Racializing Modernity: towards a racial understanding of modern thought
Research Question
By examining the Mozambican modernist architecture, I seek to analyze a transnational network of technicians that defined the meanings of modernity and tradition in late-colonial times.
Project Description
I engaged in historical research that provides us elements for understanding western modernity as a racial-based project put together through racializing colonial assemblages. In the last years, I attempted to build a genealogy of modernity in Mozambique, selecting the terms, criteria, and controversy that marked the current vision about development, modernity, and its counterparts in Southern Africa. To discuss modernity in an alternative manner, I address race as a transversal category that connects an ongoing set of political relations and perpetuates the vision that we have of ourselves, our sense of belonging, and establishes our modern epistemological background.