Achille Mbembe Research Articles

The strategic performance of heterotopic experiences in higher education: Imagining spaces of potentiality for new South African identities

In an interview published in Esprit, Achille Mbembe asks “what is ‘today’, and what are we today? What are the lines of fragility, the lines of precariousness, the fissures in contemporary African life? And, possibly, how could what is, be no more, how could it give birth to something else?” As a response to this question of African identity, this article is twofold. Firstly, I aim to draw together an argument that recent and ongoing debates about decolonising knowledge (including Mbembe’s 2015 WISER lecture and open public conversations with the #RhodesMustFall [#RMF] student movement) can be read as part of the search for ways “to be otherwise”. In fact, higher education (HE) institutions should be, can be, and often are, crucial spaces of potentiality in this regard. An essential part of realising Mbembe’s vision of a new kind of human, therefore, would be to ensure that institutions in the contemporary HE landscape recognise, embrace and therefore (paradoxically) become what they are, namely “heterotopias”. Heterotopology is a metaphor Michel Foucault suggests in his 1967 lecture Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Accepting that HE is a heterotopically discursive site, this article provides a brief, broad Foucaultian heterotopology of the contemporary HE landscape, with specific reference to the South African context. It focuses on Foucault’s three types of heterotopia (crisis, deviation and compensation) and his six principles of heterotopia. Secondly, it would be something of a performative contradiction if this article were merely to follow the conventions of a traditionally organised philosophical argument about an engaging metaphor (“heterotopia”). As an experimental “strategic performance”, the writing itself aims to produce a heterotopic reading experience, thereby joining in the heuristic excavation of experience, which is the task of the heterotopia. It draws disparate, clashing elements into a complex textual web, which should generate at least some feeling of disturbance or cognitive dissonance. In the article’s fissures and joints, readers should find points of entry for critical and creative thinking. As Johnson puts it in his analysis of Foucault’s metaphor, “heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination”.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

Biopolítica y necropolítica: ¿constitutivos u opuestos?

This article searches for respond to the question whether biopolitic’s objective (to manage life and construct lifestyles) and necropolitic’s objective (to administrate death and destroy habitats and peoples), polarized, make both concepts opposites, or on the contrary, if they indicate a dialectical relationship and mutual construction in phenomena such as migration. To answer the question, the article first examines biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault and seeks how it has been taken up in the analysis of contemporary migration. The paper then describes necropolitics in the work of Achille Mbembe, and how it has been taken up to identify the causes of forced migration and racism against migrants. Finally, it reviews the literature on biopolitical and necropolitical studies in the context of international migration.

Indecent exposure – writing violence and resistance today

Today in South Africa the rainbow is gone. We live in a society scarred by history, crippled by a lack of transformation, subjugated by the spectacle of global capitalism and marked by inequality, alienation and the reinvention of difference. These tensions are exemplified in the waves of student protest that have engulfed universities across the country in recent years. My paper asks what forms do we create in crisis, from crisis? The question for me as a writer, as a writing teacher and as a creative practitioner working within the university, is can we find a way to write that is equal to this moment – a writing that can capture and confront the present, with its new urgencies and particular forms of violence, including violence done to the body and to language? In March last year at Yale University’s Workshop in African Intellectual History , Achille Mbembe critiqued the current student movements as embracing a “politics of viscerality” that he claims curtails criticality and delimits the possibilities of intersubjectivity. I answer Mbembe’s critique with a poetics of viscerality. Language, I argue has the amazing capacity to ingest the violence it meets and, rather than merely record it, to expel it sonically and viscerally. Working from the prose, poetry and hybrid practices of a range of renegade and revolutionary writers from the global South and African diaspora, including Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Cecilia Vicuna, Raul Zurita, Daniel Borzutzky, Lesego Rampolokeng, Claudia Rankine, Valerie Mejer Caso, Mishka Hoosen and more, while at the same time interrogating my own creative practice, I ask how can we, as writers, harness and channel the liberatory and celebratory energies of the recent protests? How do we draw from our history of writing as protest and invent in the present to interrogate, reject, embrace, deface and bear out, on the page, our current pain and anger and to transcend the intimate and public wreckages of our present moment? Keywords: Poetics, viscerality, student movements, creative practices

Mito da Modernidade e Alucinações Eurocêntricas: colóquio entre Enrique Dussel e Achille Mbembe

O presente trabalho ensaístico pretende, a partir das ideias de Enrique Dussel e Achille Mbembe, explicitar reflexões acerca das categorias modernidade-colonialidade, branco-negro a fim de elucidar, reciprocamente, como cada autor critica a narrativa hegemônica de superioridade europeia/moderna. Com Enrique Dussel, salientamos o Mito da Modernidade como recurso ideológico para fazer da Europa o centro cultural do globo. O objetivo da Modernidade é a tentativa de fazer a sua regionalidade se tornar universal. Com base nos pensamentos de Achille Mbembe, apresentamos as suas críticas ao princípio de raça, alucinação eurocêntrica, construção ideológica para definir papéis sociais entre colonizador e colonizado, entre branco e negro.

Cities of the Dead: Performing Life in the Caribbean

Life and death defined the historical and temporal dimensions of the plantation. Many of these material, affective and ritualistic views on life and death haunt contemporary Caribbean cities. This essay will analyze the narrative script of Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead) and Eduardo Lalo’s documentary La ciudad perdida (2005) along with the funeral rites performed by Funeraria Marín in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, whose ‘performative funerals’ or collages, have circulated in journals and the Internet, creating what appear to be ‘living tableaus’ or original wakes since 2010. I believe that zombies, the living dead, and the performative dead – are all part of the same process, as they reflect sites of melancholia where social action – be it individual or collective, is required. I will be cautious to read these actions merely as forms of agency against the state or neoliberal economies. These necropolitics to use Achille Mbembe’s term are more than forms of agency. They ‘frame’ forms of precarious subjectivity, survival, and existence in contemporary Caribbean societies where melancholia, is pretty much related to the present.

Agamben’s Space and Postcolonialism

아감벤의 [호모 사케르] 프로젝트는 ‘수용소’의 역사를 추적하는 ‘고고학’적 연구이다. 아감벤이 영역판 [호모 사케르]의 표지에 아우슈비츠의 설계도를 실었다는 사실은 그의 작업 자체가 전체주의의 ‘공간’적 설계를 이론적으로 도식화하려는 시 도이며, 그의 공간에 대한 사유가 오랫동안 지정학적 공간이 그 분석의 대상이었던 ‘탈식민주의’ 비평과 맞닿아있다는 것을 보여준다. 사실 아감벤의 [호모 사케르] 프로젝트와 관련된 ‘생명정치’ 연구는 인종주의, 민족주의 주권, 난민 문제, 디아스포 라 등 탈식민주의가 주안점으로 삼고 있는 이슈들에 활발히 전유되고 있다. 하지만 그러한 이론의 쓰임에는 문제에 대한 검토가 선행되어야 할 것이다. 아감벤의 이론을 탈식민주의에 전유하기에 곤란한 이유 중 하나는 그의 이론에 내재하는 칼 슈 미트의 공법철학이다. 특히 주목해야 할 점은 슈미트의 결단주의가 아감벤에게 있어서는 ‘공간’적인 문제로 발전했다는 사실이다. 아감벤의 이론은 주권자의 ‘결단’이 주체를 수용소와 같은 법적권리가 박탈된 ‘예외적인 공간’에 구속하는 권력이라 고 상정한다. 아감벤의 공간 이론에 내재한 슈미트의 결단주의 덕에 수용소가 주체의 ‘합의,’ ‘선택,’ ‘투쟁’을 거치지 않은 주권의 자의적 ‘결단’에만 좌우된 공간으로 이해될 소지가 있다. 이러한 문제는 아감벤의 이론이 탈식민주의에 원용될 때 큰 불안으로 남는다. 아감벤이 아리스토텔레스 등 그리스 철학자들의 글을 분석하여 ‘비오스’와 ‘폴리스’의 영역이 일종의 정치적 영역으로서 일치한다고 보았던 점을 고려한다면, 비도시의 영역, 즉 아감벤의 담론에서 ‘수용소’로 요약되는 공간은 ‘조에’의 공간적 위치로 인식된다. 즉 그의 논리를 따르다보면, 탈식민 사회의 영역은 수용소의 공간으로 환원되는 경향이 있다. 사실 아쉴 음벰베를 포함한 많은 탈식민주의 학자들이 아감벤 이론의 공간적인 논리를 그렇게 수용하여, 아프리카와 남미의 탈식민 사회, 탈공산주의 러시아 사회, 가자지구 등에 적용하고 있다. 따라서 아감벤을 경유하여 식민주의를 분석하는 이론은 자칫 식민권위를 ‘주권’으로 피식민자들을 ‘벌거벗은 생명’으로 간주함으로써, ‘식민권력’과 ‘식민지의 삶’의 관계 를 ‘나치의 권력’과 ‘수용의 삶’의 관계 단순화 할 수 있다. 그것의 결과는 ‘저항’과 ‘탈주’가 불가능한 폭력이 일방향으로 흐르는 식민지의 공간을 상상하는 것일뿐이다.Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, as an archaeological project, follows history of camps. In its English translation of Homo Sacer, Agamben uses the blueprint of Auschwitz as its jacket showing that his work is an attempt to delineate the spatial design of fascism. Agamben’s philosophy is inseparable from and intricately articulated with postcolonialism that has analyzed the spatial understandings of colonialism. In fact, today Agamben’s theories are extensively received in postcolonial studies, especially, analyzing the issues of racism, national sovereignty, diaspora, and immigration. This essay critically examines receptions of Agamben in postcolonial studies, and reveals their related theoretical problems. The first reason Agamben’s theory is thorny to be used in postcolonial studies is that his theory is based on Carl Schmitt’s decisionism, and this extremely pessimistic philosophy of power relations develops into the question of “space” in postcolonial theories that follows Agamben’s reception of Schmitt. As Schmitt believes that the sovereign is who decides, its Agambenian development tends to understand camps as a space where political power is swayed one-sidedly by sovereign decision. In Agamben’s concept of camp or colonial space, inevitably, subjects are reduced to bare lives, deprived of any political agency. Ironically, Agamben’s theory repeats Nazi’s argument by saying that it should be avoided. Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial theory, for instance, follows Schmitt’s decisionism via Agamben’s spatial understanding, and in his theory the entire postcolonial world is reduced to a camp ruled by sovereign decision where subjects are reduced to bare lives.

Feminist Pornocracy? Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity

Feminist Pornocracy?Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity Dina Al-Kassim (bio) A scene at the April 2013 Hanover trade fair illustrates the peculiar symbiosis of pornocratic rule and struggle for celebrity enjoined by a global economy of sovereign subjectivity. Homogenizing market logics expressed as private sentiment and empowered agency feed the pornocratic economy by inflating and innovating the disciplinary imaginaries some mistake for liberty and sovereign intimacy. It was, recalls Shevchenko, a 24-year-old business studies graduate from … western Ukraine, "a very intimate moment." … "Suddenly there I was, looking into Putin's eyes, he into mine, just a metre between us before one of his men lunged to shield him from me and in those seconds I was just thinking to myself: "What a funny botox face—because of all the snips and tucks it's endured, it can't properly express what he's feeling." Alexandra Shevchenko (cited in Connolly) Femen activist Alexandra Shevchenko here gazes at the mirror image of a potential future self, one reflecting every surgical stay of mortality and of our being in common. As a major player among the "shock troops" of sextremism known as Femen, Shevchenko and the pornocrat share a moment of recognition in the public eye as she launches herself topless upon the Russian president in full view of the assembled media throng and to the contagious surprise of Europe's most powerful woman and national leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel. Cementing the public disclosure of their relation, the eye lock can be read as an index of a postsoviet identity in crisis, where personality and celebrity are sought as the other side of real poverty and an ossified gender system, conduit of trafficking and sex tourism without end by Femen's account. Cut off from its own expressive lexicon, the pornocrat's face beams back only images of bloated obscenity and grotesque invitation as Putin [End Page 111] "seems to push his chest out, raise his eyebrows and purse his lips, producing a double chinned smirk, while Merkel puffs out her cheeks and frowns as bodyguards pounce on Shevchenko and her four fellow Femen members, tackling them to the floor" (cited in Connolly). If Femen nudity primly stops at toplessness, their public materializations unleash the farcical element only ever loosely held in check by public figureheads who contend with the rigorous body discipline of public appearance. The Femen intervention exposes this fact before the cameras: "I had observed from a distance a group of suited men. The closer I got to them, I recognised the really small one amongst them was Putin. He was so puny, not like the macho pictures you see of him riding a horse bareback, or fishing barechested," she said. "And that was when I realised: now is the moment and started to charge. … I jumped over the fence, pumping my elbows out at my sides and undressing as I ran towards him, screaming: 'Fuck the dictator'" (cited in Connolly). Alternately tumescent and shrinking, fearsome yet fading, Putin appears less formidable when measured against the beauty system's exacting standards, and this fragilized masculinity, by turns ridiculous and obscenely leering, invigorates the Femen-ist who, seizing the opportunity to launch the insult, claims equality although only in the terms of erotic bondage. As one Femen-ist puts it, "We use women's sexuality as women's weapon" (Hutsol and Svyatski). Logics of saturnalian reversal or Bakhtinian carnivalesque fail to capture the restricted economy of Femen's pornocratic intimacy with heteropatriarchal power and the figures of sovereignty who front for it; for this we must reach into Achille Mbembe's notion of "commandment," a cycling entanglement of desire for glory wedded to a demand for absolute power, wherein the dominated "clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology … [while] power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence" (133). Femen-ist nudity mirrors pornocratic vulgarity and machismo by borrowing its cheap lineaments to reproduce its logic of spectacular individuality, absolute agency, and freedom understood as the media capture of subjective singularity. Yet a Femen-ist is no libertine. "We were invited to Germany...

From Dis-Enclosure to Decolonisation: In Dialogue with Nancy and Mbembe on Self-Determination and the Other

What might a sense of decolonisation (not)/be? Or, what comes after the logic of the coloniser? This question is at the centre of many debates in South Africa and extends to all countries worldwide who are faced with the challenge of self-determination by rethinking the world we live in after the domination of the world by the so-called “all enclosing Western world-view” incarnated in various oppressive political, economic, social and intellectual practices. The challenge of rethinking the world following the demotion of the West from its centre, as will be argued, is not only for those who are particularly living in a previously colonised world, but also for those who were/ still are in the position of dominance, which is a universal task. It is at this point where the various philosophical traditions meet, more precisely that of continental philosophy of religion and African philosophy. Accordingly, this article seeks to explore the question in two parts by way of an inter-cultural approach. Part one retraces the critique of (a certain) Western metaphysics in terms of its onto-theological constitution. Subsequently, this onto-theological constitution is discussed in relation to the notions of identity and political to outline what a sense of decolonisation might not be, that is a re-enforcement of the logic of the coloniser, which denies the full existence of an-other. In part two, four suggestions are made on what a sense of decolonisation might be in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy and Achille Mbembe. The suggestions include a two-sided attitude of reticence/dissidence against falling back into the problematic logic. A move to consider decolonisation as the dis-enclosure of the world, which in turn, opens up a space for an alternative ontology that acknowledges our existence as always being-in-the-word with others. The fourth suggestion concerns the implications of this alternative ontology regarding a non-substantialist notion of identity as mêlée, which is the action of constant struggle within the re-opened space for what it means to live in the world. Finally, it is concluded that the alternative ontology of decolonisation as dis-enclosure implies a universal task of taking responsibility for the reparation of the dignity of the whole of humanity within our shared world.

The African Metropolis and the aesthetics of superfluity

Abstract Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s idea of superfluity as both quantity and a paradoxical hybrid of indispensability and expendability in a city’s life, this article maps out possible relations between aesthetics and politics, aiming to understand the often contradictory spectrum of cultural and artistic production in an urban context. Looking at recent negotiations of the African Metropolis in media culture, the article not only attempts to describe artistic practices as preoccupied with conspicuous spectacle but also to come to grips with a contemporary aesthetics that itself imagines the African Metropolis in a hysterical way, obsessed with thrills and a rush for the rush.

Of dirt, disinfection and purgation: Discursive construction of state violence in selected contemporary Zimbabwean literature

This paper examines post-independent Zimbabwean literary narratives which engage with how the ruling ZANU-PF government frames dissenting voices as constituting dirt, filth and undesirability. Making use of Achille Mbembe's postulations on the "vulgarity of power" and Kenneth W. Harrow's readings of the politics of dirt, the central thesis of this paper is that the troping of dirt and state sponsored violence are closely related to the themes of memory and belonging. Literary works by writers such as Chistopher Mlalazi, NoViolet Bulawayo and John Eppel become self-effacing speech acts that are involved in reimagining and revisioning our understanding of power dynamics and how this affects human and social experiences.

Mbembe at the Lekgotla of Foucault’s Self-Styling and African Identity

Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking, which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity—which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated Mbembe’s appropriation of Foucault’s notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe’s conception of the socio-political and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to interrogate Mbembe’s narrow appropriation of Foucault’s conception of self-styling and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe’s critique of African modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of Foucault’s notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent problematic conception of African practices of freedom.

Vozes da diferença: tempo e transformação entre educadores populares em Pernambuco

Neste artigo aproximam-se narrativas de educadores populares em Recife e Olinda, atuantes em organizações não governamentais nas décadas de 1990 e 2000, dos conceitos de “tempo de emaranhamento” de Achille Mbembe e “inscrições intersticiais da diferença cultural” de Homi Bhabha. Argumenta-se que os educadores eram incitados a falar de si a partir das noções de raça, gênero, sexualidade e cultura, criando espaços de enunciação em que se intercruzavam experiências passadas, presentes e futuras: tornava-se assim mulher, negro, homossexual, artista, educador. Além de fazer ver um argumento particular sobre tempo e transformação entre educadores, o encontro do material de campo e da teoria pós-colonial também agencia uma série de bifurcações analíticas e, assim, elicia outro argumento, dessa vez sobre tempo e transformação nos textos antropológicos. Como com qualquer narrativa, a dos antropólogos não ocorre sem efeitos. Explora-se o tempo emergente nas histórias de vida contadas pelos educadores e nas trajetórias de vida analisadas por antropólogos.

A BRANQUITUDE E A COLONIALIDADE NA PRÁTICA DOCENTE NA EDUCAÇÃO BÁSICA (2000-2015)

In this article, I intend to identify the aspects of whiteness and coloniality inserted in the teaching practices carried out by the trainees of the History Course of UDESC, in the scope of Basic Education. In order to achieve these objectives, I used as a historical source the reports of the subject of Supervised Curricular Internship in the history course of UDESC. In relation to the theoretical contribution, I have based myself on authors like Franz Fanon (2005), Anibal Quijano (2009) and Achille Mbembe (2014) to think about coloniality and racism today and Stuart Hall (1997) to mobilize the concept of representation , As well as the theorists of the Critical Studies of Whiteness (Cardoso, 2008, Pizza, 2002, Frankenberg, 2004 and Bento, 2002) to question the narrative of white superiority in teaching practices.

Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties by Kathleen Biddick

Reviewed by: Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties by Kathleen Biddick Robert S. Sturges kathleen biddick, Make and Let Die: Untimely Sovereignties. New York: Punctum Books, 2016. Pp. ix, 234. isbn: 978–0–9882340–4–8. $21. Kathleen Biddick's new collection of essays (some previously published) summarizes its main concerns, for those who know their Foucault, in the title and subtitle. 'Untimely' in the subtitle refers to one of the central points to which the essays keep returning: whereas Foucault and some of those who have followed him in discussing modern biopower tend to emphasize the disjunction between pre-eighteenth-century and modern sovereignty, Biddick claims that they can do so only by erasing the medieval. Biddick rejects this disjunctive chronology and, by focusing on the medieval and early modern periods, finds greater historical continuity in ways of thinking about sovereign power. The main title, 'Make and Let Die,' thus reimagines these supposedly discontinuous modes of sovereignty. In a formula simplified—indeed perhaps oversimplified—from Foucault, traditional sovereign power was the power of death: the sovereign could 'make die and let live.' Modern sovereign power, on the other hand, diffused as it is through numerous disciplinary social institutions rather than located in a singular personage, 'makes live' that is, strictly determines how populations will live, and 'lets die,' abandoning those who do not conform. Foucault himself, in Society Must Be Defended, acknowledges that these two modes of sovereign power are imbricated in modernity, but he is clearly more interested in their differences and in attaching those differences to a pre-eighteenth century/modernity divide, so Biddick can be forgiven this simplification, especially since readers of this volume are assumed to be familiar with Foucault et al. already. Biddick's is a nimble mind playing over the fields of quantum theory, object-oriented ontologies, performance and performativity, theories of incarceration, visual arts, zombies, metallurgy, epidemiology, philology, cinema, the archive, and more. This playfulness—a hallmark of the publisher Punctum Books (which gives as its place of publication 'earth, milky way')—is not to be understood as a lack of scholarly seriousness, but actually enables a complex and convincing, progressive ethical stance toward politics and political philosophy. Rather than 'political philosophy,' in fact, one might more properly refer to 'political theology' as Biddick's topic: a touchstone is Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies and its afterlife in modern political thought. This ongoing presence of the 'make die' of medieval sovereignty, hidden in modern sovereignty, helps account for apparent anomalies such as the 'make die' of modern genocide. Biddick finds the [End Page 71] past of such 'necropolitics,' to use Achille Mbembe's term, particularly in the 'living death' of medieval Jews and Muslims. Readers of Arthuriana will be particularly interested in Chapter Three, 'Arthur's Two Bodies and the Bare Life of the Archives,' which argues that Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, read in light of contemporary archival practices, 'recounts what the neatly ruled membranes of the Pipe Rolls foreclosed and what the fictions of legal continuity the [Leges Edwardi Confessoris] suppresses—the violence of founding this sovereignty in and through archival continuity, and thus, the violence of founding the king's second body, the body that cannot die' (p. 71). Biddick concludes by demonstrating the ways in which this archival violence was directed specifically against the Jews. Other chapters take up related investigations: the relationship between the theology of the Real Presence and political realities in chapters on Lanfranc and on Shakespeare's Richard II; the relationship of Christian semiotics to the Hebrew scriptures; and sovereign 'undeadness' as represented in the Ruthwell and Cloisters Crosses. One might offer a few quibbles. It is surprising to find no mention of Mbembe's 'necropolitics,' especially as discussed in his essay of that name, which seems particularly relevant to Biddick's concerns. And the structure of this volume as a collection of essays rather than as a sustained argument makes for a certain repetitiousness: the chapter on Richard II, for example, rehashes much of what has already been discussed in the chapter on the afterlife of the doctrine of the Real Presence. But these are minor matters; Make and...

The Absolutist Monarch in Taïa's <em>Le Jour du Roi</em> and Laroui's “Tu n'as rien compris à Hassan II”: Probing the Limitations of Reader Reception Theory

This article discusses the representation of the monarch in Abdellah Taïa's novel Le Jour du Roi (2010) and Fouad Laroui's "Tu n'as rien compris à Hassan II" (2004), focusing on the act of reading and the historical context of Hassan II's reign. A close reading of Taïa's novel and Laroui's short story will reveal narrative strategies used to fictionalize sovereignty. Laroui uses humor and irony to criticize the regime of Hassan II, while Taïa uses oneiric elements to capture the arbitrary nature of monarchy and the notion of absolute royal power as theorized by Achille Mbembe. Both writers criticize Hassan II's repressive reign and assert their own sovereignty as writers, while discrediting an oppressive political regime. Both authors write about their native Morocco from a position of exile (Paris and Amsterdam). This geographical distance shapes their understanding of their roles as writers and educators who reveal and criticize sovereignty and abuse of power.

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies

The Incommensurability of the "Transnational" in Queer African Studies Ashley Currier (bio) and Thérèse Migraine-George (bio) Queer studies in the global North has inspired growing research on gender and sexual variance in the global South, yet it has framed issues in the language of post-industrial societies that does not address African needs. Queer African studies has emerged since the early 2000s. Scholars have not only contested the "homosexuality as un-African" myth; they have also documented indigenous same-sex sexual practices throughout the African continent and adopted Afrocentric perspectives in their works, resisting the imperialism of Eurocentric and US-based queer studies.1 However, there are tensions between queer African studies and queer studies that need to be articulated. Many publications in queer African studies remain anchored in national case studies that, while helping generate organic knowledge about African gender and sexual dissidence, can become mired in descriptions of lived experience and politics instead of theorizing African gender and sexual diversity in a continental, pan-African, or transnational-comparative context. In addition, queer African studies is institutionally and geopolitically dislocated. In this short essay, we address the question of the transnational, or rather of the "transnationals" in queer African studies, [End Page 613] which traverse the back-and-forth trajectories linking "Africa" and the "West," the local and the global. Through the concept of incommensurability, we grapple with new ways of representing queer African subjects and communities as subjects rather than objects of transnational discourses. TRANSNATIONAL (DIS)LOCATIONS: AFRICAN STUDIES AND QUEER STUDIES Poised at the shifting intersection of queer studies and African studies, queer African studies constitutes a nexus of crisscrossing and often competing discourses. In their investigation of queer modernities in Asia, Howard Chiang and Alvin Wong advocate for queer regionalism in an attempt to "recalibrate the uses of transnationalism as an unquestioned dominant framework within queer studies" (2016, 1645). Chiang and Wong's project to reconceptualize "queer regionalism as crisscrossing temporality and spatiality that emerge from within transcolonial encounters" echoes Achille Mbembe's description of the "postcolony" as "a period of embedding, a space of proliferation" that escapes historical and geopolitical confinement (2001, 242). The transnational in African studies itself still needs further development. Indeed, the US system of racialization and racism confined African studies to the African continent, whereas Africana and black studies became invested in exploring diasporic identities and formations, both real and symbolic. Divisions between African scholars and Africanist scholars (both African and Western-based) have been exacerbated by regional, linguistic, and disciplinary divisions in African studies and proliferating avatars of "Africa," "Africans," and "African-ness." A renewed conception of Africa as "people" foregrounded in the works of writers, artists, and critics has fostered kaleidoscopic views of Africa. Moreover, diasporic articulations of Africa have been propounded by critics who challenge the notion of race as seen mainly through the prism of the transatlantic slave trade (Arondekar and Patel 2016, 157; Macharia 2016, 184–85). The motivation to decenter Western categories stems in part from postcolonial feminist theorizing, which challenges the dominance of white Western feminist perspectives in transnational discussions about feminism, gender, and sexuality. Queer of color critics, anthropologists, and feminists of color engage with the [End Page 614] global south by working at the crossroads of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism and by challenging the narrow parameters of Western-based identity politics.2 For example, some feminist scholars of African descent interpreted the practice of woman-woman marriage in some African societies in markedly different ways. In a woman-woman marriage, an affluent woman paid bride-price to an unmarried woman's family and married her. The female husband claimed her wife's children as part of her lineage. In social interactions, men usually treated the female husband as a man. It is important to note that after the colonization of different African societies, the introduction of a capitalist cash economy transformed intimate relationships, marriages, and family arrangements. As a result, woman-woman marriages declined in frequency. African feminist Ifi Amadiume (1987) claims that woman-woman marriages never entailed same-sex sexual contact. In contrast, African American feminist theorist Audre Lorde contends that same-sex sex "has existed for...

Globalisation Discourse and Postcolonialism

This paper addresses the relationship between Colonialism and Globalisation as raised in In Koli Jean Bofane’s novel Congo Inc. Le testament de Bismarck . It draws upon the theory of decolonization by Achille Mbembe to investigate the way the novel represents Congo and its natural resources as the beginning, but also the result of colonial claims from Europe. The paper also questions the postcolonial relationship between Europe and Africa on the basis of the encounter between the young Congolese hero of the novel and the European Aude Martin and is consequently addressing the issue of colonial memory from a postcolonial perspective. It raises the argument that Bofane’s narration of an African present is the deconstruction of the topos of a postcolonial Africa caught in nostalgic cant, for it represents Isookanga, the Pygmy, as a perfect master of imagination in the sense Appadurai puts it.

Beauty as Scholarly Intervention

Beauty as Scholarly Intervention Carmel Mikol (bio) Last winter, i was thinking about the song "Conversation Blues" by Lightnin' Hopkins and Sonny Terry. Last winter, I was thinking about what Achille Mbembe calls "the logics of composition" ("The Power"). I was exploring Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation" method ("Venus" 11) and Jennifer C. Nash's "beautiful writing," her "new scholarly language" (104). I was listening to recordings of Pete Seeger singing "Guantanamera" in Spanish with a live audience singing along. At the same time, I was finishing my master's degree work at Queen's University. In seminar after seminar, professors encouraged us to come up with something "original," to "contribute a new idea." For a kid who grew up on folk music, this simply did not make sense to me. I understand the process of making—song-making, art-making, story-making, knowledge-making—to be reiterative. The folk tradition is inherently iterative and replicative. You sing old songs, add parts, omit verses, rewrite, reimagine, and collage contemporary and traditional lyrical and musical styles. Like Lightnin' and Sonny, you are constantly in conversation with other singers, those who have come before and those who will come after. [End Page 33] I launched Hyacinth Podcast just before heading to Queen's as a way of experimenting with merging folk music compositional methods and scholarly research methods. In the podcast, scholarly research and interviews are mixed with music and creative audio production, presenting scholarly ideas as an aesthetic experience. Conversations are collaged and research themes appear and reappear the way a refrain might repeat in a song. Each episode of the podcast required the same amount (if not more) of scholarly research as the traditional papers I was writing for my master's, but I found that the process of layering scholarly and artistic content was generative in a way that my regular research and essay writing was not. The compositional nature of putting an episode together brought sonics and aesthetic quality into conversation with theory, argument, and inquiry. Suddenly, scholarly knowledge-making wasn't just about one original idea or a single scholarly voice. It was about the sound and feel of many ideas, many voices. And it was about the ways ideas could be beautiful. By the winter of 2020, beauty became the focus of my scholarly research both inside and outside the seminar room. I dove into Hartman's 2019 text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments where she combines archival materials with creative narrative to describe the lived experiences of young African American women living in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the century. I placed Nash's idea that beautiful writing could be wielded as "a new scholarly language" to describe the kinds of knowledge that "can be sensed but not named" (104) next to Kandice Chuh's argument that aesthetic inquiry could be an antidote for the problems of the liberal humanities. Chuh argues that, rather than endorsing scholarly traditions that have the same roots as colonialism, imperialism, and the Enlightenment-era rise of the rational man, the aesthetic realm allows for forms of knowledge that are relational instead of rational. As Elaine Scarry writes in her seminal text On Beauty and Being Just: "But simultaneously, what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and does all this with a kind of urgency as though one's life depended on it" (30). Beauty as fertile ground. Beauty as a language for authentic expression rather than original thought. Beauty as experience. Beauty as collaborative and relational. Beauty as conversations between ideas, not just ideas. Beauty as resistance. Finally, I had found my place. I could leave behind the cubicle study carrels and locked graduate reading rooms of the institution. I could stop pretending I would find something original to say. I could re-sing, re-tell, re-make, re-discover. I could listen more than speak and I could [End Page 34] craft ideas into something beautiful and alive, get my words off the page and let them resonate...

Wuthering Heights Must Be Defended!: Heathcliff and Necropolitics in the Yorkshire Moors

This article draws on the "necropolitics" of Achille Mbembe to reconsider the figurec of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. It explores the resonances between Heathcliff's depiction in the novel and the broader 19th century vision of the colony and the colonized subject while arguing for a centering of the corporeal in the analysis of Brontë's prose. Utilizing the concepts of bare life and homo sacer developed by Giorgio Agamben, the piece argues that Heathcliff must be read as a somatic inscription of the biopolitical regimes of power of the British Empire.