![]() ![]() Understood from this point of view, decolonization is a struggle against colonial alienation in order to find ways to heal black pain (Mbembe, 2017) and to reconstitute the colonial subject. Through Fanon (1986), Mbembe offers a definition of decolonization: “radically redefining native being and opening it up to the possibility of becoming a human form of being rather than a thing” (p. He contends that anything less reduces decolonization to a transfer of power from the metropole to local elites rather than seeing it as an epistemic and structural challenge to Western hegemony. This perspective aims to recover decolonization’s numerous genealogies: revolution, mystic exaltation, and futurity. In chapter two, Mbembe argues that decolonization should not be considered a singular event, but “a concatenation of complex, uneven, and variegated processes that unfolded over a long span of time” (p. In Mbembe’s view, it is the entangled space between Africa and Europe, colonized and colonizer, which propounds an epistemic vantage point from which to defamiliarize and reimagine politics. In turn, inquiry into African and planetary crises demands that we pay careful attention to the entangled contingencies that make neocolonialism and capitalism resilient. In the context of worldwide environmental crises, growing economic inequality, and political corruption, it seems as though the world is ‘evolving’ into the kinds of societies regularly associated with Africa. Agreeing with Jean and John Comaroff (2012), he sees the continent as the vanguard of world history, a generative site for social theory and global futures. Mbembe claims that “there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship that is keen to describe novelty and originality, multiplicity, singularity, and complexity” (p. Africa is an epistemological laboratory (Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, 1997) where Hobbesian (1982) conceptions of the state and its absences (Radcliffe-Brown, 1987) are tested and fashioned into general principles. ![]() Ironically, it is this very data that has allowed modern formations of knowledge. He demonstrates acutely how it is treated as a world incapable of producing universal knowledge, being no more than a reservation for raw data. Mbembe challenges Hegelian (1956) conceptions of Africa, which represent it as an ahistorical, shadowy continent – located outside of time – ensnared in cyclical processes (Gluckman,1963 Radcliffe-Brown, 1987 Turner, 1957). And so, he focuses on the temporal ruptures and consequences of decolonization in the present, drawing attention to the supposed inability of scholarship to write these dialectically produced and shared pasts. Interestingly, it is the very acts of physical and epistemic violence that create zones of créolité where futurity is made possible. Echoing Nkrumah (1965) and Léopold (2016), Mbembe maintains a dialectical posture, which suggests that new postcolonial worlds must avoid imitating European modernity better to invent new futures born out of a marriage between African struggles and European colonialism. This will to community served to orient novel ways of becoming (Hegel, 1956) which aimed to dismantle colonial hierarchies and make possible African futures. In his words, “If decolonization was an event at all, its essential philosophical meaning lies in an active will to community” (p. He argues that decolonization, as an event, ushered in a temporal rupture that made possible innumerable futures. Rather than simply examining their historical and sociological significance, he aims to discern their philosophical salience. In the first two chapters, Mbembe investigates the wave of African decolonization movements during the twentieth century. It also maps out the philosophical underpinning behind our senses of geography, grounding Africa’s place and planetary challenges in the decolonial turn. Likewise, his new book, Out of the Dark Night, in six essays and an epilogue, intervenes cogently in postcolonial thought. ![]() Since the publication of On the Postcolony, Mbembe has produced several books that explore the invention of Africa, genealogies of blackness, colonial subjugation, and the racialized capitalism that maintains Africa’s asymmetric integration into global hierarchies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |