'Genealogical misfortunes': Achille Mbembe's (re-)writing of postcolonial Africa

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist, Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy’s lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe’s status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself within a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè

Essai sur le politique en tant que forme de la dépense

La plupart des chroniques consacrées aux guerres africaines sous-estiment la centralité que celles-ci ont fini par prendre dans la représentation que le sujet africain contemporain se fait de la vie, du politique en général et de sa relation avec la mort en particulier. De fait, lors de périodes plus ou moins prolongées de l’histoire récente de plusieurs pays, donner la mort a eu tendance à devenir aussi bien ce par quoi l’on crée un monde que le monde même que l’on fait être ou que l’on construit. La guerre a été à l’origine de situations extrêmes et a octroyé à la mort une place centrale aussi bien dans les processus de constitution de la réalité que dans l’économie psychique en général. S’appuyant sur le concept – développé par Bataille – de la dépense, cette étude analyse quelques-unes des manières d’imaginer le politique qui, dans l’Afrique contemporaine, accordent une place centrale à la pensée et à la pratique du pouvoir comme pensée et pratique de la guerre. Pour ce faire, elle identifie un ensemble d’éléments structurants des conditions matérielles de la vie dans l’Afrique du dernier quart du xxe siècle. Elle examine ensuite trois formations de l’imaginaire qui, s’enchevêtrant et se relayant sans cesse, dessinent autant de figures de la lutte politique et de la guerre en tant que prise sur les corps, sur les choses et sur la vie.An Essay on Politics as a Form of Expenditure. – The object of this study is to analyse contemporary African conceptions of the political that articulate power as a theory and practice of war. Over the last quarter of the twentieth-century, war has come to assume a central role in the mental representation that contemporary African social actors hold of politics in general, and of sovereignty in particular. War has become just the means whereby one creates a wold, as well as the life-world that is itself created. If war is as much a means to the achievement of sovereignty as a means of exercising the right to kill, what place do new imaginations of politics-as-war accord to life, death and the body

Politiques de la vie et violence spéculaire dans la fiction d’Amos Tutuola

Cette étude porte sur la question générale des langages de la vie dans leur rapport avec la violence et la terreur. Elle s’intéresse très précisément à ces manières de vivre qui, soit se situent au-delà du politique en tant que langue vernaculaire (et socialement obligatoire) du lien social, soit en déplacent les frontières au point de reléguer le politique à une zone des confins.S’appuyant sur la fiction d’Amos Tutuola (en particulier sur une lecture iconoclaste de son célèbre The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts), l’auteur tourne le dos aux notions de raison, de vérité et de droit qui ont servi de piliers à la pensée occidentale concernant la vie. En lieu et place, il privilégie celle du fantôme et s’en sert pour envisager le champ fantomal et le pouvoir du même nom, comme cette face du réel qui, loin de participer du domaine des apparences, est constitutive du monde de la vie et de la terreur. L’étude montre comment l’écriture d’Amos Tutuola permet de concevoir l’idée de la vie, de la terreur et du sujet comme fondamentalement liée a celle de l’imagination, du travail et du souvenir.Life Politics and Specular Violence in Amos Tutuola’s Novels. – This article addresses the issue of the languages of life in their relationship with sovereignty, specular violence, and terror. The author demonstrates how (and implicitly critique the ways in which), when it treats the languages of life, Western tradition – more than any other – accords a critical role to the notions of self, truth, and time. Using the metaphor of the mirror, the author bases his critique on a re-reading of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This critique rests upon the notion – developed by Tutuola – of the ghost, or better, of the wandering subject. It is argued that the metaphor of the mirror allows us to envisage ghostly power and sovereignty as aspects of the real integral to a world of life and terror rather than tied to a world of appearances. The article also shows how Tutuola’s fiction allows us to conceive of the idea of life, sovereignty, and terror as fundamentally linked to that of the imagination, work, and remembrance

Necropolítica

Este ensaio pressupõe que a expressão máxima da soberania reside, em grandemedida, no poder e na capacidade de ditar quem pode viver e quem deve morrer.1Por isso, matar ou deixar viver constituem os limites da soberania, seus atributosfundamentais. Exercitar a soberania é exercer controle sobre a mortalidade e definir a vida como a implantação e manifestação de poder

Postcolonial untranslatability: reading Achille Mbembe with Barbara Cassin

Barbara Cassin’s monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the “Untranslatable” (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe’s theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical “entanglements”, one of Mbembe’s key terms

Tertiary time: The precariat's dilemma

Progressive politics has always been about the struggle to reduce social inequities and inequalities. What takes priority depends on the type of society we live in. Today people in rich countries live in societies that are tertiary, not industrial, in that what they do is largely covered by “services.” In a tertiary society, one iniquitous form of inequality is control of time. Time is a key asset. But we do not have a conceptualization of tertiary time. We must rectify that so as to develop a progressive politics of time

O tempo que se move

Tradução da introdução do livro De la postcolonie, de Achille Mbembe, por Michelle Cirne

The battle for Zimbabwe in 2013: from polarisation to ambivalence

On the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three months after the election, outlines and attempts to explain this account. It explores the way in which a politics of polarisation that dominated Zimbabwe in recent years appears to have given way to a politics of ambivalence: where Zimbabweans once viewed their political landscape as one populated by antinomies, they now see their state and its relation to themselves in more complex and ambiguous ways. As a result, Zimbabweans' conception of the state is increasingly coming to resemble Mbembe's formulation of states as contemporaneously ‘organizers of public happiness’ and wielders of arbitrary violence

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopoli- tics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere’s continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography

‘It’s just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race

Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South African tertiary institutions position themselves in relation to race and the apartheid past. Our data include four focus group interviews from two universities, one which can be described as historically ‘black’ and the other as historically ‘white’. Given the complex nature of the data, we elected to use a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological approach. We explore how words such as black, white, coloured, they, we, us and them feature in the interviews. Our analysis shows that the positioning by the interviewees reflects a complexity and ambivalence that is at times contradictory although several broader discourse patterns can be distilled. In particular, we argue, that all groups employ a range of discursive strategies so as to resist being positioned in the historical positions of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. Our paper reflects on these findings as well as what they offer us as we attempt to chart new discourses of the future.Department of HE and Training approved lis