Transmodern heritage as radical delinking from modernity

Abstract

Guided by decolonial border thinking (Mignolo, 2007), this conceptual paper questions the rhetoric of alternative modernities proposed as a way of reclaiming the place of post/colonial heritage of Africa alongside the modern heritage in Africa. Interrogating modernity's European legacy, its precepts and the associated values, it proposes instead to define African heritage of the 19th and 20th century from the standpoint of "exteriority" and as an expression of transmodernity, in a move to delink it from the colonial matrix of power. Transmodern heritage, transversal and rooted in the decoloniality movement, represents an alternative to modernity that accounts for alterity affirmed as difference and provides space for manifold cultural expressions produced by African people liberated from modernity's colonial foundation and its vexing binary opposition of "traditional" and "modern".