 With these guiding principles in place, and in deference to the framing conditions of historicity, coloniality, and heterodoxy, the next section will present a swift history of Africana philosophy. Constructing historical narratives is always, to some degree, a presentist exercise: it is an attempt to read the past while guided by contemporary concerns and informed by contemporary resources. This reading will lean into that aspect of the exercise—it is, in effect, a reading of the history as seen in contemporary perspective, and is therefore also a way of wading a bit further into the contemporary preoccupations that are the subject of this entry.