Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico

Preface

The ideas for Colonial Blackness crystallized in the postcolonial aura flourishing in and around the Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For much of the eighties, Chapel Hill (both the university and the town) constituted a palenque where a diverse assortment of exiles and expatriates from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America, and the United States found refuge. Whether they were temporary or long-term residents, members of the gathering of sojourners created overlapping public spheres in which diverse global realities were made manifest, vigorously debated, and acted upon. At the same time, the realities of a Reagan-dominated America reinforced local and global concerns. In what seemed like never-ending conversations, debates, arguments, and lectures featuring Afro-Germans, Black Americans, Black British, Central Americans, Chicanos, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Tanzanians, South Africans, and southern White liberals and radicals, we engaged the global manifestations of blackness through our differences. Since those days in North Carolina, during sojourns in Durham, Mexico City, London, Baltimore, and New York, I have pressed on my initial concern with blackness. Lately, a group of law professors, anthropologists, literary and performance theorists, and historians interested in deepening the critique of the political present have turned to the study of slavery and its legacies. In these interdisciplinary conversations, I perceive a deep commitment to discerning the shifting logics of power and agency and domination and resistance that shape modern life. Skeptical of the orthodoxy that informs the politics of knowledge, these intellectuals consistently raise issues about the political present and seek to re-map our political future. Through our conversations, I have been affirmed in the belief that studying the slave constitutes an engagement with the present, the past, and the future. Our concerns with the present are linked to the past through the following question: In what ways did African survivors of the Middle Passage experience the New World? Each generation of black intellectuals contends with this ontological question. But now another more politically charged refrain accompanies this cultural-philosophical question: When was freedom? How did that freedom enable this present? Through our many differences some of us turn to the African presence, particularly the slave experience, to engage the elusive quest to know and understand the black present. Far from representing a quixotic quest for black    Preface xii   Preface authenticity and historical truth, our concerns with the formation of blackness reflect a deep interest in the cultural logic of the modern. For this reason, my interlocutors and I engage the concepts of modernity that are imbued with the burden of European political thought: state formation, political economy, labor, slavery, race, religion, and freedom. Colonial Blackness examines the making of cultures and identities in an early modern society, thereby confronting a set of questions related to the meaning and representation of blackness, still a reigning problem of my intellectual generation in the Anglophone world. Recent invocations of identities as hybrid, performed, situational, contingent, context specific, fluid, or oppositional have transformed studies of race and slavery. However, similar efforts in Latin American scholarship that have occurred alongside attempts to engage the contemporary Afro-Latin American condition have done little to change the hegemonic representation of the slave past and racial present. Indeed, the persistence with which contemporary Afro-Latin American experiences continue to be based on a monolithic past despite attempts to grapple with the social dynamic of mestizaje reflects a pre-configured historical imagination, especially with regard to the foundational category of slavery. At its most elemental level, this structuring associates, then and now, specific persons and places with the institution of slavery. In scope, these images determine both the authentic sites of the slave experience and the contours of cultural memory. The problem of slavery influences how scholars and nonscholars alike approach the past, the present, and possibly even the future. The emphasis on experience—with the slave experience constituting the master trope—structures the historical imagination. As a result, experiences that underscore the context-specific aspects of consciousness and identity are simply absorbed or rendered as exceptions. By extension of this same logic, scholars have long asserted that universal memories and experiences produce a universal consciousness rooted in the black community. As a commonplace assertion, this idea reinforces the prevailing depiction of a timeless and ahistorical black cultural experience—an essentialized representation that can only be identified as “black structuralism.” In its standard formulation, black structuralism rests on the idea of a singular slave subject with...