Historical Sankofa: On Understanding Antiblack Violence in the Present through the African Diasporic Past

Abstract

This essay makes a theoretical and methodological intervention into the historical discipline by arguing that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. Using the Black Lives Matter movement and the global uprisings of 2020 as a case study, the author rejects long-standing critiques of presentism in the historical discipline. Instead, she argues that the history of transnational black activism and protest engaged by activists in the African diaspora throughout 2020 were indicative of the ways in which the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present. The author calls the process of excavating these connections between the past and the present “historical sankofa”—a concept borrowed from the Akan tradition of Ghana.