The ‘Image of Africa’ in Africana Sociology

Abstract

‘Africana Sociology’ begins with a reappraisal of the ‘image of Africa’ in the form of sociology’s theoretical narrative about modernity’s spatial and temporal order. Early sociologists, like Auguste Comte and Lester Ward, conceived sociology as a secular discourse, although it transmitted Protestant values that reduced people of African descent to fetish objects. In the work of Charles H. Long, the ‘image of Africa’ appears in the African American religious imagination because it – more than the land in which Blacks were enslaved – authenticated their origins. In my appropriation of the concept, it is a semiotic device that, through its dialectical relationship with the ‘image of involuntary presence’, structures sociology’s narrative form. Like in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, the image of Africa designates the American nation as a site of crisis, while imbuing Black subjectivity with a wider consciousness of modernity.