Abstract

Ato Quayson's Calibrations adds a crucial volume to the expanding library of Africa-inflected theoretical apprehensions of the present. Achille Mbembe's provocative ruminations on the macabre state of the African present, On the Postcolony, appeared 2001. Olakunle George's compelling work on the proper way to account for the modernity of the African postcolonial subject, Relocating Agency, appeared two years later. All these writers find contemporary continental European philosophy very useful for understanding life postcolonial Africa. Hegel, Heidegger, and Bakhtin are the motivators of analysis Mbembe, and the theoretical backcloth of George's account of how African agents relate to their worlds is cut of Althusserian notions on subjection and subjectivity. While it is very hard to locate a single source of inspiration for Quayson, reverberating through every chapter Calibrations are echoes of an array of modernist and postmodernist thinkers like Claude LeviStrauss, Sigmund Freud, Clifford Geertz, and Fredric Jameson. I find all three authors-Quayson, Mbembe, and George-and their texts a tendency towards the proverb that says, Wherever you are, you are. For Mbembe, the African state visits literal death on its citizens probably because the career of being the African postcolony consists of little that can claim to be genuine. Regarding African history, Achille Mbembe says, [F]rom the fifteenth century, is no longer a 'distinctive historicity' of these societies, one not embedded times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination (9). One mark of Africa's irreversible assimilation into the course of history charted by Europe is to be found the way Africans and the rest of the world live a contingent, dispersed, and powerless existence (13). In Africa, these ontological givens manifest in the guise of arbitrariness and the absolute power to give death any time, anywhere, by any means, and for any reason (13). The rule of death is inevitable because the history of the most recent three centuries have initiated Africa into a form of inescapable slavery. Although Mbembe's ballooned rhetoric of inevitability is not noticeable Olakunle George's studies of the textual figurations of modernity Africa, he too argues for an analytical outlook that heeds the conditions on the African ground. George proposes that the essence of modernity Africa does not lie somewhere out there excess of the modern practices of African intellectuals. George, like Mbembe, is catholic his approach to theories of the present: To undervalue (let alone reject) AngloAmerican theory because it is a first world preoccupation is to misconceive a lot that is

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