Toward a Critique of Consumer Imperialism

For me, reading Achille Mbembe's absorbing piece ("African Modes of Self-Writing," Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239-73) conjured up the well-worn modernist image of the critical philosopher as an escapologist: Initially imprisoned and confined by a host of ingenious shackles and devices, he disappears from view before publicly shrugging them all off after some secret minutes of unseen but energetic activity. He stands now before an appreciative audience absolutely untrammeled, in this case, with only a few Derridean or Lacanian fig leaves to conceal the shame that attends his postcolonial renaissance.

It is an impressive performance of the very autonomy to which his piece is addressed: a learned, provocative, and worthwhile essay that offers a wealth of subtle insights. They echo in and reverberate through my own thoughts, and there is much agreement between us, particularly on issues flowing from his courageous diagnosis of authoritarian political cultures and their claims upon the political and philosophical languages of Africa and its diasporas. In entering these difficult and contested areas, Mbembe touches on matters of the greatest importance for both Africa and those various diasporas. That necessary distinction splits authentic and differentiated "Africans" from "Negroes," whose supposedly simpler modes of being in the world were invented in slavery but are, in reality, no less heterogeneous. This division is difficult to manage within an analysis that ducks the implications of seeing that African-descended people in the United States occupy economic and communicative locations very different from those that play home to their racialized siblings in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa itself.

I want to endorse Mbembe's timely rejections of culture as property and identity as a unitary phenomenon or "substance." I would also like to applaud his tantalizing grasp of "race" as the "blind spot" of modernity and his acute observations on the culture of freedom as a practice of domination. His passing remarks to the effect that it is "race" that makes it possible to found difference in general, and the existence of nations in particular, deserve to be elaborated at length and explored carefully.

I suspect that there are also substantive disagreements between us, but the density and momentum of this essay makes them hard to hold on to. They emerged briefly into focus as a result of my disinclination to follow him into the dense philosophical thickets where he imagines that the evasive, wounded quarry of African self-knowledge can be located. It may be that he is caught because, by posing the problems involved in the attainment of selfhood in this particular manner, he is already open to the accusation that he is playing the very German game he has expounded and expressly forbidden. Indeed, to name this political problem in terms of the selfhood of the African subject may already be to have been defeated by the well-oiled workings of an alien philosophical idiom.

The hopeful transition heralded but never completely identified by the colonial humanists of the Second World War period, particularly Léopold Sédar Senghor, anticipated that African culture and critique would manage an imaginative ethicopolitical leap in which particularity would be reconciled with universalism. Their dream shadows Mbembe's own. However, if the relationship between African self-possession and African self-government is eventually to be resolved, this postcolonial project requires additional resources. To put this more bluntly, it needs tactics that do not reduce the philosophical inquiries demanded by racial slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and, yes, globalization to a choice between flight and melancholic resignation.

There is a particularly big hiccup when Mbembe switches from the uncomfortable but creative task of critique to the different work of obligatory reconstruction. The fireworks with which he has led his readers through his own speculations anticipate and deserve a more substantial conclusion than the one he offers. It might lie, perhaps, in a better account of how the counterdiscourses of colonial "transmodernity" contain, but could also supersede, the philosophical approaches to which he remains bound...