded white status when Jews (constituting a core leveraged component of the fourth major capitalist empire) in the United States of America and, generally, in the West suddenly became predominantly white (Kaye-Kantrowitz, 2007; Benjamin, 2014, and forthcoming). Meanwhile, after achieving tenuous federal status in the United States of America as white after inter-war legal battles, several overlapping and loosely identified Arab, 'Syrian', Berber, North African and Levantine immigrant populations there nevertheless continued to experience racism and racial terror both in the south and the United States of America more broadly (Gualtieri, 2009). These populations in the United States, in Europe and the West more generally are examples of the partial acquisition, and subsequent loss, of whiteness and white subjectivity, due to the vagaries of the transnational political economic order, and its discursive/representational grids of being. Especially since the 1970s, particularly around the Israel-Palestine conflict, Arabs and North Africans everywhere have been increasingly racialized and dehumanized within the world system. Cataclysmically so since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent rise of anti-Western terrorist cells (though Mamdani, 1994
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shows that most have deep Western financial/cultural ties and training), when Islamophobia has risen at a quantifiably faster rate than perhaps any other xenophobic impulse of the difference-phobic Western world order (Bulkin and Nevel, 2014). The current racial state of North Africa and North Africans is symptomatic of the lack of epistemological decolonization, and the extent to which contemporary fault lines remain drawn between an always-changing version of 'civilization'/'the West' and everyone else.
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# Conclusion
Far from being marginal in the emergence and arc of our modern world, North Africa and its contiguous regions were central to the initial formation of modern conceptions of alterity, as well as to resistance against this emergent world system and its structures of difference and inequality. While the fixedness and relentlessly hierarchical organization of modern identity categories is axiomatic, paradoxically the fluidity within these structures remains a central axis of contestation and negotiation. Western epistemology, built on fundamentally oppositional categories such as civilization and savagery, whiteness and blackness, continues to draw from the deep well of African, Arab and Islamic alterity to construct not only its Other, but also its relational self-conception. These underlying structures explain the longevity of these categories, opportunistically used in myriad ways, always contested, and always indicative of both power and the extent of subaltern agency.
Simply inverting these tyrannical systems is insufficient, as Fanon (1961 [1966]) made plain, though such impulses spring from a very comprehensible place in the context that produces them. Western demagogues continuously, and resurgently in recent electoral cycles, return to the conception of an inherently colonial civilizational model that pits the entire Western edifice, real and/or imagined, against the rest of humanity. Powerful elements within the West are also busier than ever inventing, supporting and funding non-Western agents who share this falsely antagonistic formula and gladly play the part of the Other, the false doppelganger that helps legitimize the whole relationship and the systems of hegemonic power and thought (Mamdani, 2004). Similar dynamics are seen in the internally colonized domestic populations of Western nations. As Wynter explains, this reflects the 'Era of Man', in which some men designate themselves superior to, and therefore rulers over, other men, women, and even nature itself - over all that they literally and figuratively survey. Reconfiguring
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and decolonizing the ways we think about history, identity and epistemology may be central to helping us return to a new but familiar non-Western-centric 'Era of the Human', in which such false and reductive dichotomies no longer make sense and fall by the wayside (Benjamin and Lundy, 2014; Fanon, 1961 [1966]; Gualtieri, 2009; Kaye-Kantrowitz, 2007; Lorde, 1984; Rodney, 1972; Shohat and Stam, 1994; Wynter, 1979, 1998).
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# References
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