Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies : A Critical Anthology stages a conversation between two fields—Black Studies and Early Modern Studies —that too often have viewed each other with suspicion. Scholars of early modern Europe have traditionally insisted that the social category of race is inappropriate to the field, as they believe it results from the legal, social, and scientific developments of other places and later periods. 1 For its part, much activist Black Studies scholarship concentrates on present-day sociopolitical concerns, sometimes at the expense of the deeper historical research that might re-orient current activist projects and analyses. 2 The orientations of these fields leave a gap that EMBDS seeks to fill. How can reconceptualizing the time and geography of racial blackness —as well as the methods for assessing the impact of black Africans on early modernity —transform both fields? Through this anthology, we seek to stimulate productive and provocative conversations between two seemingly disparate fields, through an interrogation of the regional and temporal boundaries that typically restrict scholarly inquiry. Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies endeavors to enlist the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies in the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. This cross-pollination revises current understandings about racial discourse and the contributions of black Africans in early modernity across the Atlantic world .
The essays that comprise Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies offer new critical approaches to representations of black Africans and the conceptualization of blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, material and visual cultures, and performance. Contributors address these phenomena in Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the disciplinary perspectives of literary studies, history, anthropology, and performance studies, among others. All contributors have been prompted by the primary charge of Black Studies: to place black lives at the center of inquiry and to provide answers to how black people affected and were affected by various social, political, and cultural institutions.
We aim to shift paradigms in the constitutive fields of early Atlantic studies by asking scholars to re-conceptualize the relationship between black Africans and the early Atlantic world . In the past, studies of black Africans and race in the early modern era examined the ways in which Western cultures utilized black Africans and racial ideologies on symbolic and material levels to construct cultural and political institutions. 3 Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies advances the conversation with approaches that not only recognize the incidental influence of black Africans in the construction of Western culture but that also examine the extent to which black Africans were integral in shaping that culture and in some cases building their own.
This volume features essays that ask how the conversation shifts when we approach developments in early Atlantic culture from the perspective of black Africans . What would it mean to have an entire subset/discipline devoted to discussing the many ways in which black lives mattered in the early Renaissance —not just as part of the story about what Europeans were doing but as the story itself? In what ways could archive, method, geography, and temporality expand to center black subjects in this way? And how might such an undertaking inform the study and practice of black political struggle in the present? Ultimately, we contemplate the contours of a field of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies .
A Brief History of Black Studies
EMBDS endeavors to change the frame of reference for Early Modern Studies to one more Afrocentric in nature, a move that inherently disrupts current Eurocentric epistemologies that are rooted in material experience, the sensory. How does what we know about the early modern period change if we view that epoch from the perspective of black Africans and with a different epistemological sensibility, one that allows us to acknowledge and accept, as one example, the realms of the spiritual and the paranormal as archives of knowledge? What new insights emerge, as another example, when we privilege orality alongside the written word or consider the histories of ancient Africa when demarcating time periods, like medieval, early modern and modern? In short, what would a field of study look like that accounts for the agentive energies of black Africans who were, to borrow Maulana Karenga’s definition for agency , “thinking, acting, producing, creating, building, speaking and problem-solving in their own unique way” in the early modern world? 4
Not incidentally, epistemology and Afrocentricity have been key thematic markers of Black Studies scholarship for decades. That scholarship most often addresses black experiences within modern-day contexts and does so for many of the same reasons that Early Modern Studies have been slow to examine the agentive experiences of black Africans in earlier periods—a perceived lack of archival data and relevance. This is not to say that Black Studies scholars do not concern themselves with the histories of black Africans , including those who lived in the early modern period. In fact, a central, though at times contested, thrust of Black Studies is Afrocentrism , which is a philosophical orientation to the discipline that situates the black experience within the history of African imperial civilizations, such as Egypt (or Kemet), Kush (modern-day North Sudan), and Ghana. 5 The point rather is that Black Studies , activist in nature, has evoked the past mostly as a means to interrogate the present and advocate on behalf of black lives today. This aim of Black Studies is a product of the discipline’s beginnings in the 1960s black freedom movements . 6
Since its earliest iterations as a formal discipline, Black Studies has questioned whether current epistemological structures can accommodate the life experiences of people of African descent. How can western knowledge help us arrive at insights about black Africans ? And how can we employ established institutions to enrich the lives of black Africans throughout the African diaspora ? On an institutional level, can one pursue an Afrocentric academic agenda in already-established departments of English, History, Sociology, and so forth? These questions were central in the early formation of Black Studies and resulted in competing intellectual frameworks whereby some advocated for what Perry Hall calls a separatist approach and Nathaniel Norment, Jr. terms radical. 7 A separatist or radical perspective insisted that the best way to pursue a Black Studies agenda was to supplant current epistemologies with knowledge systems arising out of the philosophies and histories of African cultures. This perspective sought to extricate the study of black African experiences from the ethnic and racial biases of Western structures. Others advocated for a more integrationist model, in Hall’s words, or a moderate framework, as Norment articulates it, that acknowledged the efficacy of current critical paradigms and sought to incorporate the study of black African experiences into already existing intellectual traditions. This move emphasized the value of black Africans in dominant, Euro-American culture.
Today, the field is defined more by what Hall calls a “transformationist” approach, which acknowledges Black Studies ’ efforts to break from Eurocentric epistemologies but insists on locating black experiences within, in Hall’s words, “an inclusive human universe.” 8 EMBDS adopts this approach. That is to say, we recognize the b...