This paper explores the concept of “livity,” the ground of Rastafari subjectivity. In its multifaceted nuances, “livity” represents the Rastafari invention of a religious tradition and discourse, whose ethos was fundamentally sacred, signified the immanence of the Absolute in dialectic with the Rastafari worldview and life world. Innovatively, the Rastafari coined the term “livity” to a discourse to combat despair, damnation, social death, and the existential chaos-monde they referred to as Babylon. In the process, the Rastafari reclaimed their power to name their world. The Rastafari neologism “livity” articulated a mysticism, alternative spatial visions, and a positive technology of the self that revalorized blackness, explored, and interrogated profound dimensions of the human condition, from within the Jamaican context, that inevitably brought them into conflict with the local colonial authorities and implicitly shifted the model of social relations between the master and slave.

The central claim of this essay is that Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity” is most fruitfully understood not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment. That is, opacity is not a given but an achievement. Taken up in this way, opacity is relevant for ongoing decolonial work today.

In the Caribbean, we cannot stop the misconduct of irresponsible global actors who agitate the winds beyond their natural cycles and push the sea over our shores, but now, we should refuse to leave our destiny in the hands of those for whom nature’s only beauty is its monetary value. Humanity is reading on its earlier footprints before nature has had time to erase them. That undermines sustainability, the backbone of continuity, survival and development, which goes beyond the pleonasm of sustainable development invented by the dominant system in order to maintain its predatory economy rather than a sustainable ecology. Forced to live from reconstruction to reconstruction, the Caribbean has the moral authority to speak out and take command of our destiny along with other vulnerable states, in a fusion of local and global action.

This article summarizes the Afro-centric ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Cheikh Anta Diop between 1960 and 1974, the dates on which he defended his thesis on the African identity of Egypt (Kemet and Nubia) and argued his thesis, with Théophile Obenga, before the UNESCO Cairo Conference on the “General History of Africa.” I discuss both the unhappy reception, by European Egyptologists and others, of Diop’s ground-breaking, multidisciplinary research, as well as its gradual spread, among others, to Diasporic thinkers. One such thinker, Marimba Ani (who expressly acknowledges her debt to Diop’s revolutionary demonstrations) took a further step by rethinking, in Africanist terms, the philosophical bases underlying the unfolding of what she probatively shows is the European (or western) Asili (Kiswahili for an overarching way of living or cultural source), as exemplified in its patterns of thought and affective-ideological patterns. I attempt to show, here, how Ani inherits and prolongs Diop’s “Copernican” displacement.