Keeping Africanity Open

Achille Mbembe's text ("African Modes of Self-Writing," Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239-73) can be read as carrying out a double movement of desubstantiation: on the one hand, desubstantiation of difference, and on the other, desubstantiation of identity. The first movement corresponds to a critique of discourse about what it means to be "African" in some unique sense—the "metaphysics of difference," as it is called. The second aims at answering that question by explicitly stating that "Africanity" must be seen as an open question. It appears to me that what is at stake in this essay is authenticity. And one of the essay's great achievements is to propose a quite new understanding of that concept.

1. Authenticity here conveys the idea that meaning does not come from the past (the figure of tradition, or repetition); that it is not a projection of tradition on the present and the future. On the contrary, it is the future that continuously sheds its light on the African past and present and endows them with meaning. Mbembe is dealing here with a philosophy of time conceived as creative duration, as a continuous unfolding of multiple possibilities that are open to true—that is, authentic or affirmative—subjectivity. This conception is quite contrary to a notion of time understood in terms of space rather than of duration proper—of time as the transmission (or tradition) of a meaning from the past toward the future, whence the notion of disruption of the continuum as a loss of meaning. In a word, what the essay calls for is an authenticity that could be defined as an anticipatory attitude toward the world.

2. Authenticity is also exploratory attitude. Self-writing, as we understand it from Mbembe's essay, is not to be understood as a practice of writing of or about a preconstituted self. Neither at its beginning nor its end can the self be said to be immanent in the process of writing. To get out of the dead end of the invented self —invented in the sense that the author speaks of Africa as invented—Mbembe calls for the continuous and open-ended invention of the self through writing. We can see that in this aspect, his argument comes quite close to the way in which créolité has spoken of itself as being the creation of its own hybrid language, a braid of multiple narratives containing the possibility, which remains always open, of multiple ancestries (see Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1989). Affirmative subjectivity has to do with permanent decentering and with proliferation; Gilles Deleuze's notion of the rhizome could be evoked here.

3. It follows that what authenticity is not is a central question for the author in his effort to establish what has led the discourse of Africanity to a dead end. One of Mbembe's critical affirmations here is to say that authenticity is not to be understood as the reconstitution of one's coincidence with one's essence. Authenticity is not, in other words, the outcome of a project of transcending alienation, deracination, or dispossession—the production of what Kwame Nkrumah (1964) had called in his Consciencism a "New Harmony." Nor is it the result of overcoming falsification—for example, falsification of African history/identity in the colonial discourse.

The African discourse that relies on this inauthentic understanding of subjectivity is, according to Mbembe, that which understands Africanity in an ontological sense. "We proclaim 'Africanity,'" Archie Mafeje (2000), for example, says, "as the affirmation of an identity that has been denied and demeaned." Mbembe's contention—and this is an important point—is to reply that writing back is not self-writing. This sort of practice of writing back fails in its purpose—misses its mark of authenticity—because it is not affirmation but resentment, to use Mbembe's Nietzschean categories.

In his endeavor to clear the way for an authentic understanding of subjectivity, Mbembe's genealogical critique of African discourse nevertheless appears in places to...