Constituting Negative Geopolitics: Memoriality and Event inThe World and Africa (1946)

In certain political and intellectual circles, it has now become more amenable to engage in reflection on geopolitics, its origins, its dialectical relationships with other so-called forms of politicization across continents, its effects on intellectual formations, and, more likely, its reproduction into an ideological code for a more neutral form of liberal pacification and containment of the political field as such. According to such writers as Immanuel Wallerstein, Gerard Tuathail, and John Agnew, the concept geopolitics now seems relevant for the current configuration of intellectual disciplines not only because it is taken to be the defining trope of modernity as such but also because this concept has always straddled two competing functions.¹ On the one hand, geopolitical gives a structure to the commonsense narratives that frame “the conduct of world politics.”² On the other hand, geopolitics opens itself up as the main vehicle by which the integration and separation of global space can be hierarchized according to the efficient calculation of expendable labor and the availability of potentially untapped resources for capitalist expropriation. In the face of a globality that suggests the need for a full destruction or overturning of the concept of geopolitics and its full-blown operation within certain schemes of global foreign policy, this renewal of interest in and reiteration of geopolitics and its accompanying habits of thought—which are truly also habits of the cultural manifestations of empire—is beginning to reveal itself as a ruse for the localization of empire. Or perhaps, through a more reluctant gesture, all of this can be said to lead to the full occlusion and closure of the distance between empire and its historiographic exemplars.

It is the unavailability of such a distance that makes it necessary to open a reflection such as this one with an examination of the intellectual situation surrounding the production and circulation of these concepts of geopolitics and empire. Such a reflection also entails examining the political standards by which even the most residual perspective on planetary sense and understanding is given over to the occasion for thinking about the constitution of a nonsituational, eventful, and thus differential practice of intellectual production under the conditions of empire. W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The World and Africa necessarily stands as such a challenge, even to those strident critiques of the micropolitics of race issuing from such fields as cultural and postcolonial studies. Its challenge stems from the sheer capacity and resolve of labor by which its author attempts to offer a periodization of the collapse of European imperialism following the end of the Second World War and the consequences of that collapse for creating a political dialogue and an economic bridge with the emerging nations in Africa. The World and Africa does this with a keen sense of the increased awareness in the heart of Europe of the widespread importance of the race debates captured under the banner of Pan-Africanism. Because it is a book that places itself on the table of history as a corrective to the massive neglect of the African continent, its topical horizons bridge more issues and questions than I can possibly begin to address, let alone account for, in the format of an essay. What is well within the reach of this essay as interesting and undeniably fertile both for theoretical and political measures are the ways in which The World and Africa takes up geopolitics less for reasons having to do with the justification of empire and more for reasons having to do with breaking up the historiographic formalism that abounds in the narrative imperatives and codes of argumentation drawn by and into the great texts of European hegemony, beginning with the Spanish chroniclers and continuing with legislative bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), to name just one. Presenting itself as a self-styled chronicle of world history and events, The World and...