One fundamental consequence of the tragic failure of the postcolonial nationstate in Africa has been the elaboration of discursive positions underpinned by sentiments of despair and hopelessness. With one developmentalist thesis after another crumbling under the weight of civil wars, famine, poverty, social inertia, and political stasis, it has become the norm in various Africanist disciplines to homogenize the continent's postcolonial space as one uniform site of dysfunc-tionality.'Underpinning the reasons often proffered for this pervasive Afropes-simism is the belief that" the African condition" 2 can only be understood from the perspective of what Simon Gikandi calls" the schemata of difference"(455), difference, that is, from the teleological ethos of the Occident. Thus, an entire discursive symbology has evolved to place the temporal frame of the African postcolony within a largely unproblematized sign of negativity. This is the diffi-culty of speaking" rationally" about Africa that Achille Mbembe evokes in the introduction to On the Postcolony.

In an effort to transcend both Afropessimist representations of the African condition and the Eurocentric paradigms that underlie some of them, Patrick Chabal andJean-Pascal Daloz propose in Africa Works an analytical grid designed to reveal the" continuities in their historicity." Although their study focuses on articulations of agency in the informal infra-State contexts of African postcolonies, Chabal and Daloz are able to show that Afropessimism devolves from scholarly practices and discursive formations that are too often fixated on the tragedy of Africa's colonial past and the imperfect modernity of the nation-state it engen-dered. The trouble with such positions is that they often underestimate the dyna-mism of the present, subsuming its independent vitality within the causal