Participatory Cultures and Biopolitics in the Global South in In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc.

Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's most recent novel Congo Inc. (2014) explores various inflections of African participation in contemporary globalization. Bofane embarks on a dialectical undertaking, debunking globalization-hype as it de facto impacts Africa and showing in reverse that globalization means the participation of African subjects in the global economy as commodities rather than as actors. This reduction of African producers to the level of the raw material they produce in the extractive economies culminates in a negative biopolitics: a necropolitics embedded within economy-as-warfare. By contrast, Bofane suggests a mode of participation in globality (rather than globalization) that stresses an "affirmative biopolitics" of cosmic or planetary dimensions—a form of participation that outstrips and confounds all the pseudo- or semi-participatory sops that are thrown to the inhabitants of the African continent.