diacritics

Korang, Kwaku Larbi, 1959-
Where Is Africa? When Is the West's Other? Literary Postcoloniality in a Comparative Anthropology
diacritics - Volume 34, Number 2, Summer 2004, pp. 38-61

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Kwaku Larbi Korang - Where Is Africa? When Is the West's Other? Literary Postcoloniality in a Comparative Anthropology - diacritics 34:2 diacritics 34.2 (2006) 38-61 Where is Africa? When is the West Other? Literary Postcoloniality in a Comparative Anthropology Kwaku Larbi Korang This essay brings into a critical dialogue two contemporary cultural-intellectual projects, one Western, the other African. The two are commonly and broadly informed by questions of ethics, epistemology, and the politics of representation as they bear on how, in the here and now, we are to conceive anew the relations between Self and Other, subject and object, similarity and alterity, universality and relativity, normativity and difference. The concerns and questions that commonly characterize the two projects, Western and African, arise within a globally enfolding spatiotemporal and cultural horizon, a horizon I identify in this essay by the designation "postcolonial(ity)." The notion that the era we live in is a "postcolonial" one is not universally accepted: the designation "postcolonial(ity)" has attracted heated opposition from critics who question its conceptual, historical, and political adequacy. Mindful of the shortcomings that critics of the term have demonstrated, I hasten to point out that by prefixing "post-" to the substantive "colonial(ity)," I do not mean to point to a stage or phase of history, a state of being, or a mode of cognition that mark a clean break...