The dispersion of Africans is a phenomenon of the modern world.
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| —Kilson and Rotberg1 |
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The historian who looks eastward, confronting the vast movement of men and women across Asia will be taken for granted.2
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| —George Shepperson |
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The black man is lord of the people of the East.3
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| —Al-Baladhuri |
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Race, Epistemology, and Historiography | |
| Westerners have a tendency to view interaction among the world's various peoples as a marker of the modern age. This implies that interaction across the globe is a modern phenomenon given primarily to Westerners. Inherent in this tendency is the inability of non-Westerners and those also deemed un-modern to participate in this interaction. |
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Even when this interaction occurs within modern time and space, most of us have little critical regard for what we view. For instance, what are the levels of African and Asian interaction in the "New World"? How is this interaction interpreted? What are its nuances and implications? What should we make of an eighteenth-century Mexican slave from "Bengal" who sues for his freedom and that of his wife, "una creola negra"? Or how is Alberto Fujimori understood in a Peru once mined by African slaves? |
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The exigencies of modern racial construction have erected paradigms that are accepted globally and that militate against critical examination of African and Asian interaction. In that regard, modern racialized hierarchies preclude Africans and Asians, as well as other interested parties, from making such inquiries. If this is true of modern analysis and the histories that it spawns, the issue of the histories that precede the modern era written by those of us who consider ourselves "Western" or modern—even postmodern—appear to be more problematic. |
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This is particularly true in the examination of Africans and people of African descent. The vision imposed on Africans is temporally and geographically fixed: movement to the western hemisphere in the wake of the Columbian voyages. The vehicle, and therefore, the sociopolitical economic icon of this experience is the slave ship. It is here that the histories of Africa, Africans, and peoples of African descent are "known." |
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