Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (review)

Abstract

James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press, April 2006. In fifth essay James Ferguson's forthcoming collection entitled Global Shadows: Africa Neoliberal World Order, author gives account of a short-lived Zambian Internet Magazine called Chrysalis. Produced by a cohort of young, foreign-educated Zambians, Chrysalis first appeared September 1998. Echoing then South deputy president Thabo Mbeki's call for an African Renaissance, editors of Chrysalis proclaimed magazine to be the voice of a new generation of Zambians: confident, proud of their heritage and possessing collective will and capacity to build [their] country to take its rightful place pantheon of sovereign nations. Also following Mbeki's lead, Chrysalis contributors turned a critical eye upon Zambia and Zambians, calling for their compatriots to take responsibility for future of nation rather than blaming their troubles on external factors, including legacy of colonialism. In space of a year, however, tone of critique within magazine changed dramatically from what Ferguson describes as earnest idealism to ironic dark humor, as magazine became a forum for reflecting on what was understood as a continuing national failure. In words of one of contributors, the expectant dream is as we speak turning a nightmare. The unfulfilled hopes revealed essay, entitled Chrysalis: The Life and Death of Renaissance a Zambian Internet Magazine, index broader phenomena on continent, Ferguson tells us this collection of eight essays, five of which have been previously published, and three of which, along with introduction, were written for volume. Notwithstanding liberalization of polities and economies post-Cold War era, Africa remains marginal to global economy. Growth rates have fallen to record lows-in some cases, negative-in recent years. Whereas celebrants of globalization boast that capital flows into and covers open spaces, Ferguson suggests that capital hops around globe, from point to point, skipping over most of what lies between. Much of Africa, according to Ferguson, fact lies in between points of contemporary global economy, fomenting evergreater frustration and resentment on continent. Conventional development discourse, Ferguson reminds us an essay entitled Decomposing Modernity: History and Hierarchy after Development, has long cast Africans as being not merely bottom, but also beginning of a process that would, one day, allow them to rise. For those at bottom of global hierarchy, Ferguson writes, the message was clear: Wait, have patience; your turn will come. But for editors of Chrysalis, like many Africans today, narrative is no longer persuasive. According to Ferguson, telos of modernity has, for most, given way to a hierarchy of statuses that are, Ferguson's words, divided by exclusionary walls rather than developmental stairways. He writes, As understandings of modernity have shifted this way, vast majority of Africans denied status of modernity increasingly come to be seen, and may even...come to see themselves, not as 'less developed' but simply as less. This is not to say that Africa has been untouched by global forces recent years; indeed Africa-in so far as one can generalize about this vast continent of disparate nations-has been transformed, Ferguson argues. In an essay entitled Paradoxes of Sovereignty and Independence: 'Real' and 'Pseudo-' Nation-States and Depoliticization of Poverty,-wherein he suggests that Lesotho (the tiny nation surrounded on all sides by South Africa, whose independence from Britain was granted 1966) was scarcely more autonomous apartheid-era than Transkei bantustan (whose autonomy was dismissed as farce by virtually all but apartheid politicians)-Ferguson suggests that none of impoverished nations of world are truly 'sovereign' or 'independent,' and nowhere do we find a true 'national economy. …