## Introduction  
Language intending to ascribe meaning to the bodies, cultures, territories and skin colour of people of African descent is a central device for racial signification and, hence, central to the very constitution of constellations of power and knowledge in the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. These ethnic-racial grammars are composed of categories that mark modes of domination while they orient the dynamics of resistance, struggle, and selfaffirmation of Africana subjects.  
I use the category 'ethnic-racial' to conceptualize the entanglement of the cultural and phenotypical dimensions of racial classifications and stratifications. This implies a necessary, yet complex, relationship between race and ethnicity as historical categories and as markers of identity and difference, insofar as there are cultural dimensions to race, while ethnic ascriptions tend to be racialized. I will also use the terms 'racial' and 'race' on their own, as they were the first to appear historically, they still have cultural dimensions, and they call attention more unambiguously to the key problem of racism. I also use the term 'Africana', which refers to African peoples both on the continent and in the diaspora - itself understood as a  
global translocal formation and as a space of multiple exchanges and travels back and forth with regard to the continent. ${ }^{1}$  
In the light of their ubiquity and importance in modern/colonial regimes of power and knowledge, signifiers for ethnic-racial classifications and stratifications have always been polyvalent, contested, ambiguous and unstable. Their historical locations are global at the same time as they are local and contingent. Genealogies of signifiers such as negro, morena, mulata, preto, and zambo, coined and used as integral parts of processes to establish and maintain ethnic-racial hierarchies, demonstrate their potency as world-historical devices of power, as well as their historicity and, therefore, performativity and specificity in time and space or place.