Whatever Happened to Diaspora, and Why Not Global-Blackness? Interrogating Black Time-Spaces for a Decolonial Agenda1
This historico-conceptual essay offers the concept of global-Blackness as a productive optic for exploring the relationship between race and Blackness and advancing a multidimensional decolonial project. In critical dialogue with the more popular invocation of diaspora, which explores the dispersed geographies inhabited by Black bodies, the authors see global-Blackness as a wider optic offering a more fulsome potential of incorporated comparisons and a broader political project that better captures the complexity of decolonial moves and gestures associated with Blackness as site of overdetermination, as well as movement, method, and poethics. In considering global-Blackness in relation to the becoming global of modern power, the politics of Black time, and the economy of power, the essay also puts forward the concept of a “de/coloniality of place” and draws upon the method of relational histories as analytical tools that can bring new significance to the idea of race. As an optic, global-Blackness recognizes the affiliation of race and Blackness, which, while not dismissing the pivotal link to corporeal and identitarian Blackness, avoids privileging distinct geographies and facilitates a more capacious and expansive apprehension of the relationship between the global, Blackness, and race in the modern production of subjects, spaces, places and temporalities. Through a series of polemical and rhetorical devices, the essay raises questions that eschews essentialist frames for thinking the global, Blackness, and race in modern times and temporalities to advance decolonial praxes and thought aligned with Black time and its complexly racialized body political.
