Willing Conscripts: Black Radical Thought, Modernity, and the (Im)possibility of Return

This article examines from a global perspective how Black radical thinkers have attempted to reconcile modernity and the African past. Black radical thinkers have developed diverging ideas about what the future should look like, even while each extolled traditional African cultures and values and drew on the idiom of modernity. But many such thinkers have shared a recognition of the impossibility of a return to a precolonial African past, and argued instead that African traditions must play a part in building a new modernity in which Africa, along with the rest of the world, would join the West as equal partners. Modernity – while marked by racial-colonial divisions – was seen by many Black radicals to offer emancipatory possibilities. They saw actually-existing modernity as offering hollow and circumscribed equality, freedom and humanism, and in response sought to remake these values and fill them with meaning. If such Black radical thinkers have been modernity’s conscripts, as David Scott has argued, they have been its willing conscripts. Black radicals, faced with a world they did not make, were enthusiastic to answer modernity’s call. They looked forward with great optimism to refashioning it into a shape in which its promises were kept.