The Postcolony as Trope: Searching for a Lost Continent in a Borderless World

Abstract

If the hubris of postcolonial studies derives from the inflation of a local condition into a cosmic paradigm, the very idea of Africa as a massive, monolithic postcolony must be one of the comforting illusions of con? temporary theories of African cultural, economic, and political production. Achille Mbembe has stressed the need to recognize the multiplicities of identities in the postcolony (5). Yet in his own epistemology, this pluralization of identities remains at the level of a particularly geocolonial space, with the Cameroonian experience providing the background and details for the postcolony. It is indeed a very sobering historic irony that very close to the southeastern border of modern Cameroon, the imposition of three different types of colonial rationalizations on the people of the old cultur? ally contiguous Kongo kingdom would have altered the postcolonial reali? ties of modern day Angola, Congo Brazzaville, and the former Zaire. Yet as a trope, the postcolony is profoundly illustrative of the African condition in the epoch after the cessation of actual colonization. Wliether the post in postcolonial is taken to mean after, because of, and inclusive of, or as a prefix of opposition and resistance to the colonial, the con? clusion is inescapable that it suffers from a diminution or attenuation ofthe real thing (see Hutcheon).Thus, whether it is a protocolony or a paracolony, the postcolony wears the marker of inferiorization orjuniorization in bold, troubling relief. It has the disadvantages of the colony without its advantages. At least in the colony, the colonizing metropole takes some responsibility; whereas under the guise of independence the postcolony is formally on its own. The postcolony, then, is a Kafkaesque penal colony where inhabitants perfect the masochistic pastime described by a celebrated Nigerian musical gadfly as shuffering and shmiling. But if the notion ofthe postcolony is a tormenting if illusive reality, the quest for a lost continent in a world often described as borderless, a global space where everything is ground into conformity by the homogenizing leviathan of globalization, is at best quixotic and at worst a Sisyphean venture. (see Jameson and Miyoshi) Yet despite the onslaught of globaliza? tion, despite the relendess attempt to subsume the entire world within the capitalist logic of development, the invention, re-invention and de-invention of Africa with all their cultural, intellectual, and ideological accretions have continued apace. Indeed, in sharp contradistinction to Bhabha's controversial postmodernist and post-nation notion of the and his? torical hybridity of the postcolonial world [. . .] as the paradigmatic place of departure (21), others have insisted that the nation-state remains the most vibrant site for contemporary cultural and political contestations (see Chabal; Ahmad).