Читать книгу In Search of Africa(s) - Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Страница 7

The day will come – perhaps, indeed, in some academic or activist circles, it came a long time ago – when we will talk of postcolonial studies and decolonial thought in the past tense. However, they have been a subject for discussion for only a score of years in France, and no doubt they could be seen, in the recent history of ideas, as part of a perspective specific to the early 2000s.

It was with Jean-Marc Moura’s Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory), first published in 1999 and later reissued,¹ and the collection of articles that he co-edited the same year with Jean Bessière, Littératures postcoloniales et représentations de l’ailleurs (Postcolonial Literatures and Representations of Elsewhere),² that this area of research started to cause a stir in the French academic world. As these two titles suggested, this new field was an offshoot of literary studies, establishing as it did a close link between literature, representations and ‘theory’.

In fact – and the many genealogies drawn up since then have continued to insist on this point –, what is still called ‘postcolonial theory’ first saw the light of day in literary studies departments, initially in the English-speaking world.³ Whether we take the pioneering work of the American-Palestinian critic and historian of literature Edward Said, Orientalism, first published in 1978,⁴ or the equally pioneering collective work co-edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, first published in 1989,⁵ the starting point and the critical issue remained the same. (Said’s work was translated into French in 1980, while The Empire Writes Back had to wait until 2012.) On the one hand, the question was how, in the era of European colonial expansion, a discourse on ‘the other’ developed, either seen from a scholarly point of view (the literature of ideas and the various human sciences), or envisaged in a more literary light (fiction, especially ‘exotic’ and then colonial literature) – a discourse that soon trapped that ‘other’ in a posture of radical difference from the Western world. But on the other hand, and more importantly, by a boomerang effect not anticipated by the colonizers, this very ‘other’ – or this ‘the same but otherwise’ – answered Westerners back in the very same languages and genres of discourse (literature, history, philosophy, etc.) that they had imposed on it, in order to develop a reverse picture, a critical image, of the European world. This is particularly emphasized by English-speaking thinkers of Indian origin such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak⁶ and Homi Bhabha.⁷

Postcolonial studies, in short, focuses on how colonial and imperial domination, by exercising itself in a double form, through power and knowledge, or through weapons and representations, in fact generated a reciprocal influence – not just of the colonizers on the colonized, but also of the colonized on the colonizers – that tended to confuse binary oppositions and the hierarchies between them.

The very term ‘postcolonial’ is affected by this confusion, since it serves both as a historical marker – what comes after colonization and was produced by it – and as a critical project, aiming to get beyond schematic or dichotomous distinctions between the West and the non-West, colonizers and colonized, colonial era and postcolonial era. It follows from this confusion that ‘the colonial’ – whether in the shape of mentalities or practices – has obviously been able to survive historical decolonizations and to persist into the postcolonial era, while, conversely, subjects of the various European empires were – even in the past – able to produce ‘postcolonial’ critical, political and poetic gestures. Though still in the colonial era, they anticipated a world to come that would shake off the forms of relationship and social conceptions that predominated in their time. So we can, for instance, produce a ‘postcolonial reading’ of the political and literary history of Haiti, which the Black revolution, leading to the abolition of slavery and independence from the French colonial metropolis, turned into the first truly postcolonial nation – even more than the United States, which, though it had indeed emancipated itself from British tutelage, still preserved slavery and a racial hierarchy as the basis of its economic and social relations.

‘Postcolonial’ thus becomes, so to speak, the equivalent of ‘anticolonial’. In particular, by maintaining the demand that the process of decolonization be brought to completion, going beyond the historical independence attained by former colonies formerly run by colonial powers such as Britain or France, this term easily lent itself to reappropriation by various militant circles, especially in the voluntary or communal associations that had emerged from or were caught up in the history of immigration.

This is how we can identify a second stage in the emergence of a postcolonial paradigm in France. This stage came about in the mid-2000s and was a combination of chance and the zeitgeist: January 2005 saw the launching of ‘the call of the Indigenous of the Republic’, which, a few months before the sixtieth anniversary of the Algerian uprising (it was put down by France in Sétif on 8 May 1945), aimed to establish the ‘foundations of postcolonial anticolonialism’ and to denounce the prevalence in the French nation of forms of domination and discrimination inherited from the colonial period.

Published a few weeks before the riots in the French suburbs in November 2005, the collective volume La Fracture coloniale (The Colonial Fracture),⁸ most of whose authors came from the worlds of local communities or scholarly activism such as ACHAC (the Association pour la connaissance de l’Afrique contemporaine, i.e. the Association for Knowledge of Contemporary Africa), in turn stirred up many echoes. In fact, it was only restating in postcolonial language a political slogan (‘la fracture sociale’ or ‘the social divide’) that had won Jacques Chirac his first presidential election ten years earlier.

The years 2005–7 saw many journals – Esprit, Hérodote, Labyrinthe, Mouvement, Multitudes – devoting special issues to post-colonial studies, while the anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle led a charge that was as heroic and chivalrous as it was critical,⁹ followed by the political scientist Jean-François Bayart.¹⁰ These soon met with a response in a new collective work from the ranks of ACHAC, Ruptures postcoloniales (Postcolonial Breaks).¹¹

Tempers now seemed to be flaring between African intellectuals – such as the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf and the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe – and French Africanist intellectuals. It was on the basis of their training and their publications devoted to African studies, such as the Cahiers d’études africaines, edited by Jean-Loup Amselle for nearly thirty years, and the review Politique africaine, founded by Jean-François Bayart in 1980, that Amselle and Bayart conducted their critique of postcolonialism. In a certain way, the present book brings this dialogue back to the public stage, even if in actual fact it was never really interrupted, nor devoid of persistent misunderstandings.

Where was the main point of friction and hence of discord? We could say, summarily, that the Africanists criticized postcolonials for trying to reinvent the wheel and thereby giving a new lease of life to some of the essentialist and culturalist quirks of their predecessors (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi) at a time when Négritude and anticolonial critique were in the ascendant. Postcolonials, meanwhile, mocked the tendency of Africanists to reduce them to mere epigones of prestigious masters and ancestors, though they claimed to have a more complex filiation with these forebears than the mere phantasmatic projection of a new ‘strategic essentialism’ might suggest.¹²

Finally, the main issue of this disagreement was without doubt the following: to what extent could a true decentring be achieved, a shift away from the Western thought that had influenced the founders of anticolonial criticism themselves and a return to more autonomous, even autochthonous, traditions of thought? And to what extent was such a decentring envisageable or possible within Western thought itself? A secondary question was: could one ‘provincialize Europe’ by making it one pole of reflection and one tradition of thought among others, without the precedence or pre-eminence it had enjoyed? Could other dialogues take place between various points and intellectual traditions of the global South, without systematically requiring Western mediation? It is undoubtedly the growing force and importance of these questions, together with an exponential polarization of the positions for or against postcolonial thought, which may explain the gradual shift to a new paradigm: that of decolonial thought.

As Jean-Loup Amselle explains on several occasions in the following conversations, the genesis of decolonial thought differs from that of the postcolonial theory first developed by Edward Said and Australian and Indian thinkers. Decolonial thought admittedly involves a similar circularity: we need to take into account the point of view of the colonized, a point of view underestimated by Western literatures (in both fictional works and the literature of ideas); in particular we need to adopt a ‘subaltern’ point of view or a view ‘from below’. But decolonial thought radicalizes this critical standpoint in a twofold way. Firstly, it traces the emergence of modern colonial hierarchies right back to the time of the discovery of the Americas (1492), and, secondly, it examines the implementation of a new formula of social domination and economic exploitation, a formula now indexed to the notion of race.

These ideas are developed in concert by many South American thinkers, such as the Argentine semiologist Walter Mignolo, the Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel and the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Brought together in an interdisciplinary research collective called ‘Group M/C’, decolonial theorists endeavour to demonstrate the interdependence of modernity/coloniality as two simultaneous phenomena linked in space and time up until the contemporary period. The decolonials also emphasize the collusion, if not the compromise, in this same modernity between, on the one hand, Cartesian rationality with its various dualisms and their hierarchical relations (between mind and body, man and nature, with the first terms systematically dominating the second), and, on the other hand, colonial reason (where the European must himself overcome non-Europeans, reducing them to an almost animal status of machine-bodies, so as to have an exclusive right to human intellectual functions as his own domain).

Two major consequences ensue for decolonial thinking: on the one hand, the progressive but precocious implementation of a capitalist world order organized for the sole benefit of Europe, mobilizing colonialism and racism as principles of the division and organization of labour on a global scale; on the other hand, the concomitant establishment of a Eurocentric episteme, or of a geopolitics of knowledge where the European point of view – and more exactly that of the Western White man – replaces God’s point of view as the only measure of all possible and universal knowledge, thereby relegating, de facto, all non-Western intellectual traditions and forms of knowledge to the realms of belief, magical or primitive thinking and, at best, mere folklore.

This unequal organization of the world continues today in other forms, since (despite the two waves of independence, in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century) global capitalism has merely given a new lease of life to the fundamentally dichotomous and hierarchical structures of the world system that divides the human population into Whites and non-Whites, centre and periphery, North and South, superior and inferior, and so on. Taking note of this, decolonial thought, as its name indicates, proposes a radical decolonization that would involve, on the one hand, the rehabilitation of ancient and non-Western forms of economic and social organization, as well as the quest for new forms of solidarity between the various Souths and, on the other hand, a fundamental break with epistemological and cultural Eurocentrism and its claim to be the sole embodiment of scientificity and universality.

This critique of Eurocentrism is admittedly not new: more than a century ago, the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas was already denouncing the ‘cultural spectacles’ (‘Kulturbrille’) of what he called ‘Nordicism’ in reference to the sense of superiority that the White man’s mastery over the forces of nature conferred on him.¹³ Boas emphasized how the advent of a truly scientific point of view would only be achieved by correcting these forms of conceptual myopia and, in particular, by getting rid of teleological illusions that viewed the White man as an empire within an empire, and his culture as the destination if not the destiny of all other cultures, ordained as these were to follow the path his model traced from barbarism to civilization, from tradition to modernity, from community to individual and from despotism to democracy.

Postcolonial thinking in its turn denounces this Eurocentrism as well as the binary oppositions and purely linear evolutions that it established between ‘the West and the rest’. But decolonial thought goes further insofar as it does not simply plead for ‘epistemological plurality’, that is, the recognition of traditional cosmologies and epistemologies as having the dignity of forms of knowledge every bit as legitimate as Western scientific-technical rationality. It shows that these kinds of knowledge, often local, indigenous or ‘native’, are today highly valued, desired and more and more often appropriated by the Western economic and industrial powers themselves, in the context of a new transformation of global capitalism, moving from the exploitation of ‘natural capital’ (raw materials and the products derived from them) to the exploitation of a ‘human capital’ which now values the knowledge, skills and experiences of diverse social actors.

However, this new age of capitalism, cognitive in some ways since it accords a central role to knowledge (including the most traditional forms of knowledge, suddenly promoted to the rank of the ‘intangible heritage of humanity’), never renounced what Enrique Dussel calls its ‘structural heterogeneity’, namely the consubstantiality and interdependence between modernity and coloniality; instead, it has reprogrammed it according to its new needs and objectives. Thus, biodiversity and traditional knowledge are the new ‘green gold’, part of what is now conceived of as sustainable development, and we are witnessing a new appreciation, in postmodern form, of other types of knowledge, non-scientific, non-rational and non-Western, which had hitherto been excluded from the realm of legitimate knowledge.

But in this new postmodern and postcolonial framework (in the historical sense of the term ‘postcolonial’), there is still a strict hierarchy between dominated South and dominant North, and the transfer of knowledge remains a one-way street, with the pharmaceutical, agri-food and biotechnological industries granting themselves the right to document, to preserve and soon to patent traditional knowledge and genetic heritages for their sole benefit. From this point of view, postmodernity and postcoloniality do not in the least imply the end of modernity and of its colonial substratum; they are, rather, a reorganization and extension of these phenomena: ‘Just as coloniality is the other constituent face of modernity, postcoloniality is the structural counterpart of postmodernity. On this view, postcolonials are the new updated forms of coloniality in the postmodern stage of the history of the West,’ writes the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez.¹⁴ Here, he agrees with the critique voiced in 1992 by the Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who waxed ironical about postcoloniality, writing: ‘Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.’¹⁵