African/Black utopic registers of the future
By utopic registers of the future I mean named imaginations and visions of a future that emerged as Black, African, and Indigenous people fought for a present and a future. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2009) depicted them as ‘re-membering’ initiatives. They carry a spirit of reworlding from the underside of modernity. They carry the aspirations of an oppressed people. These utopic registers of the future are never perfect, as they are born from the battlefields of history and struggles.
The Black radical tradition is better understood as the epistemic framework underpinning the politics, initiatives, and struggles for reworlding from the Global South. Robinson revealed how at the centre of the Black radical tradition subsisted various intellectual-cum-cultural and ideological-political productions and grammars of liberation, including a particular version of Marxism known as ‘Black Marxism’ (see Robinson 1983). Black radical tradition exists as a long-standing overarching grammar of liberation consisting of epistemic, existential, political, ethical, and intellectual formations and initiatives made of diverse but related responses, critiques, and subversion of Eurocentric epistemology and opposed to the colonizer’s model of the world. Lewis R. Gordon (2009) defined it as the ‘Africana philosophy of existence’/ ‘Existentia Africana’ – a reference to ‘the set of questions raised by the historical project of conquest and colonization that has emerged since 1492 and the subsequent struggles for emancipation that continue to this day’.