EDITOR'S NOTE: Another world: practice, performance, a common preoccupation
Denise Ferreira da Silva
A starting point is not necessarily a beginning, not in the sense of coming into being; the starting point already situates and is situated in a large configuration, in the field of becoming, in its constitutive comings/goings.
Living Commons, in that it registers a practice, a performance, and a partaking, a common preoccupation, could describe just such a position, a locus of enunciation and renunciation of what is to come. For the collective is nothing more than a gathering around, within, before the vanishing point, which is all radical question(ing)s can promise, that is the convergence and disappearance of each, all, and everything at that never to be reached ‘some point.'
Toward an African Future opens this exchange. It is the first of what we hope will be many written interventions that share collective preoccupation with asking otherwise. Nahum D. Chandler’s magnificent exposition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s probe of the problem of the color line records a site that is an opening, where the African in the African American example exposes the vanishing point of modern historicity. From there, another conception of time, another version of the world, another question of the being or becoming can be contemplated. Always already located, thus, fully contained in a field, modern historicity and its teleological, evolutionary, temporality becomes just another mark of coming/going, that is, an unfolding in the field of globality.
“The African American situation”, Chandler states, was a global one for Du Bois. And, in this way, at a ground level of historicity, shall we say, it was an exemplary example of a global problematic”. Each part of the sentence reads as playing a grammatical role (at the level of the sentence) similar to the ones the parts of his text play at the level of discourse. His invocation of Du Bois’s African as the proper name the future without modern historicity is preoccupied with how the colonial and racial map the dimension that constitutes the global as a field of politically (economic, juridical, and ethical) relating and related entities. As such it is occupied by the urgency, the pressing call for another becoming, another shift in the field, the starting point of a future without the unyielding violence and violations which the subjects of modern historicity continuously and consistently deploy in every attempt to take control of the planet and its human and other resources.
