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African Futures in Crisis?

Essays on Precarity, Emergence, and Possibility
Introduction: Untimely Africa
Juan Obarrio
Brian Goldstone
This collection of essays addresses the question of futurity as it has come
to be embedded within various social processes and cultural forms emerging in
contemporary Africa. It navigates an intellectual landscape of confronting
perspectives, attempting not so much to move beyond as to think within the
contradictions and perplexities that characterize the current moment. Long held
captive to an array of demonizing and often cynical diagnoses as to the present
fate of Africa (Meredith 2006) diagnoses, it need hardly be pointed out, that
continue to enjoy a quite profitable career within many quarters of public
discourse recent scholarship has assumed a more ambivalent stance, the
cumulative effect of which has yielded an impression of the continent as a
veritable montage of competing destinies. Thus, alongside accounts of
unrelenting debt and extreme precariousness, war machines and disposable
populations, occult imaginaries and eviscerated nation-states, we are given
vibrant sketches of a continent to come, of novel modes of living and becoming
whose defining features, far from insinuating the resurrection of myriad
archaisms, signal instead the appearance of unforeseen horizons of desire and
potentiality. Once denied its claim to historicity indeed infamously placed
outside of history altogether Africa now evokes, or has the power to evoke, a
rather different set of possibilities. The time is ripe, this book contends, to throw
light on the multiplicity of routes the sensibilities, aspirations, relationalities,
disavowals through which African futures are being produced and apprehended.
Crisis
The writings in this volume suggest that pursuing such a line of inquiry
demands a thoroughgoing interrogation of the spectacularization of catastrophe
typically associated with Africa, as well as the attendant stigmatization of African
states and political cultures engendered by broad sectors in the media, policy
analysis, and the academy. To this end, by traversing a wide variety of settings
and phenomena, the following chapters critically reassess the centrality of the
notion of crisis and its purported analytic pertinence as a means of coming to
terms with current conditions on the continent.
Today, it scarcely seems possible to think about Africa without making
recourse in some shape or form to the figure of crisis, which, understood as
rupture, malfunction, disorder, or disaster, a deviation from a presumptive norm
or standard, has become a commonplace of social and political discourse.
Spanning domains as diverse as state governance, law, security, finance, health,
humanitarianism, citizenship, and the natural environment, crisis is mobilized as
the defining characteristic of contemporary life, an omnipresent sign in almost
all forms of narrative involving African societies (Roitman, this volume), arguably
losing in the process whatever conceptual purchase it may have previously

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possessed.1 This volume therefore subjects the very idea of crisis to critique,
disentangling the concept, revealing how it functions within the study of
contemporary Africa (and beyond) by shrouding itself in an aura of enlightened
common sense and privileged insight into a supposedly undeniable, however
unverifiable, empirical terrain.
In terms of a politics of knowledge, perhaps the most troubling consequence of
the incessant talk of crisis is that it nourishes deeply reductionist explanatory
frameworks. Within its logic, every social process, every experience or
sensibility, is studied as a mere reflection and effect, or, at best, as a form of
resistance to an intractable predicament of one kind or another. And the same
goes for the complex historicities in the continent, as the temporality of crisis
itself presented as an effect of a single factor originating in the near or distant
past, be it colonial expropriation, the economy, war, or ethnic identity engulfs
all of sociality within the whirlwind of the assorted maladies of the present. On
this view, whereby circular explanations of crisis serve ultimately to buttress
precisely those double binds (modernity/tradition, customary/state,
class/ethnicity, global/local, urban/rural) they purport to investigate, the future
can only be imagined according to an ever expanding repertoire of technocratic
formulas or a series of breathless salvaging interventions. Implicit in this
collection is the suspicion that crisis as a signifier, as a diagnostic is all too
often an alibi for the political management of putative conditions of social
emergency.
Suffice it to say, then, that our inclusion of the word crisis in the title of this
book is highly qualified, seeking neither to legitimize received images of the
continent nor to reproduce them unproblematically. In this sense, the question
mark is crucial. Whether directly, through a critical reappraisal of the category
itself, or indirectly, by providing empirical illustrations of its everyday
repercussions, the following chapters consider the ubiquity and alleged
permanence of African crisis, approaching it with more than a dose of
skepticism, attuned to its prejudicial, self-fulfilling mode of judgment, while also
taking seriously the rapidly unfolding transformations, fractures, and dead ends
indexed by the term. How to avoid absorbing the singularities of the present
conjuncture within the totalizing frame of endemic lack and breakdown? Plunging
into the life worlds that expert opinion would define (dismiss?) as chaotic
predicament, the contexts elucidated in this collection show their tenacious
productivity as laboratories of the new, affirming that the future directions and
shapes of African experience, emancipatory or regressive, remain wide open.
Present
A basic premise of this book is that the contemporary conjuncture defies
both the bland optimism of lenders, policy makers, and humanitarian charities, as
well as the vicious circles of so-called Afropessimist projections. Across the
continent, life eludes its demarcation by the usual alternatives of damnation,

1 Concluding his appraisal of the history of the term, Reinhart Koselleck observes: The
concept of crisis, which once had the power to pose unavoidable, harsh and non-negotiable
alternatives, has been transformed to fit the uncertainties of whatever might be favored at a
given moment. Such a tendency towards imprecision and vagueness, however, may itself be
viewed as the symptom of a historical crisis that cannot as yet be fully gauged. This makes it
all the more important for scholars to weigh the concept carefully before adopting it in their
own terminology (Koselleck 2006: 399).

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donation, or salvation. As Africa increasingly presents itself as a global site of

experimentation on scales both world-historical and subjective, received
categories become inadequate to conceptualize phenomena such as the ones
examined in this volume, and the registers of anticipation, hope, revelation, or
anxiety that animate them. Here, accordingly, is a situation in which many of the
macro sociohistorical and theoretical frameworks of the post-colonial period have
finally outlived their usefulness, or in any case have seen their assumptions and
typologies diminished by events that outstrip their applicability. In short,
empirical research on the continent today seems to be lacking in the vocabularies
and methods that would allow us to make sense of the fast flow of
transformations and reversals that have transpired there in recent years.
It is in response to this impasse that the following essays have been
assembled. Together, they comprise a collection of maps of key contemporary
formations through which the contours of the future are actively being imagined:
the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational; the
intoxicating efflorescence of signs and wonders and so many prosperity gospels;
the production and collapse of assorted techniques of juridification and illegality;
regimes of invisibility that seduce desire and subvert everyday linearity; lotteries
and Ponzi schemes that hedge the present against tomorrow; apocalyptic
revelations of the end of time; visions of impending and foreign worlds; a
pervasive yearning for exile. What unites these investigations is their shared
(though by no means uniform or concordant) analysis of a continent irreducible to
its alleged critical condition, as well as their overriding commitment to the plural
and open-ended over the monolithic and deterministic even, or especially, when
the phenomena under investigation exceed the geographic boundaries of Africa
as such.
The chapters theorize these incipient forms and practices against the
backdrop of a post-Cold War, post-9/11 political-economic landscape. Without
question, this is a sociological terrain decidedly unlike that studied by a previous
generation of Africanist scholars. No longer bound to a bloated dictatorship
system, todays political apparatus is diffuse, decentralized, and officially if not
in practice increasingly democratic, its ties to the rural often attenuated and
strategic. Amidst state pullback and a privatized commons, novel sovereignties
and biopolitical configurations are appearing in city and village alike. Meanwhile,
a scramble for African land, oil, and minerals has brought a gallery of
transnational players to the continents doorstep: corporations and venture
capitalists, a charitable but muscular China, US oil and terrorism interests, a
burgeoning development-humanitarian-entertainment complex. Jostling for
influence, these agents scramble old boundaries public/private,
development/entertainment, legal/illicit, military/humanitarian, local/global and
set in motion a new range of possibilities for organizing and unsettling life on the
continent as we have known it.
In the aftermath of the demise of the master tropes and narratives that
oriented the study of Africa over the past three decades, the following thought
pieces resist the temptation to resuscitate the presuppositions of a prior moment,
opting instead to work within the countless cracks and fissures that have opened
up in their wake. The volume does not presume a paralysis of being as defined
by the governance of crisis (or, in a different register, the force of the customary
and traditional). Rather, it gives expression to a poetics of becoming. Against
the widespread rhetoric of atrophy and disaster, it illustrates how present

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horizons of meaning and conditions of possibility are to some extent inflected by

various political and economic histories of domination, misuse, and extraction,
but shows that these do not absolutely determine their future. They are not, in
other words, merely reactive to so many neoliberal schemes, the ebbs and flows
of capital accumulation, or the supposedly entrenched logics of territorialism and
ethnicity.
Attuned to the profound intricacies and incongruities of contemporary
social, political, religious, and economic configurations, these essays consider
instances and sites of crystallization of the new, the impending: emergent trends,
practices, aesthetics, and subjectivities that may well provide a window onto the
numerous prospects for the otherwise (Povinelli 2011) presently in the works.
Emerging Time
At a moment when a number of critical theorists are forswearing the
conceptual hegemony of the future in its various moral and political, even
theological, valences (Berardi 2011, Berlant 2011, Edelmen 2004, Love 2009), it
may seem strange that the following essays foreground this thematic as a crucial
point of entry into the vagaries of life on the continent today. On closer
examination, however, it turns out that the contributors to this volume are
similarly wary of the category, perceiving in the term many of the conceptual
cognates progress, (re)production, development, and so forth that for so long
imposed on African societies a normative vision of what their material and
intellectual capacities ought to be directed toward. Speaking of futures, in the
plural, is one modest but meaningful way of mitigating the teleological
significations of the category without doing away with it altogether.
Recent theorizations of futurity within African studies have paved the way
for a project of this kind. Over a decade ago, Achille Mbembe observed that
what Africa as a concept calls fundamentally into question is the manner in
which social theory has hitherto dealt with the collapse of worlds, their
fluctuations and their tremblings, their about-turns and disguises, their silences
and murmurings. According to him, social theory has failed also to account for
time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and
simultaneities, its presence and absences (Mbembe 2001: 8). It is, in a sense,
exactly this call for a rigorous engagement with the everyday experiences of time
in Africa, with the dense, interlocked qualities of that peculiar temporality that
Mbembe will otherwise refer to as emerging time, or the time that is
appearing (ibid., 16), that has provided the impetus for the present collection.
Eschewing the hubris of a popular punditry that would confidently
pronounce on Africas future (Clarke 2012), as well as the developmentalist
conceit that there could be a single point toward, trend, or cycle toward which an
entire continent might find itself inexorably moving, the contributions in this
collection rather illustrate the irreducible heterogeneity of desires, rationalities,
hopes, demands, and frustrations that together invigorate (or thwart) the
capability, in Nietzsches famous phrase, to conceive of a tomorrow and the day
after tomorrow. As they materialize in the pages that follow, such tomorrows
reveal themselves to be resistant to the conventional narratives and logics, both
local and imposed, that have defined the study of Africa and African societies
for over half a century. And in this, perhaps, they bespeak a rather different
version of Africa as a concept: recombinant, manifold, and, now as ever, never
entirely self-contained.

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This intervention has been inspired by a cluster of recent works (Comaroff

and Comaroff 2012; Ferguson 2006; Makhulu, Buggenhagen, and Jackson 2010;
Mbembe 2001; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008; Piot 2010; Weiss 2004). Among
anthropologists, it was Jane Guyer who, in a 2007 essay, most forcefully
articulated the need for ethnographies of the near future (410), arguing that
what we have instead produced is an obsession both with the very distant past
(i.e., origins) and the very distant future (i.e., eschatology), eliding in the process
an awareness of a time that is punctuated rather than enduring: of fateful
moments and turning points, the date as event rather than as position in a
sequence or a cycle (ibid., 416). Her article found striking how the
anthropology of time settles so quickly into the past in the present and
memory, concluding that much relevant thinking about time in anthropology is
less illuminating about the future than about the past (ibid., 418, ff. 4).
Today, as Charles Piot (2010: 168-170) has recently noted, West Africans
from all walks of life are jettisoning, even violently repudiating the past and its
cultural, political, and religious associations, embracing in their place a new
panoply of self-stylings and imaginaries. Yet it is telling that so much academic
and popular writing about Africa seems incapable of following their lead. Surely it
will not suffice to hold fast to postcolonialism or any big theory for that matter
as the key to comprehending these transformations. How, then, might we begin
to think the future on its own terms? It is within the field of indeterminacy
opened up by such a question that the varied worlds elucidated in this book begin
to make their claim upon the present.
Futures
What, specifically, will it entail to map out emergent African futures?
Different critical questions are posed by a milieu punctuated with multiple
temporalities and fluctuating speeds. Whither the market and the political, along
with their earlier attendant notions of security, citizenship, territory, and value,
amidst such drastic defamiliarizations of their given forms and trajectories? Has
a (theo/techno)logic of immanent miracles and instantaneous ruptures finally
supplanted the progressivist teleologies of the party, the state, the intelligentsia,
or, lately, the NGO? How might the inauguration of novel spatializations and
embodiments, passions and sensory modalities be assessed in conjunction with
the historically specific contexts by which they are given shape?
On the one hand expert discourses in the academy, media, or policymaking have recently emphasized various historical legacies as determinant of
key social processes. On the other hand, local experiences of political, cultural,
or religious movements on the ground have essentialized various conceptions of
the past, projecting them onto the future as certain, inescapable horizons.
Two different versions of the eternal return of the same take hold of the
contemporary moment in Africa. The teleological future-oriented programs of
contemporary governance re-appraise elements of the precolonial and high
colonial moments, such as custom, regional regulation or ethnic identity,
envisioned as crucial aspects for future programming.
Meanwhile, past-oriented experiences of autochtony, neo nativist
identities, the reprise of customary law and traditional authority, or the retrieval
of ritual, while providing certainty and a sense of direction within times of
disarray, mirror the closing of potentialities and the interruption of the openness
of forthcoming times produced by current schemes of governance.

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Two modes of projecting the past history or myth onto the future
dominate the politico-cultural field of forces and they both meet at uncanny,
unlikely points. One is cast from above, as it were, following the viewpoint of
connected macro systems of law and capital ruling conducts; the other, from
below, according to the perspective of the field of local aspiration materialized
in new recombinations of urban experience or in customary practices of longing
and belonging.
The space of governance presents a return of the past under the form of a
politics of recognition and a teleology of transitions toward an universal point of
arrival. Global regimes of normalization of African localities thus mandate stages
of development, foreign aid and humanitarian intervention, as well as transitions
to democracy and transitional justice.
The field of experiences of social movements and local aspirational
processes presents the reiteration of collective memory traces that reaffirm
entrenched identities of ownership, belonging and relatedness. Autochthony,
struggle over ethnic and regional affiliation, xenophobic conflict, myths of origin,
the revival of custom and its figures of sovereignty, religious law, or prosperity
gospels, are some recent troubling expressions of the re arrangement of the
geological plaques of African sociality.
Yet something escapes the facile depictions of a continent in permanent
crisis. A resilient element contests the politics of time that attempts to subsume
the African contemporary condition within the inescapable present of global
governance, international law and absolute real subsumption by capital.
The essays included in this collection point out to a certain excess
particular to Africa: a surplus of meaning or an overload of desires, imaginations,
intensities. It is a potentiality materialized in the resilience of multiple temporal
vectors of African sociality. This excess resists all attempts to domesticate the
continents present direction and pace of its processes, translating its meaning
into a single, totalizing frame.
Untimely
Currently, Africa presents a disjointed condition materialized in political and
cultural projects constituted with reference to the past, either as a projection of
the past onto the future (governance, autochtony, custom) or as an absolute
break with the past, based on narratives of revelation that give origin to the
beginning of a new time (Pentecostal Christianity, capitalist extraction, structural
adjustment).
The strictures of global temporality and the teleologies of social
programming constitute a politics of time attempting to enclose the multiple
vectors of contemporary Africa into a single continuous present defined as crisis.
The scenes and practices described in this volume reveal Africa as an event, an
untimely space that escapes the logic of linear development and transition.
The spectacular signs of the alleged African crisis, reported by academic
and policy centers alike and amplified by the media, appear as self-evident: war,
epidemics, interruption of governance, delay of development, rupture of family
structures, demise of genealogy, gender and generation. This volume describes
an untimely Africa located beyond those fatalistic definitions. It presents a
continent holding multiple futurities that exceed the temporalizations of expert
knowledge and economic reason; a territory of deferred potentialities yet living
through an effervescent actuality.

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An untimely Africa confronts two broad conditions that attempt to enclose

it. First, the global time /space of late capitalism and trans-national governance,
and second, the related temporality and spatiality of exception. The continents
economic and social indicators are evaluated with regard to a global standard
against which all localities are measured, as historical telos, economic horizon or
political perfection. Regions that do not adjust to universal parameters of
progress are declared in emergency, and therefore deemed worthy of rescue and
tutelage.
Yet the continent removes itself from these coordinates that generate
either predictions of doom determined by global politico-economic subsumption,
or the foreclosing of any possible exit strategy from the suspension of the law
that paradoxically includes populations within regimes of social exclusion in
deathly juridico-economic enclaves. An emerging Africa presents a challenge
that escapes both its saturation by global time and the critical temporal condition
of emergency. It is located beyond the supposed traumas and compulsion to
repeat that provide legitimacy to so many external interventions.
Against the global state of exception, untimely Africa offers the textured
force of locality and its spaces of inception. This volume maps out locality as an
event that interrupts the politics of global time, or as an heteronomous space of
reaffirmation of difference as a potential politics of life.
From Enlightenment thought and dialectical philosophies of history that
considered the continent as being located outside history, to modernist
programming aimed at social improvement and population control, to current
accounts of globalization that exclude the continent from world economy, Africa
has often been portrayed as not being in synch with the pace and direction of
world history, and its localities presented as uncivilized spaces frozen in time,
shaped by conflict and calamity. This gesture continues today in the presentation
of the historicity of crisis as an abstract and perpetual condition that casts the
continent as ahistorical.
The temporality of crisis seems to foreshadow a future that could only
reiterate the tragic contours of the present. Governance and international law
mostly conceive of Africa as a mere space of humanitarian intervention,
charitable appeasement and a politics of recognition of decayed rights and
endangered identities. Global political economy, to a large extent, considers the
continent as a space of extractive enclaves, rapid speculation, massive land
grabbing and channels for the circulation of flows of capital located in liminal
legal zones.
The essays included in this volume present a continent located beyond the
absolute reference to a historical past as the determining factor marking the end
point of the future. It is an untimely Africa situated beyond postmodernity and
postcoloniality, a space different from both utopia and dystopia. This condition
exceeds the end of history allegedly brought about by absolute real subsumption
by capital and the total immanence of the political. It is not reducible either to
the enamored longing for precolonial bedrocks. It goes beyond the recursive
nature of time proposed by the search for mythic homelands or the return of
custom as the register of citizenship and national belonging.
Untimely Africa does not represent an ahistorical space. Rather,
contemporary experiences in the continent escape the teleologies of universal
political programs. Untimeliness also implies that the irreducible specificity of
Africas unique historical trajectories need to be reassessed in order to measure

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the scope of current conditions beyond any reductionism. Foreign recipes and
imported methods of statecraft, development, or well-being have been proved
wrong. This volume presents local expressions of a continent that emerges as a
space that is distinctively cosmopolitan yet firmly based on singular perspectives,
moving past the recent emphasis on sites of memory and the certainty of
community, towards a creative politics of involuntary remembrances and active
forgetting.
Time

African political, socio-economic and cultural trends in the early 21 st

century offer various contending imaginations of forthcoming times. These can
be schematized into three main versions of the future, endowed with a particular
temporality and a potential emancipatory outcome.
First, the juridico-political field operates under the logic of governmentality.
It offers a linear path of rule and ascending steps of development. Saturated by
the logic of liberal democratization and humanitarian intervention, it represents
the linear temporality of transition, as in transition to democracy, transitional
justice, stages of structural adjustment and development.
In Africa, at the turn of the millennium, following the authoritarian rule of
autocratic states, law and the political had blended in the neoliberal normative
regimes of rule of law, an economistic articulation of market logic, norm and
exception. Within this context, local practices related to citizenship, electoral
politics, access to land and resources, demands for inclusion or respect toward
cultural difference, currently struggle to expand the limits of this logic. Opposite
to the law and its system of exchange and equivalences, the positive sign of
political processes in this field might be a version of the future as justice, as an
emancipatory horizon of potentiality.
Second, the religious-economic field operates under the logic of
accumulation toward miraculous creation out of nothing. It functions as the
experience of an absolute break with the past and the belief in recurring new
beginnings. Late capitalism-as-religion works through what are experienced on
the ground as apparently random periodic cycles of accumulation, burst, decay
and design of new forms of production.
Capital and the sacred blend within the practices of immaterial, electronic
financial investment, media and communication technology, electronic churches
and prosperity gospels. They follow sequences of destruction, creation, and
accumulation and a similar quest for miracles within public discourse and practice
presenting the analogy of an all-encompassing deity reigning over the kingdom of
this world and the real subsumption of the planet by capital, and its absolute
commodification.
Economy and religion mirror each other in the double movement of profit
and prophecy, in figures of capitals return and of messianic arrivals signaling the
end of times. This field represents the abrupt temporality of conversion,
materialized in the parallel transformation of newborn subjectivities, the global
convertibility of currency, the instantaneity of finance, overnight sudden gains or
the accelerated speed of land grabs. The progressive version of the future
exemplified by social processes in this field is the figure of redemption, as in the
economic and religious concept of deliverance and release.
Third, the field of autochthony and custom operates under the logics of
exclusion and demand. Its versions of national and regional political history are

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shaped by ritual, belief, relatedness and kinship. Neo-nativist aspirations reenhance received notions of ethnic identity, regional and national belonging,
social exclusion and the obliteration of foreignness. This is illustrated in practices
both governmental and local of indigenous ethnic and regional identity, belonging
and return to the land as the basis for inclusion and entitlement.
The practices within this field cast onto the future versions of the past that
blend in uncanny ways nationalist historiography and myths of origins. They
represent the temporality of recursion, and their most negative effect appear as
xenophobia or denial of the other as a foreign, absolutely different being, devoid
of rights.
The affirmative version of the future espoused by these experiences is the
temporality of recognition, understood not as dialectical reconciliation between
groups or sublation by the state but rather as a true play and coexistence of
troubled historical difference.
Even though the current actuality of these three composite fields is quite
tangible, African sociality is not absolutely fragmented into compartmentalized
sectors. These domains constantly intermingle in multiple processes and
experiences. The field of governance espouses custom and its figures of
authority as object of juridical reform and democratic decentralization. Donors
and foreign experts prescribe the reinforcement of authority of chiefs and elders
as democratic panacea in post-conflict situations. Development agencies and
NGOs implement projects through articulations with chiefs, councils of elders or
kinship structures. Public/private ventures in the field of global health articulate
with figures of autochthony such as healers, diviners and pastors. Customary
chieftaincies and ethnic communities own vast extensions of land and exploit
precious natural resources, conduct capitalist investment and sign contracts with
foreign corporations, governments, or negotiate with trans-national financial
institutions, bypassing the nation-state. A multiplicity of practices blend religious
aspiration with mass-mediated ritual belief, electronic telecommunication and
financial devices. Movements of autochthony based on myths of indigenous
identity generate demands of legal rights and cultural or economic entitlements.
Thus, the three fields are interrelated in their embrace of a conception of
times to come as future anterior. Despite the multiplicity of social experiences
encompassed within them, they all present variations of an ideology that affirms
the primacy of a past that is being projected onto the future. The processes
surveyed in this volume contest the stance of a broad variety of contemporary
regimes of governance and practices on the ground, according to which Africa
merely will have been but a reiteration of an (im)perfect past.
Space
The volume illustrates how an untimely Africa is additionally a dislocated
and deterritorialized continent by showing how its imaginations of the future are
built upon a reference to space. One of these crucial allusions revolves around a
re-linking of the ruralurban continuum. Another key element surveyed in the
following chapters is the way locality re-signifies global flows, with these spatial
processes reconfiguring questions of law, citizenship, labor and identity
formation. A third element refers to one of the main legacies from colonial
regimes still impinging on the political present, as the processes described here,
both deeply localized and inserted in trans-regional networks, show the
evanescence of the project of nation-state sovereignty and its boundaries.

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Each of the social fields presented in the previous section, besides the
particular conceptions of the future they engender, also crucially operate on
particular spaces. First, the field of capitalistic economy mainly unfolds today in
the continent at extractive enclaves, rural land and localized zones of intensive
exploitation of labor power and natural resources, fragments of territory
increasingly crossed by the ethereal spaces of finance and telecommunication.
Second, new juridico-political developments currently unfold in privileged
spaces such as camps, militarized areas, local districts as objects of legal reform,
provincial and regional spaces as loci of debate over constitutional and legalreligious issues, and liminal zones linking the urban and the rural.
Third, the field of the customary today holds its main practices around
various spaces of eternal return such as sacred sites, landmarks, homelands,
places of ancestral origin or centers of articulation of networks of kinship and
relatedness.
Showing the salience of territoriality for most political and cultural
imaginations of futurity, the essays collected here demonstrate how the
singularity of place interrupts the designs of global time, its universal measure of
value and the linear temporality of its legal and political regimes. They chart
local experiences taking place in trans-national circuits between metropolitan
capitals and former colonial towns, sites of worship and places of origins that
structure kinship networks and communities of relatedness, borders around which
ethnicity and foreignness are demarcated, processes of urban development that
meet haunting imaginations of the city, rural territories of war machines, avantgarde performance stages, the ethereal materiality of film and media, the locales
of juridical reform and governance regimes, and the otherworldly spaces of
apocalyptic spirituality.
Mapping out emergent time/space formations as platforms of the future,
the essays in this volume disclose locality as an event. As global regimes of
governance and capital aim at demarcating and reforming the local in order to
capture it for broad programs of extraction and control, the essays show how
African localities, saturated with vibrant creativity, are dislocated spaces that
contest the genealogy of redemption and recognition, as well as the teleology of
transition.
Rater than the quintessential locus of abandonment, situated at the
receiving end of global flows, African localities, understood as a textured sense of
belonging, as situated memories, dreams, anxiety and norm, constitute moments
in time that shape and reconfigure the global.
Local histories and spaces deflect the ethical self-righteousness of
intervention and the linear time of governance, privatized adjustment of the
economy and development. These chapters show how African localities are
singular places of sedimentation and experiment, particular sites of memory,
creation and aspiration that produce a definitive inflection on the universal. The
African locality, as event, interrupts the primacy of linear time, opening up the
question of futurity as never predetermined, as always irreducibly open.
Life
Beyond the powerful doxa of crisis as permanent state of emergency, the
essays disclose sites of potentiality and emergence. They trace experiences of
an impending time emerging in places of ordinariness such as new sites and
dynamics of migration, novel credos and religious sentiment, revamped rituals of

10

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belonging in life and death, new urban local configurations, emergent juridical
regimes, or incipient imaginaries of foreignness, exit and exile, in sum new forms
of departure-as-return. Beyond the usual depiction of spectacular times, these
events show that the ordinary and the quotidian are in themselves exceptional
and originary.
The following chapters do not reflect the usual epistemological depiction of
African precarity as a supposedly all too real landscape of dereliction. Rather,
they engage an ontological precariousness, as a condition of possibility for any
imagination of the future. They portray spaces of the everyday and the times of
commonplace and routine, showing how among the cracks of the decayed
edifices of sovereignty and crisis, precariousness is the necessary, if unstable
infrastructure of potentiality, of any virtual possibility.
The essays implicitly beg the question: What forthcoming modalities can
be observed in these practices of city dwelling, monetary exchange,
displacement and migration, labor, marriage and filiation, urban longing and rural
belonging, mediated religion, technocratic discourse or apocalyptic belief? These
are singular experiences of potentiality that interrupt the trans-national regimes
that try to uniformly shape up local identities and socio-cultural formations. The
essays chart these futureoriented practices as a politics of life.
This politics of life does not merely reacts in the face of critical conditions.
Its singular practices related to rite, belief, symbol, laughter, displacement,
creation, or redemption are affirmative. They do not reflect a history of crisis,
as mere enactment of violence or decay mirroring perilous and desperate
conditions or some fundamental essential or historical substratum.
These practices of emergent future life enact the untimely condition of the
continent, which takes place beyond biopolitics and the capture of life by law in
liminal zones of exception. They also avoid the ambiguous areas where
necropolitical regimes exploit resources and confine populations as mere
recipients of the gift of death. Rather, these experiences signal a horizon of
justice as a never-ending aspiration, as a quest for redemption from total
capitalistic subsumption in a continent, a world indeed, deemed a space of
absolute immanence, presenting no exits or outside.
Saturated with conflicting views, these ordinary spaces show the
emergence of a new dimension, where life can, at least momentarily, capture the
law, thus reversing the current paradigm for the governance of crisis.
Conceiving the imagination of the future as an untimely dislocation of the
present, the following chapters recount experiences outside the law and the
oscillating economy of biopolitics and necropolitics. Located after the strictures
and paradigms of the colonial and postcolonial moment, the situations they
depict go beyond the programs of governance of the past and the present alike.
They resist, as well, the reduction of the heterogeneous and unproductive to a
story of disorder. Rather, they tend stubbornly, in their different ways, toward an
open-ended array of untimely futures.

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Draft, 11/23/12

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