In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir Diagne
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image, of the European world. This is particularly emphasized by English-speaking thinkers of Indian origin such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak6 and Homi Bhabha.7
Postcolonial studies, in short, focuses on how colonial and imperial domination, by exercising itself in a double form, through power and knowledge, or through weapons and representations, in fact generated a reciprocal influence – not just of the colonizers on the colonized, but also of the colonized on the colonizers – that tended to confuse binary oppositions and the hierarchies between them.
The very term ‘postcolonial’ is affected by this confusion, since it serves both as a historical marker – what comes after colonization and was produced by it – and as a critical project, aiming to get beyond schematic or dichotomous distinctions between the West and the non-West, colonizers and colonized, colonial era and postcolonial era. It follows from this confusion that ‘the colonial’ – whether in the shape of mentalities or practices – has obviously been able to survive historical decolonizations and to persist into the postcolonial era, while, conversely, subjects of the various European empires were – even in the past – able to produce ‘postcolonial’ critical, political and poetic gestures. Though still in the colonial era, they anticipated a world to come that would shake off the forms of relationship and social conceptions that predominated in their time. So we can, for instance, produce a ‘postcolonial reading’ of the political and literary history of Haiti, which the Black revolution, leading to the abolition of slavery and independence from the French colonial metropolis, turned into the first truly postcolonial nation – even more than the United States, which, though it had indeed emancipated itself from British tutelage, still preserved slavery and a racial hierarchy as the basis of its economic and social relations.
‘Postcolonial’ thus becomes, so to speak, the equivalent of ‘anticolonial’. In particular, by maintaining the demand that the process of decolonization be brought to completion, going beyond the historical independence attained by former colonies formerly run by colonial powers such as Britain or France, this term easily lent itself to reappropriation by various militant circles, especially in the voluntary or communal associations that had emerged from or were caught up in the history of immigration.
This is how we can identify a second stage in the emergence of a postcolonial paradigm in France. This stage came about in the mid-2000s and was a combination of chance and the zeitgeist: January 2005 saw the launching of ‘the call of the Indigenous of the Republic’, which, a few months before the sixtieth anniversary of the Algerian uprising (it was put down by France in Sétif on 8 May 1945), aimed to establish the ‘foundations of postcolonial anticolonialism’ and to denounce the prevalence in the French nation of forms of domination and discrimination inherited from the colonial period.
Published a few weeks before the riots in the French suburbs in November 2005, the collective volume La Fracture coloniale (The Colonial Fracture),8 most of whose authors came from the worlds of local communities or scholarly activism such as ACHAC (the Association pour la connaissance de l’Afrique contemporaine, i.e. the Association for Knowledge of Contemporary Africa), in turn stirred up many echoes. In fact, it was only restating in postcolonial language a political slogan (‘la fracture sociale’ or ‘the social divide’) that had won Jacques Chirac his first presidential election ten years earlier.
The years 2005–7 saw many journals – Esprit, Hérodote, Labyrinthe, Mouvement, Multitudes – devoting special issues to post-colonial studies, while the anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle led a charge that was as heroic and chivalrous as it was critical,9 followed by the political scientist Jean-François Bayart.10 These soon met with a response in a new collective work from the ranks of ACHAC, Ruptures postcoloniales (Postcolonial Breaks).11
Tempers now seemed to be flaring between African intellectuals – such as the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf and the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe – and French Africanist intellectuals. It was on the basis of their training and their publications devoted to African studies, such as the Cahiers d’études africaines, edited by Jean-Loup Amselle for nearly thirty years, and the review Politique africaine, founded by Jean-François Bayart in 1980, that Amselle and Bayart conducted their critique of postcolonialism. In a certain way, the present book brings this dialogue back to the public stage, even if in actual fact it was never really interrupted, nor devoid of persistent misunderstandings.
Where was the main point of friction and hence of discord? We could say, summarily, that the Africanists criticized postcolonials for trying to reinvent the wheel and thereby giving a new lease of life to some of the essentialist and culturalist quirks of their predecessors (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi) at a time when Négritude and anticolonial critique were in the ascendant. Postcolonials, meanwhile, mocked the tendency of Africanists to reduce them to mere epigones of prestigious masters and ancestors, though they claimed to have a more complex filiation with these forebears than the mere phantasmatic projection of a new ‘strategic essentialism’ might suggest.12
Finally, the main issue of this disagreement was without doubt the following: to what extent could a true decentring be achieved, a shift away from the Western thought that had influenced the founders of anticolonial criticism themselves and a return to more autonomous, even autochthonous, traditions of thought? And to what extent was such a decentring envisageable or possible within Western thought itself? A secondary question was: could one ‘provincialize Europe’ by making it one pole of reflection and one tradition of thought among others, without the precedence or pre-eminence it had enjoyed? Could other dialogues take place between various points and intellectual traditions of the global South, without systematically requiring Western mediation? It is undoubtedly the growing force and importance of these questions, together with an exponential polarization of the positions for or against postcolonial thought, which may explain the gradual shift to a new paradigm: that of decolonial thought.
As Jean-Loup Amselle explains on several occasions in the following conversations, the genesis of decolonial thought differs from that of the postcolonial theory first developed by Edward Said and Australian and Indian thinkers. Decolonial thought admittedly involves a similar circularity: we need to take into account the point of view of the colonized, a point of view underestimated by Western literatures (in both fictional works and the literature of ideas); in particular we need to adopt a ‘subaltern’ point of view or a view ‘from below’. But decolonial thought radicalizes this critical standpoint in a twofold way. Firstly, it traces the emergence of modern colonial hierarchies right back to the time of the discovery of the Americas (1492), and, secondly, it examines the implementation of a new formula of social domination and economic exploitation, a formula now indexed to the notion of race.
These ideas are developed in concert by many South American thinkers, such as the Argentine semiologist Walter Mignolo, the Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel and the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. Brought together in an interdisciplinary research collective called ‘Group M/C’, decolonial theorists endeavour to demonstrate the interdependence of modernity/coloniality as two simultaneous phenomena linked in space and time up until the contemporary period. The decolonials also emphasize the collusion, if not the compromise, in this same modernity between, on the one hand, Cartesian rationality with its various dualisms and their hierarchical relations (between mind and body, man and nature, with the first terms systematically dominating the second), and, on the other hand, colonial reason (where the European must himself overcome non-Europeans, reducing them to an almost animal status of machine-bodies, so as to have an exclusive right to human intellectual functions as his own domain).
Two major consequences ensue for decolonial thinking: on the one hand, the progressive but precocious implementation of a capitalist world order organized for the sole benefit of Europe, mobilizing colonialism and racism as principles of the division and organization of labour on a global scale; on the other hand, the concomitant establishment of a Eurocentric episteme, or of a geopolitics of knowledge where the European point of view – and more exactly that of the Western White man – replaces God’s point of view