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1 Hegel’s Burden The Slave’s Counter Violence in Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Literature Ogun layé [Existence is war]. —Yorùbá proverb What we need to do is kill ourselves. —M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj An insurgent is not a subject of understanding or interpretation but of extermination. —Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” At the beginning of his very lucid and tightly argued On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe recommends that critics should cease formulating theoretical statements about the possibility of Africa’s autonomy and come to terms with the reality that African societies permanently lost their “‘distinctive historicity ’” when they ceded control to Europe. Since then, nothing important has happened in Africa that is “not embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination” (9). The “particular and sometimes local” concerns of African societies can no longer be honestly perceived outside the worldly orbit into which their dealings with Europe have consigned them. Of course, Mbembe is being a little disingenuous because his book, which he says is intended to lay out “the criteria that African [social and political ] agents accept as valid” (7), is about nothing other than “particular and local concerns” of African politics. A little less than a decade earlier, Paul Gilroy’s now deservedly influential The Black Atlantic eloquently challenged the self-authorization “resistance” paradigms that have dominated the writing of the intellectual history of black peoples in the New World. Gilroy argued that the manifest antagonism of 9 Adeeko, Slave's Rebelion 5/5/05 3:56 PM Page 9 black thought, at least as it is reflected in literature and popular music, is thoroughly misread if it is classified as an opposition to New World modernity . Idioms of self-constitution such as “nationality, ethnicity authenticity, and cultural integrity” (2) articulated by black thinkers to fight slavery, the deadly path most New World blacks took to modernity, do not contradict modernity’s intellectual assumptions. In essence, Gilroy seems to be saying, the basic principles of what we now call modern black thought gestated as questions generated by the contradictions slavery constituted for modernity. I started by quoting Gilroy and Mbembe, who do not appear to have read each other’s work, because their accounts of modern black being (perhaps nonbeing in Mbembe) resurrect the ghost of Hegel’s allegory of Lordship and Bondage. For either author, slavery and colonialism constitute the historical “normativity” within which modern black communities in Africa and the New World have evolved in the last four centuries or so, and it is only from inside that “normativity” that black acts of self-constitution can be honestly studied.1 Gilroy, writing about British and Anglophone American cultural politics, condemns the language of occultic “‘cultural insiderism’” that black nationalisms, including both the latent one in black poststructuralist literary criticism and the manifest one in Afrocentricity, use to justify their general assertions and to conceal the fact that the exclusive ethnic space is never the primary category of identification for black thinkers.2 Writing about Africa in the same valence, Mbembe excoriates theories of a separate African being, historicist or mythical, that fail to reckon with colonization. The slew of research projects implemented around the “Black Atlantic” theme proposed by Gilroy indicates that the basic terms of writing modern black history may be undergoing some fundamental revisions, and that a distinct body of knowledge is being amassed around the defining impact of the flow of ideas enabled by colonization and modern transatlantic slave trade on the cultures of the African Old World and the American New World. Black Atlanticism represents cultural traffic in black societies in the United States and the Caribbean from the eighteenth century onward as the strategic deployment of ideas that leading writers and thinkers adapt from European philosophers of modernity. Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Blyden, and even the fiercely nationalist Marcus Garvey comment on their societies and generate programs of black advancement by refining the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment to account for black existence. Whatever may be “black” in these formulations cannot, therefore , be uncoupled from the gains of Enlightenment. To complete the argument , it is suggested that a fairly honest account of modernity has to include black peoples’ “selective use of the ideologies of the Western Age of Revolution” (Gilroy 44) to make their case against slavery both in theory the slave’s rebellion 10 Adeeko, Slave's Rebelion 5/5...

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