Anthropology at the Limits: A Genealogical Re-Appraisal of Colonialism in the Time of Contemporary Globalization

The work of John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff is no doubt unique in the field of African studies due to its learned multidisciplinarity, scope, depth, and startling freshness. It is difficult to cover the grounds made by their corpus within a single article, but an attempt can be made to explain their insights into the nature and ramifications of colonialism within the context of South Africa and also to demonstrate why these insights are unique within the field of African studies. In addition, focusing on their work on globalization and the relation(s) of parts of Africa to that millennial process shows that the colonial encounter, with all its disruptive, reconstructive, and transformative processes, can be read and constructed along certain thematic lines. In this way, colonialism within the African context can be read into and from the dynamics of global capitalism with a cogent theoretical and empirical point of view. Furthermore, it is possible to pursue this course in a way not found in the work of V. Y. Mudimbe, Mahmood Mamdani, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, or Kwasi Wiredu. Those theorists have all been concerned in a profound manner with the historical antecedents of the colonial encounter and also its enduring contemporary effects, but none has developed as elaborate theoretical models as the Comaroffs, who offers us fresh ways of linking the event of colonialism with the current wave of global capitalism. It is this theoretical expanse and continuity that allow us to read the African predicament within and outside the matrix of the contemporary global system.

Theoretical readings of the colonial encounter are often decidedly rigid and discontinuous, thus precluding a satisfactory engagement of the African continent with the processes of contemporary globalization. The Comaroffs turn this state of affairs around, so that the African continent, even its position of extreme marginality and continuing peripheralization, can be inserted in interesting ways into the age of virtuality. The multifaceted dimensions of colonialism can be understood through volumes one and two of their on-going opus, Of Revelation and Revolution (vol. 1, 1991; vol. 2, 1997). Their theoretical reflections on the processes of contemporary globalization span several essays in which their insights are complemented by the work of theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Arjun Appadurai. The coupling of processes of colonialism with those of contemporary globalization offer unexpectedly vast apertures for inventive theoretical reconstructions of the event of colonization beyond its immediate historical limits. Those processes transcend their limits in a way that they continually reinvent the African postcolonial subject not only as a product of historical colonialism but also as a participant in the millennial moment whose central features she has not actively created but whose evolving and transformative dynamics she is always subverting, replacing, and displacing in local terms. Thus, for the African postcolonial subject, the history and event of colonialism remain key parameters for the apprehension and transcendence of the millennial moment.

The first volume of Of Revelation and Revolution begins with a sustained discourse on the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonialism, pointing out that "[c]olonizers everywhere try to gain control over the practices through which would-be subjects produce and reproduce the bases of their existence. No habit is too humble, no sign too insignificant to be implicated. And colonization always provokes struggles—albeit often tragically uneven ones—over power and meaning on the frontiers of empire" (1: 5).

Arjun Appadurai explains how cricket as a seemingly harmless sport became an elaborate instrument of the colonial enterprise and subsequently became an indigenized medium of decolonization when the time came. This situation only underscores the fact that no habit or sign was too insignificant for the "civilizing" and transformative imperatives of colonial event. Although the Comaroffs claim that their study is "a historical anthropology of the Non-conformist mission...