Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231204833
• Author: Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(1) 213–225

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231204833

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Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity:

Political Speech, Barbarism, and the

Euromodern World

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes

1

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Abstract

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing

so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-

black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The

essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human

being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromode rnity, con-

trastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics

becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes

that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting

American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution.

Keywords

race and identity, black lives matter, Afromodernity, political speech, mass incarceration

This essay offers a reconstructive reading of black lib-

eration within the twenty-f‌irst century, reimagined in

contemporary parlance as the Black Lives Matter

movement. It was Anna Julia Cooper who once dismissed

as a barbaric proposition, discourses on women’s rational

faculties that contend “higher education was incompatible

with the shape of the female cerebrum”(1988, 65). Her

rejoinder was simple: “But these are eighteenth century

ideas,”ones unsuited for the modern sensibilities of the

nineteenth century, in which she wrote (1988, 66). W.E.B

Du Bois, in the same vein, argued: “The problem of the

Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”(1994,

9). Du Bois’problematizing of the race problem, or more

historically, the Negro problem, as being a constitutive

feature of modernity or civilizational progress, renders

analyses of anti-black racism incoherent or inchoate, if

they elide critical conversations about what it means to be

a modern subject in a seemingly modern age.

In what follows, I offer an interpretation of Black

Lives Matter

1

(BLM) as a form of political speech that

opposes the Euromodern project of preempting and

disavowing blackness. In the Euromodern world, to be

black is to be a barbaric artifact of the past, warranting

exile from the world of the present and, most crucially,

the political sphere wherein the world of the future is

produced. As such, I propose that implicit in the for-

mulation that “Black Lives Matter”is the claim that

black speech is understood as having an intrinsically

political function. I begin by articulating a portrait of

Euromodernity as reconf‌iguring an Aristotelian logic of

politics, speech, and barbarism. I then develop an ac-

count of how Euromodernity’s rendering of blackness

sediments as a form of racialized criminality and illicit

appearance, necessitating colonial modes of control and

incarceration. I then turn to elucidating Black Lives

Matter as exemplifying and developing an Afromodern

approach to political speech. Finally, I analyze this

Afromodern approach as a mode of abolition-democracy

whose revolutionary telos is one where Black Lives

Matter can, in short, be re-interpreted as an attempt to

abolish the Euromodern world such that Afromodern

political speech can emerge. This democratic revolution

1

The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, Department of Political Science, The

University of Memphis, Clement Hall, Walker Ave, Memphis, TN 38152-

6400, USA.

Email: dkchvnns@memphis.edu