Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World - Nahum Dimitri Chandler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World by Nahum Dimitri Chandler Erick Raven (bio) NAHUM DIMITRI CHANDLER, Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World. State University of New York Press, 2021. ix + 139 pp. ISBN 9781438484198. In Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of World, Nahum Dimitri Chandler muses on and proposes a reconceptualization of W. E. B. Du Bois's oft-quoted statement, "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Primarily referencing two DuBois texts mostly written during the final year of World War II, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945) and The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa Has Played in World History (1947), Chandler argues that the "problem of the color line" Du Bois wrote about at the dawning of the twentieth century was in fact "not only problem but also possibility—the prospect of new forms and ways for groups of humans to attain or create full realization of historical capacity, or even to open the paths toward the possibility of a horizon of unlimited generation and generosity" (p. 30). Chandler centers the location of this possibility on the continent of Africa in the aftermath of colonialism precisely because of its role in the development of Western economic and global power. He writes, "Africa stands not as an indication of a closed and primordial figure in the history of the modern world … but as the scene by which the passage of historical possibility might be tracked and perhaps announced" (p. 19). Additionally, while the reconceptualization of what it means to be human and the future possibilities of humanity begin in Africa, just as when the species first began, it will spread to Asia and to the uttermost parts of the globe. Though many scholars identify Du Bois's global outlook at a later stage of his career, Chandler argues that Du Bois's global consciousness about race and the implications of the color line could be seen as early as 1899 through to the end of his life in Ghana in 1963. In other words, the global significance of Africa and the African/African American experience is the frame through which the oppressive forces of racism, colonialism, and capitalism as well new possibilities for humanity can be perceived and comprehended. [End Page 125] Fred Moten (2008) in "The Case of Blackness" writes, "The air of the thing that escapes enframing is what I'm interested in—an often unattended movement that accompanies largely unthought positions and appositions" (p. 182). Toward an African Future is a textual example of this statement. Like Moten, Chandler focuses on the possibilities that could emerge out of the chaos and turmoil of oppression. Echoing the biblical idea of creation emerging out of chaos, so for Du Bois as read by Chandler, Africa is the resedimented soil at the source of a new version of humanity after the pillage of the slave trade and colonialism. Like Derrida, Chandler emphasizes the idea of to come hidden in plain sight within Du Bois's texts. The African, and by extension African American, experience serves as an example and a model for other "colored" peoples globally, particularly Asia (p. 56). Chandler writes, "it must be said that for DuBois, Asia was not simply one example among others … [Asia's] major bearing for world history in the modern epoch—in the planetary sense—remained yet to come" (p. 24). In other words, the reconceptualization of human possibilities taking place in Africa is merely the starting point for a reconceptualization of the world, of which Asia was of particular importance for Du Bois. From his novel Dark Princess (1928) to his travels to Japan and China in the 1930s and 1950s, respectively, Asia intrigued Du Bois and served as a locus of (perhaps naive) hope for Africa and Black America. Thus, it is interesting that Chandler proposes Africa as the source of possibility whose influence could then spread to modern Asia. The text is structured as a work in progress; a musing on implications and possibilities that possibly reflect the African continent. He writes, "Africa named for Du Bois...