A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity and the Law

• Pages: 1409-1435
• Date: 01 June 2024
• Published date: 01 June 2024
• Author: Lewis R. Gordon
• Subject Matter: Derecho Civil

A Black Existential Perspective on Afrofuturity

and the Law

LEWIS R. GORDON*

Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs at the University of

Connecticut (lewis.gordon@uconn.edu). © 2024, Lewis R. Gordon.

This Essay examines Africana Black existential conditions of Afrofuturity

and some of the expectations they may pose for justifying the law. The dis-

cussion summarizes the Sankof‌ic dimensions of this kind of thought and the

challenges they address for the understanding and alleviation of problems

imposed on humankind by the emergence of Euromodern hegemony and its

racialized anthropology, conceptions of freedom, crises of justif‌ication, and

problematic search for redemption. The Essay presents Africana Black

existential responses, including kinds of political responsibility and under-

standings of the existential political commitment they pose. The thesis is

that those commitments entail the law playing an important role for people

building societies in which they can live livable lives.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1410

I. AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY AND BLACK EXISTENTIALISM . . . . . . . . . . . 1415

A. RACIALIZATION AND THEONATURALISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1415

B. FOUR PROBLEMATICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1421

1. Problematic of Humanity ............................ 1421

2. Problematic of Freedom ............................. 1422

3. Problematic of Reason............................... 1423

a. Epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1423

b. Reason. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1426

c. Power/Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1426

4. Problematic of Redemption .......................... 1427

II. POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN BLACK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1428

A. WHAT IS RESPONSIBILITY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1428

*

1409

B. AFROFUTURITY, BLACK MELANCHOLIA, AND THE WAY FORWARD . . . 1431

CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1434

INTRODUCTION

A guiding principle of Afrofuturism is that another world is possible.

1

This

possibility is linked to an unusual amount of weight on the imagination, since

“possible” in Afrofuturistic literature often means thinkable. This imaginative

recourse emerges from understandings that accompanied the Euromodern trans-

formation of African peoples into “blacks.”

2

In this context, there is a double

move, for as there have been—and continue to be—many kinds of blacks, the

focus here is on Afro-blacks, those concomitant with the rise of the African dias-

pora. Euromodern societies mark such blacks in specif‌ic moments and move-

ments of their history, most of which distinguish those in the “New World” on

one side of the Atlantic from those on the “Dark Continent”

3

on the other, with

the Indian Ocean on the continent’s other side and the Mediterranean to its north.

4

1. Discussions abound. For an excellent succinct summary in the context of legal studies, see

generally Bennett Capers, Afrofuturism and the Law, CRITICAL ANALYSIS L., no. 1, 2022, at 1. For cross-

disciplinary discussions and a history of the subject, see generally NAT’L MUSEUM OF AFR. AM. HIST. &

CULTURE, SMITHSONIAN INST., AFROFUTURISM: A HISTORY OF BLACK FUTURES (Kevin M. Strait &

Kinshasha Holman Conwill eds., 2023).

2. I will use “blacks” to refer to the racialized identity Europeans imposed onto Africans and other

groups such as the varieties of Indigenous peoples of Australasia. When I refer to the positive political

identity those racialized people create, I will use the capitalized term “Black.” For discussion of this

distinction, see LEWIS R. GORDON, FEAR OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS 18–20 (2022).

3. See generally HENRY M. STANLEY, THROUGH THE DARK CONTINENT (London, Sampson Low,

Marston, Searle, & Rivington 1890) (describing a nineteenth-century explorer’s travels throughout

equatorial Africa).

4. I use the term “Euromodernity” instead of “modernity” because of the negative effects of reducing

“modern” to “European,” which dominates many forms of critical discourse on Euromodern life. As

“modern” ultimately means to belong to the present, the reduction of the concept to “European” entails

non-Europeans belonging to another time, usually the past. A response to this, as we will see in

Afrofuturity, is to posit a form of belonging in the future, which retroactively legitimates belonging to

the present. See infra Section I.A. What is this, however, but then also a form of Afromodernism? For

discussion of “Euromodern” and critical interrogation of “modern,” see generally LEWIS R. GORDON,

FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND DECOLONIZATION (2021) [hereinafter GORDON, FREEDOM, JUSTICE, AND

DECOLONIZATION]. As well, for studies of the varieties of enslavement in and beyond the transatlantic

exemplar, see generally JANE ANNA GORDON, STATELESSNESS AND CONTEMPORARY ENSLAVEMENT

(2020) [hereinafter GORDON, STATELESSNESS AND CONTEMPORARY ENSLAVEMENT]; JULIUS S. SCOTT,

THE COMMON WIND: AFRO-AMERICAN CURRENTS IN THE AGE OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION (2018);

MURRAY GORDON, SLAVERY IN THE ARAB WORLD (New Amsterdam Books 1989) (1987); ROBERT

HUGHES, THE FATAL SHORE: THE EPIC OF AUSTRALIA’S FOUNDING (Vintage Books 1988) (1986) (using

“Aborigines” and “blacks” interchangeably); Titas Chakraborty & Matthias van Rossum, Slave Trade

and Slavery in Asia—New Perspectives, 54 J. SOC. HIST. (SPECIAL ISSUE) 1 (2020); Alexander Geelen,

Bram van den Hout, Merve Tosun, Mike de Windt & Matthias van Rossum, On the Run: Runaway

Slaves and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century Cochin, 54 J. SOC. HIST. (SPECIAL ISSUE) 66

(2020). And, of course, for enslavers’ eyewitness accounts from proverbial horses’ mouths, see, for

example, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE FOUR VOYAGES 27–123, 283–320 (J.M. Cohen ed. & trans.,

1969) (providing accounts from Columbus’s First Voyage, 1492–1493, and his Fourth Voyage, 1502–

1504, respectively), and then see generally some accounts by Columbus’s son Hernando, id., and

BARTOLOME

´ DE LAS CASAS, A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE INDIES (Nigel Griff‌in ed.

1410 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 112:1409