Radical Africana Vitalism and the Dialectic of Eros & Thanatos in Modernity/Coloniality

Abstract

In this article, I define “Africana vitalism” as an epistemic and political movement guided by the onto-existential principle of life, and grounded on the historical and ontological underpinnings of modern /colonial Africanity, namely world capitalism, western imperialism and its global regimes of white domination, transatlantic racial slavery and its ‘afterlife,’ which persists in widespread processes and practices of antiblackness . As a pillar of modernity, Africanity should be explained through the modern /colonial matrix named as the coloniality of power and knowledge (Quijano 2000, Lander 2000). I understand the coloniality of power and knowledge as a world-historical process constituting capitalist modernity. It is a defining feature of a globalization process that emerged in the long sixteenth century and articulated the whole world as a historical system. At this juncture, Atlantic racial-heteropatriarchal capitalism arose as a dominant mode of production in tandem with the simultaneous inventions of the Americas, Africa, and Europe as geo-historical categories of regionality and civilization, corresponding to racial constructs of color and culture1. Antiblackness, a long-term process of dehumanization, overexploitation, expropriation, dispossession, and abjection of bodies, cultures, and territories signified as “Black” and “African,” is constitutive of the modern /colonial capitalist world system. Antiblackness is a fundamental category for understanding the patterning of the world-historical process we call racial-heteropatriarchal capitalism. This is the fundamental sense in which it is argued that we live in an “antiblack world,” namely a historical universe wherein the leading institutions —the capitalist world-economy, modern /colonial structures of power /knowledge, the modern nation-state, dominant cultures and hegemonic definitions of self —are antiblack.