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Abstract:
In bis latest work. Sortir de la grande nuit, tbe Cameroonian social tbeorist
AcbiUe Mbembe nuances bis description of tbe ontological status of tbe
postcolonial African subject, wbicb be bad tbeorized extensively in bis best-
known text. On the Postcolony, and at tbe same time exploits tbe conceptual
resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy's lexical innovations. Tbis recent
text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiograpbical essay, and tbe gesture of
tbis 'reinscription' is critical to our understanding of Mbembe's status as a
contemporary 'postcolonial tbinker', and tbe way in wbicb be positions bimself
in relation to a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial tbeory. Witbin tbis
trajectory, I argue tbat we can read fruitfully bis relationsbip to tbree influential
figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyob.
Deconstruction As Auto-decolonization
Otherwise Responsible
Remember Ruben
How, tben, can we read Mbembe's avowed debt to, and poeticized
memory of, tbe Cameroonian anticolonial miUtant journalist Ruben,
botb in tbe early essay 'Writing Africa from a Rupture', and its
rewriting in Emerging from the Dark Night, wbere tbe 'deconstructive'
logic of bis postcolonial thinking is foregrounded more openly? Ruben
serves as tbe focus for a kind of double but contradictory imperative:
inscribing bis memory is both an act of commemoration, and a means
of liberation from a past wbose history always functions potentiaUy
as an enclosure, a means of containing identity. Writing is tbus for
Mbembe an act of bonouring an essential attachment to Ruben, to
tbe political tradition be represents, and to tbe past and tbe country
tbat made him. At tbe same time be affirms tbe necessity of tbe
dissolution, or dclosion, of tbis bond. Indeed, Ruben could be said
to figure tbe irretrievable 'object' tbat Africa became for Mbembe
once be left Cameroon, but we can perbaps now better read tbe
continuing presence of Ruben in bis text and in bis tbinking as a
'spectral' object, in mucb tbe same way that Derrida talks of tbe radical
undecidabiUty of tbe ontology of gbostly presences in Specters of Marx.
In 'Writing Africa', Ruben is described as a kind of gbost, neitber
present nor absent, neither bere nor tbere, a trace of tbe 'nigbt-of-tbe-
postcolonial-African-world' wbo is at tbe very source of Mbembe's
writing, or of Mbembe as a writer. He is tbe gap in wbicb, or from
wbicb Mbembe's 'writing Africa' can emerge, a writing tbat can only
begin once it has dispeUed both the myths of authenticity and of tbe
iUusory promises of radical politics. 'Writing Africa' is thus a different
(postcolonial) responsibility tbat goes beyond tbe responsibility of
nationalist representation as the speaking 'for' one's people, or one's
country, or one's place of origin. In tbis sense, Mbembe's Ruben
points to tbe need for Africa to be otber tban itself, to look to
tbe future and beyond itselfwhat Mbembe proposes towards tbe
end of Emerging from the Dark Night as a determined, outward-facing
Mbembe 's (Re-) Writing of Postcolonial Africa 419
'afropoUtanism' and as Derrida reminds us in Specters of Marx, tbe
undecidable temporality of gbosts always looks to botb tbe future and
tbe past. Tbe 'poetics' of tbis 'writing Africa' is tbus ultimately at tbe
beart of a very strong political agenda:
Afropolitanism is thus not tbe same tbing as Panafricanism or Ngritude.
Afropolitanism is a styUstics and a politics, an aestbetics and a certain poetics of tbe
world. It is a way of being in tbe world wbicb as a principle refuses any identity
as victim (...). It also takes a political and cultural position witb respect to tbe
nation, to race, and to tbe question of difference in general. {EDN, 232)
NOTES
1 Acbille Mbembe, 'crire l'Afrique partir d'une faille'. Politique Africaine,
51 (1993), 87. My translation. Subsequent references will be included in
tbe text, foUowing tbe abbreviation WA. Mbembe is referring to Micbel
de Certeau, The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988).
2 Martin Heidegger, 'Wbat are Poets for?' in Poetry, Language, Thought,
translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 89-139.
3 Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique dcolonise (Paris: La Dcouverte,
2010). Subsequent references wiU be included in tbe text, foUowing tbe
abbreviation EDN. Translations are my own.
4 Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity [2005],
translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Micbael B. Smitb (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
5 On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
6 The Creation of the World or Clobalization, translated by Franois Raffoul and
David Pettigrew (New York: SUNY Press, 2007).
7 See, for example. La Dmocratie venir: autour de Jacques Derrida, edited by
Marie-Louise MaUet (Paris: Galile, 2004).
420 Paragraph
S See 'What is Postcolonial Thinking?', interview with Olivier Mongin,
Nathalie Lempereur and Jean-Louis Schlegel, translated by John Fletcher,
online journal Esprit (2008), http:/'www.eurozine.com/journals/esprit/
issue/2006-12-15.html (accessed 21 May 2012).
9 Interestingly, the split revealed by this paradox echoes the marked polarization
of the field of postcolonial studies more generally, which tends to be divided
between on the one hand critics inspired by the theories of what is loosely
referred to as French poststructuralism, and on the other those who are
sceptical about what they perceive as an a-political, textualist emphasis, and
who advocate the necessity of attending to the material conditions of life in
postcolonial cultures.
10 See, for example. Pal Ahluwalia, 'Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism's
Colonial Roots', Postcolonial Studies 8.2 (2005), 137-54, and Jane Hiddleston,
Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2010).
11 Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London:
Routledge, 1990).
12 Robert Young, 'Deconstruction and the Postcolonial,' in Deconstructions:
A User's Guide, edited by Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave, 2000), 187-210.
13 I have tried to tease out the conceptual tensions of Young's reading of Derrida
in my Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory (Liverpool and
Chicago: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
14 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 16.
15 See Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: "The Mystical Foundation of
Authority'", Cardozo Law Review, special issue Deconstruction and the Possibility
of Justice 11.5-6 (1990), 920-1045.
16 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, translated by
George CoUins (London: Verso, 2006).
17 For an important and original re-reading of Senghor's 'political imagination'
along these same lines, see Gary Wilder's excellent The French Imperial Nation-
State: Ngritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2005).
18 Jacques Derrida, 'Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of "Religion" at
the Limits of Reason Alone' in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002), 40-101.
19 Derrida develops the thematic of the 'wolf most extensively in his recently
published seminars, translated by Geoffrey Bennington as The Beast and the
Sovereign (reviewed by Marian Hobson in this issue of Paragraph). See also
Mbembe's short essay, 'La Rpublique et sa Bte: propos des meutes dans
les banlieues de France', Africultures 60 (Oct-Dec 2005), 176-81.
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