Beschreibung
This anthology interrogates two salient concepts in studying the black
experience. Ushered in with the age of New World encounters, modernity
emerged as brutal, complex and multiple, from its very definition to its
manifestations. Equally challenging is blackness, which is forever
dangling between the range of uplifting articulations and insidious
degradation. The essays confront the conflicting confluences of these two
terms. Questioning Euro-centric and “mainstream'” American interpretations,
they reveal the diverse meanings of modernities and blackness from an
equally diverse set of milieus of the black experience. Interdisciplinary
and wide-ranging in thematic and epochal scope, they use theoretical and
empirical studies to demonstrate that, indeed, blackness is relevant for
understanding modernities and vice versa.
