Introduction:Performances of Sovereignty in African Dictator-Fiction Charlotte Baker Correction: On page x: A citation was added: (Armillas-Tiseyra, "Dictates of Authority," 5-6) On Page xiii: The filing date for Magalí's dissertation should be 2012, not 2014. The online version of this article has been updated. This special issue focuses on the relationship between literature and sovereignty and, more specifically, on the ways in which writers of African literature since independence have responded to the performance of authoritarian state power in Africa.1 In postcolonial Africa, sovereignty is more than simply an expression of supreme power or authority. It is to have the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die or, as Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe puts it, "to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power" ("Necropolitics" 1). The very legitimacy and efficacy of sovereignty in the postcolony relies on repeated performances of violence. Contributors to the special issue examine the role of writers of fiction in revealing and questioning this legitimizing violence, the ways in which sovereignty is expressed in African literature and how such expressions of sovereignty can be read. Analysis of the ways in which states deploy spectacle has led many contributors to this special issue to Mbembe and his insights into the performance of power in the postcolony. His ground-breaking work De la postcolonie was published in French in 2000 and appeared in English as On the Postcolony just one year later. On the Postcolony extends Mbembe's earlier discussion of his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa, concentrating on the aesthetics of postcolonial regimes, their style of government, and attempts to represent themselves. The postcolony, for Mbembe, "identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship involves" (102). Focusing on political rule in the postcolony, he continues: The postcolony is characterised by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by [the] distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence. (102–03) [End Page vii] Above all, Mbembe highlights the inadequacy of the legal model of sovereignty to account for the functioning of the African state. Etymologically, the term "sovereignty" comes from two French words: "souvrain" and "souveraineté." The former means a leader with supreme powers and authority, while the latter alludes to the territory over which a leader has such powers. The complex issue of sovereignty has been debated in the writings of political and jurisprudential theorists including St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Baron de Montesquieu, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. As Christopher Morris comments: The modern notion of sovereignty developed slowly with the interest shown in Roman law in the twelfth century and with the discovery of Aristotle's works in the thirteenth. By the time Bodin formulated it, most of the elements needed for its emergence were to be found in Western Europe, or at least France. (173) Morris continues: "Sovereignty is the highest, final, and supreme political and legal authority and power within the territorially defined domain of a system of direct rule" (178). Thus, sovereignty is understood as the supreme power of a governing body to administer itself without any outside interference. In this view, those who incarnate this supreme power of the state are vested with the ability to make laws and enforce them with cohesive force. This perspective on sovereignty warrants that the individual is obliged to take part in state affairs even when they are contrary to his own views and vision. The sovereignty of the state is above individual will or consideration and any individual or group attempting to undermine the sovereignty of the state could be accused of treason. Mbembe points to the inadequacy of the legal model of sovereignty for the African postcolony, remarking that: As in the colonial regimes, in African regimes...
Read full abstract
Mar 14, 2018
Amhar Nasution 
Open Access