Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences

The paradox of cultural heterogeneity, or cross-cultural capacity, lies in the evolutionary thrust it restores to orders of the imagination, the ceaseless dialogue it inserts between hardened conventions and eclipsed or half-eclipsed otherness, within an intuitive self that moves endlessly into flexible patterns, arcs or bridges of community.

Wilson Harris (The Womb of Space xvii)

I define Unicentricity as One-Centeredness, a logic which demands a single center (intellectual, economic, political, cultural, geographic) from which all emanates. In unicentricity the logic of core and periphery, even in the "world systems" ¹ sense, functions to center some experience, marginalize others. Further, it assumes a unidirectional movement outwards from this constructed source. Thus, unicentricity turns on the idea of a certain essential meaning, beginning, parentage, ancestry, origin. Unicentricity thus cannot imagine multiple and equal centers but instead has to operate with one constantly expanding center. Unicentricity, then, legitimizes its gains, seeking and expanding the set of peripheries that it gradually pulls into its orbit and thus inevitably can become a colonialist project. The single center logic, then, is the basis of dominance and control, for it functions with other communities in terms of competition, hierarchy, and subordination. What is centered becomes the most important, the proper, the politically appropriate. Rather than an interactive logic of multiple, relational spheres of interest, in unicentricity, something has to be centered. That something attains dominance and becomes the central star around which all others orbit.

In my view it is necessary to pursue analyses of "unicentricity" because we have several extant versions. Unicentricity, or one-centeredness, I am arguing, is the logic of Eurocentrism as well as that of its counterdiscourse, Afrocentrism. My definition, then, comes from observing both philosophical positions operationally, and their forms of representation, relationally. While I am not arguing that they are in any way symmetrical or have access to the same levels of power, what interests me is the logic that drives each position.

It is against unicentricity, another form of one-dimensional thinking, that I want to challenge the imaginative to pursue other paradigms that move away from the logic of center/periphery, single origins, one-centeredness. I want to assert here, then, that a world in which we consider variable approaches seems appropriate for a number of reasons. It gives us more scope; it prevents fascism and the kind of dominance that we have seen under Eurocentrism; and it opens a wider range for reflection. The assumption of a "politics of possibility" means that there are many other possibilities. The task which follows is to imagine better versions of the worlds we inhabit, but also all the possible worlds that could exist—other kinds of states, other models, other paradigms. Imagining other possibilities allows us, along the order of Wilson Harris's statement above, to pose a new series of suppositions. ² My interest is not a free-floating imagination occupied just with its own pursuits (which on its own could be a desirable, creative scenario), but rather the freeing of the imagination to other possibilities which allow us to create better pictures of what kinds of communities we live in, but more importantly, how they can be.

Samir Amin in Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (1985) put forward the idea of a genuine polycentrism as a basis for an economic restructuring of the world. While Amin was engaging in a political economy with a specific set of interests in terms of a critique of capitalist economies, his logic of polycentrism is one of the few attempts to identify other paradigms than the popular oppositions. Polycentrism assumes a many-centeredness which necessitates the absence of a single center.

Others have talked, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o does, of Moving the Centre (1993) in his first chapter, "Towards a Pluralism of Cultures." Basically, Ngugi does not challenge the idea of a center nor the idea of a certain "pluralism" that assumes symmetry. Instead, his preoccupation is with relocating the center...