Thinking from the Diaspora Back Toward the Homeland: Reading Humanity at the Crossroads of Solidarity and Extinction

Abstract

As is by now obvious, this eclectic collection of chapters finds its common focus in crisis. Increasing recognition of the limits and failures of the project of modernity—in this late hour of growing terror —has provoked a “turn to the indigenous” in search of experience and lifeways less destructive. The international cycles of modern economic boom and bust—at least partially manipulated by overlapping interests between finance capital, neoliberal “fundamentalism,” and U.S. “green-zone” imperialism rooted in military bases, as indeed, by the blowback from the environment in the form of ever more consequential ecocatastrophe accompanying modern intervention (such as in the Gulf, and more episodically in the rain forest in Ecuador and the tar sands of Canada)—altogether push academic theory toward a much more radical questioning of our continuing romance with modernity, technology, and growth. As a way of rounding out this concern, this last chapter—like the first one—will once again inflect critical theory with personal reflection.

Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am m given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, amen!

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of White Folk