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By way of focusing on more particular links between the discursive projects of Foucault and Farah, I offer a comparison between the former’s doubtful formulations and Salman Rushdie, a more recognisably postcolonial entrant on Said’s inventory:

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the 20th century. One of the things that has happened to us in the 20th century as a human race is to learn how certainty crumbles in your hand. We cannot any longer have a fixed view of anything – the table that we’re sitting next to, the ground beneath our feet, the laws of science are all full of doubt now. Everything we know is pervaded by doubt and not by certainty. (White 1993: 235)

Whilst Rushdie is describing the eruption of modernist sensibilities during the early twentieth century, it is striking that he chooses to articulate such doubt in terms so similar to Foucault. Fissures emerge, certainty crumbles and for both it is, to borrow from Rushdie’s eponymous novel, ‘the ground beneath our feet’ that begins to subside, threatening instability at the most embodied of levels. Besides a shared rhetorical register, both articulate sentiments that cannot be divorced from specific socio-historical periods. In the aftermath of World War Two, with the advent of Partition and the eruption of anti-colonial resistance, Rushdie speaks with peculiar poignancy about both the desirability and the inevitability of more intense cultural-political doubt. It is in this spirit of strategic scepticism, re-evaluation and rupture that Foucault’s own critique, cited by Miller, can be seen to correspond with many of the central preoccupations of postcolonial studies: ‘my project is precisely to bring it about that they “no longer know what to do”, so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous’ (Miller 2000: 235). As the editors of the ‘Society’ lectures suggest, this can be seen as a counter-hegemonic principle that not only informed his working practices, but also underpinned his discursive and political project: ‘it is typical of Foucault’s approach that until the end of his life, he constantly “reread”, resituated, and reinterpreted his early work in the light of his later work and, so to speak, constantly updated it’ (Foucault 2003: 275).

In various attempts to explore one of the key tenets of his thesis (the Clauswitzean inversion that war might be considered ‘the continuation of politics by other means’), Foucault calls for various acts of recuperation (Foucault 2003: 267). He wants to refresh the blood that has dried on antique parchments and laws. He seeks to amplify the distant roar of battle. A spirit of reanimation prevails. As Said maintains, this focus upon the remnants of historico-political/juridical discourse is indicative of the overarching objective of Foucault’s work to open up spaces from which to analyse the marginalised and transgressive components of society. Taken onto a more transnational level, this recuperative impulse resonates with some of the key negotiations that have taken place in postcolonial studies over the past decade or so. In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, for instance, Patricia Ingham and Michelle Warren argue that ‘medievalists working explicitly with postcolonial theories have been analyzing the ways in which “the medieval” may be said to haunt the field’ (Ingham and Warren 2003: 6). Here and elsewhere, the pivotal, Foucauldian-inflected relationship concerns power and discourse:

But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something that could not, perhaps, have been foreseen from the outset: what might be called the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least ... all-encompassing and global theories. Not that all-encompassing and global theories haven’t, in fairly consistent fashion, provided – and don’t continue to provide – tools that can be used at a local level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level only when, and this is the real point, the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. (Foucault 2003: 6)

The rhetoric is typically robust. Buoyed by the residual energy of a period still marked by the events of 1968, Foucault conceives of the pressing need to interrogate totalising schemes. Indeed, for the purposes of this book, it is the very eclectic nature of his toolkit that makes it both functional and inspirational. By highlighting the possible limitations of global discourses, Foucault demonstrates a willingness, however tentative, to engage in work that might pave the way towards more transnational dialogue. There is a call to attend to the mediation between the macrological and the micrological or, in other words, a reconsideration of more embodied and local relays of power, discipline and the possibility of resistance. Finally, it is this act of blurring theoretical boundaries, separating speculations on discourse and methodology and the analysis of ‘body politics’ that is most productive for my purposes. Such ‘translation’ has a peculiar relevance when considered both in the context of postcolonial Africa and in relation to the critical preoccupations of Farah’s work.

Whilst I look at specific reconfigurations of Foucauldian thought in relation to colonial and postcolonial power in Africa throughout this book, a brief overview is instructive here. In their respective contexts, both Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and V.Y. Mudimbe have extended some of Foucault’s most penetrating observations on ‘carceral space’, discourse and colonial anthropology. For Mudimbe, in The Invention of Africa, it is precisely the disruptive quality of Foucault’s thought, alongside that of Levi-Strauss, that most appeals:

Although most Western anthropologists have continued up to now to argue about the best models to account for primitive societies, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, and, since the 1960s, Africans have been destroying the classical frame of anthropology. By emphasizing the importance of the unconscious and questioning the validity of a universal subject as the center of signification, they simultaneously demand a new understanding of the strange object of the human sciences and a redefinition of at least three fields, anthropology, history, and psychoanalysis, as leading disciplines of self-criticism. Foucault dreamed of the prestige of an anthropology that will ‘seek its object in the area of the unconscious processes that characterize the system of a given culture’ and ‘would bring the relation of historicity, which is constitutive of all ethnology in general, into play within the dimension in which psychoanalysis has always been deployed’. (Mudimbe 1988: 37–38)

Similarly, in her exacting study of the use and abuse of biopower in colonial Africa, Curing Their Ills, Megan Vaughan has drawn extensively from The History of Sexuality to provide a critique of some of Foucault’s essentialist speculations. Likewise, Alexander Butchart’s The Anatomy of Power seeks to apply ‘some of the theoretical tools developed by Michel Foucault to the problem of the African body as it exists to western socio-medical science’ (Butchart 1998: ix). In a chapter entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Vulgarity’, Achille Mbembe provides a striking juxtaposition between descriptions of two Cameroonian ‘malefactors’ and the opening evocation of Damiens’ dismemberment in Discipline and Punish. It haunts On the Postcolony, as it does so many other texts: ‘the postcolony is a particularly revealing, and rather dramatic, stage on which are played out the wider problems of subjections and its corollary, discipline ... [the] fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous’ (Mbembe 2001: 102–103). In this spirit, innumerable collections have focused on the practical and variously punitive applications of some Foucauldian meditations on discipline. In his essay ‘Torture and the Decolonization of French Algeria’, included in Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration, James D. Le Sueur makes strategic references to Foucault, variously taking him to task for what he perceives to be his dangerous Eurocentrism (Le Sueur 2001: 161–175). Similarly, he emerges as a prominent if problematic referent throughout the rich collection A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (2003). Whilst selective, this initial survey suggests that the Foucault/Africa discursive marriage is neither as incongruous nor as speculative as it might appear to some.