DIFFERENCES IN THE POSTCOLONIAL The Status of Others and Artefacts in the Work of K. Anthony Appiah

Abstract

In his 1997 essay, 'Cosmopolitan patriots', K. Anthony Appiah's view of the 'global' finds order and resolution in 'basic respect', 'obedience to the law' and 'tolerance'. Appiah's values in the cosmopolitan context suggest a liberalism occlusive of its others, along with its own violence and regulation. And yet, in stark contrast to this liberal position, Appiah's 1991 essay, 'Is the post- in postmodern the post- in postcolonial?' offers a critique of the exhibit Perspectives: Angles in African Art , and, in doing so, remains preoccupied by a certain absence of the subjectivity of 'Africa' and a lack of autonomy in postcolonialism's relationship to postmodernism. Indeed, the Appiah of the 'posts' suggests that modernity's grip over its subsequent eras, and so-called self-reflections upon them, can be glimpsed in a mobilization of relativism at the exhibit, wherein the curator, through particular exclusions, re-establishes the requirement for the co-curators to have received 'this distinctly Western education'. For instance, Lela Kouakou, 'village born artist, from the Ivory Coast', was excluded from curatorial responsibilities because 'he would read to meet Baule standards' rather than western ones. Appiah's issue, that relativism operates to maintain Kouakou among the artefacts to be captioned, rather than as critic, and therefore enables a de-authorizing exoticism, comes to light as Appiah gives his own interpretation of a particular Yoruba artefact, 'Man with a Bicycle'. Appiah's interpretation is overly authoritarian and pointedly banal. He states, 'Man with a Bicycle . is not there to be Other to the Yoruba Self . it is there because it will take us further than our feet will take us.' Here Appiah invokes precisely the liberal and relativist relations of dependence and desubjectification for which his 1997 cosmopolitanism remains unaccountable.