This paper critically examines the nexus between the scientific method and the study of race in the contemporary world. It begins by historicizing the emergence of the scientific method as indispensable to the advent of European modernity. The development of modernity collapsed into the racialization of black subjects as subhuman and criminal. This criminalization of blackness occurs at two critical junctures: the arrest of blacks via plantation enslavement and the concomitant imprisoning of black bodies of thought. The consequence of modernity’s (...) carceral methods implicates the study of race, particularly the formation of Black Studies, by criminalizing black reason. As such, the paper contends for an Afromodern scientific revolution, understood as the emancipation of method and the decarceralizing of science in order to procure black liberation in the modern world. (shrink)

The Caribbean is an undertheorized region within canonical political theory. This paper critically uncovers the West Indies as the inaugural site of modernity within the Americas. If it is European modernity that introduces into human existence fundamental markers of social identity, such as the historical nexus between race and class with devastating effects, then contemporary racial problems, including anti-black racism in the postcolonial world, can only be remedied by taking seriously the postcolonial Caribbean. In doing so, this paper argues that (...) while early modernity within the Caribbean inaugurated racialization in the Americas, its revolutionary movements throughout its vast histories of resistance do the work of decolonizing modernity as an act of hemispheric seizure by its poor, Black laboring class. The paper contends the transformative work of decolonizing Caribbean modernity begins by enacting universal emancipation from below through revolutionary movements during its mostly colonial era, and then shifts toward democratic revolution by struggling for self-determination in its postcolonial epoch. In the end, the recovery of Caribbean modernization amounts to a reclamation of the Caribbean subject, along with its vast political possibilities for democratic transformation. (shrink)