Techniques of the Global: Race, Territory, and the Coloniality of Reason

To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism—with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power—is to understand our present organization of life anew.

(Lugones 2007:187)

The interrogation of our academic orientations within the life-worlds we construct and inhabit as scholars of Africa(s) is a critical labor in the project of decolonizing our institutional arrangements and intellectual practices across disciplines and methodologies in contemporary global contexts. In other words, to comprehend and question the constellations and relations of power between academic institutions and the gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions of terrestrial life is “to understand our present organization of life anew” (Lugones 2007:187). In particular, recognizing and understanding the systems, modes, and techniques that produce and modulate the global reveals the centrality of the problem-place of race at the intersection of the institutional politics of universities in the United States and the national, regional, and global—territorial—objects or areas they inscribe, rationalize, and colonize.

As a graduate student, assistant instructor, and critical intellectual working in and across the interstices of global or international schools, area-based research curricula, national literature departments, and African language programs, I am uniquely, though not unusually or uncommonly, located between the discursive territories and political-economic systems of relations that have formed—and continue to form—the present institutional architectures and conceptual contours of the global. Positioned along the interdisciplinary borderlands of comparative literature, I have encountered—in a singular, local-specific dimension—the attitudes, forces, and energies that supply and supplement the techniques of knowledge production, and cultural reproduction, at work in the design and manufacture of contemporary global(s).

The displacement of my intellectual habitat between departments, institutes, schools, and programs has forced me to navigate both the institutional and conceptual challenges of the global, especially in the contexts of African studies; however, while it is possible to meet the forces and challenges raised by the global as epistemological barriers, my own critical approach to such forces and challenges has emerged as a style of interrogation and a mode of appropriation choreographed through a series of questions: What is the (historical-material) relationship between the shifting shapes of imperial cartographies, the evolutionary mutations of the military-industrial complex, and the institutional formation of academic areas and regions of study? In what ways is the global mobilized as a colonial machine of domination? How might the global or globals be appropriated and abused in processes of decolonization? And, finally, what is at stake in the global? And who is invested in its valorization?

Through an engagement with these questions and an appropriation of their interrogative choreography, my present intervention aims to address two distinct, but interwoven, techniques: the modes and systems of relations that construct and mobilize the global as an imperial trademark and colonial territory (i.e., the deployments of the global as a racist machine of planetary domination). The first of these techniques is that system and mode of relations that designates the limits of the map as the limits of humanity and inscribes a process of world-making through the proportioning of whiteness as the space and magnitude of the globe. The second is that system and mode of relations that extends the global as a political economic apparatus in the order of maintaining the process of cultural reproduction between social institutions and the military-industrial complex. Evolving between the operations of these techniques, the global, I argue, may be understood as a form of machinic (yet erratic) movement—an inundation of capital networks and technologies of domination. And to combat this movement, we—as scholars, administrators, students, and teachers—must struggle to generate institutional models and pedagogical practices that remain mobile and adaptable so as to turn against the colonial operations of the global and appropriate the energies of its totalizing force.

One such mode of mobile and adaptable modes of scholarly inquiry is, I think, participation in conferences, symposiums, and discussions like the one we are building...