Afrofuturism 2.0.

Afrofuturism 2.0 – Afrofuturism, The New World Order. Reynaldo Anderson

Delinking, Relocating, Projecting Beyond the Euro Apparatus of Logos and Nomos.

Recently, I was commissioned to compare Sven Beckert’s tome Capitalism and Reynaldo Anderson’s Afrofuturism and World Order (2025). In the following days, I have been moved to interrogate the metaphysical aspect of Anderson’s work. Afrofuturism is often considered part of the literary and media canon. In an earlier work, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (2015), Anderson shifts the paradigm to a creative, counter-, anti- and decolonial space, where a world untainted by modernity could look like, feel like, and be.

Using my own ontological stance, which is rooted in Baradian agential realism, I believe the ontic, the building block of reality, consists of a variety of entities that appear as a result of their intra-actions. For those familiar with quantum mechanics, the wave function collapses due to multiple parameters, and before it materialises, all possibilities exist in a Schrödinger-esque fashion. Although these possibilities exist as abstract concepts that may never come to pass, their existence matters before concretisation; when the wave function collapses, they become baked into matter.

In Anderson’s work, he expertly acknowledges the onto-epistemology of the West/Global North and recognises that any thought stemming from that knowledge tree must include the middle passage and colonisation as a whole. On the metaphysical plane, this means Quijano’s matrix of coloniality, Eurocentricism, capitalism, Judeo-Christianity, and racial hierarchy is rooted in matter through thought and possibility. Thus, slavery lives on in the processing and kneading of knowledge. White supremacy is baked in. Through the same medium, decolonial, anti-colonial, and resistance spaces are also sprinkled into the cake.

Alexander Weheliye cites the law as a racialising assemblage that dyselected Latinx and Black folx as reduced to Spillersian flesh in his seminal work, Habeas Viscus (2014). I believe his use of Deleuze and Guattari terminology supports the idea that race exists as the relational product of the territorialising of various interactions. Race then exists socially as a consequence regardless of a phenotype or genetic code. The law, melanin, church, scripture, capitalism, the ship, knowledge, and the ledger all exist discretely before race is materially realised interactively as a construct.

From an agential stance, the ship cannot be separated from the ‘curse of Ham,’ the hand and ink that scored that verse, nor the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in 1492. None exists independently until the agential cut is made and the function collapses. The logos and nomos then are to be viewed as an apparatus, and relata to all phenomena and don’t exist till the fall.

Interrogating this intra-action, logos is wrought as a result of nomos, and vice versa. Many scholars look at the process as meaning (logos) being created and read after the law (nomos) has done its work; the law picks out the Black body and allows violence without retort. Habeas corpus is often suspended, epistemically and legally, when the social order is challenged.  Similarly, logos is always read retroactively against the grain of time, as a consequence of knowledge communicated through laws of grammar seals its meaning through its retroactive effect (Lacan, 1955-56; 1957/1966). If we view all logos and nomos as apparatus, inseparable parts of the same creation, we can liberate them either by taking the critical, analytical road of a Derridean grammatology that impacts the word, or by collapsing time itself.

Before I continue, critically, if what I have set out is correct – that colonial epistemology of modernity taints every word we write with the same racialising power we aim to disavow, that the whole symbolic order is endowed with white supremacy – then how can we create a knowledge system outside the library? Outside of the grammar of the sentence? A book has to be written that acknowledges the pen and strives toward a novel cut.

Anderson provides a methodology through conceptualising a “geography of reason”. The concept derives from Lewis Gordon, was developed in Afrofuturism 2.0 (2015), and applied to a world order in his latest book (2025). If the symbolic law (nomos) of knowledge (logos) is centred in Europe, then the arbiter of what constitutes worthiness is geographically locked to that land; the cut happens discretely in a Black-and-white fashion. Those outside the land are reduced to an aknowledge, a deknowledge, and an antiknowledge, and, as nomos intra-acts with logos, that intra-action becomes the mechanism that reduces them to flesh.

Resistance matters.

Historically, Senghor attempts to create a new geography of thought and feeling. He seeks value in rejecting Africa in this metric entirely. He positions African emotion as superior to Europe’s supposed rationality with his famous formulation: “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison est hellène” (Senghor, 1939/1964: 288). This is a natural consequence of intra-action; even the mixing of oil and water involves some emulsification. Fanon’s critique in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Chapter 5 on Négritude, is an apt attack on the dialectical nature of knowledge and feeling, as it leaves Europe as the crown, judge, and jury of logos, which is then a consequential affirmation of the law of European supremacy.

These imaginative spaces are something new. They, of course, carry some taint in the ink of modernity, but on an imaginary blank page where modernity can seek to be erased, we can still create something new. Here, we imagine a world through delinking, relocating and projecting (Anderson, 2025). Delinking through abandoning Europe as the metropolis of thought. We relocate the geographies of reason as multivarious and appreciate the hierarchy of the current world order. These geographies exist in daydream, imagination, and fiction, or anywhere delinking can begin, in Malian (Dogon) astronomy as a base, in an indigenous reading of justice that is rooted in restoration, and then projecting these spaces onto-epistemologically.

I stated earlier that there was a movement from the literary and media canon. These ‘geographies of reason’ are more than fictional art spaces, as in the critical race theory tradition suggests. The ‘geography of reason’ processes into an agentic entity that impacts the ontic. By overlaying an analysis of the episteme, challenging the essence of language and thought, and daring it to exist, it changes the metaphysics around it.

The liberatory geography of reason must not centre Europe nor its failures. It must exist as a non-totalising episteme that claims no power over thought, that begins within the imagination of those oppressed by modernity’s domination. My ask is that you think, postulate and dream about a world that freedom can exist without the permission of what is. That will lead us from the world as it is to the world as it should be.

References

1.     Anderson, R. (2015). Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington.

2.     Anderson, R. (2025). Afrofuturism and World Order. Ohio State University Press.

3.     Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks.

4.     Lacan, J. (1955-56). Seminar III: The Psychoses – point de capiton / retroactive signification.

5.     Lacan, J. (2006). The instance of the letter in the unconscious. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). Norton. (Orig. 1957) – sentence completes its signification only with its last term, sealing meaning by retroactive effect.

6.     Lacan, J. (1990). Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (Orig. broadcast 1973) pp.32-33 – Other’s jouissance and racism.

7.     Senghor, L. S. (1964). Ce que l’homme noir apporte. In Liberté I: Négritude et humanisme (p.288). Orig. 1939. “L’émotion est nègre, comme la raison hellène”

8.     Weheliye, A. (2014). Habeas Viscus.