Africa, India and the Postcolonial: notes towards a Praxis of infliction.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Adesanmi, Pius
• Date: 01 January 2003

Beyond the occasional glancing references and the deployment of intellectual authority, the absence of an authentic and well sustained African input into the paradigm of contemporary postcolonialism is one of the most intriguing intellectual developments of our time. Adebayo Williams This is one of the many reasons Africa has been absent in the dominant varieties of poststructural theory, especially postcolonial theory. We should not, of course, attribute the absence of Africa from poststructural or postcolonial theories to any bad faith on the part of critics associated with these modes of reading and interpretation. We should, rather, focus on the lessons to be learnt from Africa's absence from the theoretical configurations of our time. Simon Gikandi Is Africa contributing efficiently and sufficiently to the growing and monstrously disparate body of knowledge we all now refer to as postcolonial theory? (1) Judging from current reflection and discussion among specialists, it would seem that initial anxieties about the relevance and applicability of postcolonial theory to African literatures (and postcoloniality to the African condition) are now compounded by even more troubling anxieties about the quality of Africa's contribution to the field. (2) Participants in Anglophone and Francophone African scholarly circuits do not experience this unease in the same way. Since postcolonial theory has an essentially Anglo-Saxon provenance, the problem in Anglophone Africa is more about the slow pace of African contribution to the major sites of high-tension postcolonial theorizing. In Francophone Africa, however, the issue is about a near total African absence, a point that is usually related to the reluctance of French and Francophone studies in general to embrace postcolonial theory. (3)

With regard to Anglophone Africa, Adebayo Williams' engaging reflections in his essay 'The Postcolonial Flaneur and Other Fellow-Travellers: Conceits for a Narrative of Redemption', and Pal Ahluwalia's stringent critique of Williams in his Politics and Postcolonial Theory: African Inflections, share the merit of drawing attention to a very interesting dimension of the question: India. (4) The overwhelming presence of Indian thinkers in the field, the centrality of their thought to postcolonial discursive formations, and the concomitant production of India as the major subject/ object of postcolonial theorizing, all serve to underscore the question of African presence and participation. I will return to this question as teased out by Williams and Ahluwalia and its overall implications for African knowledge production.

First, a necessary digression. My first serious encounter with the question of the quality (and quantity) of African contribution to postcolonial theory occurred in the summer of 2000 during a lecture tour of South Africa and Lesotho. In Johannesburg I had occasion to spend a literary soiree with Harry Garuba, a Nigerian literary scholar and poet. Garuba and I reflected generally on the state of African knowledge production, but trouble started as soon as we got to postcolonial theory. The names we kept citing as central, globalized actors in the arena of high-tension postcolonial theorizing were not from Africa. They included Ranajit Guha, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ashis Nandy, R. Radhrakrishnan, Satya Mohanty and Chandra Mohanty. It appeared to us that, all things considered, postcolonial theory was a polite name for Indian theory. We compared notes on our research explorations in major scholarly journals where some of the seminal contributions to postcolonial theory had made a cacophonous appearance: Critical Inquiry, Boundary2, Representations, Social Text, Cultural Critique, Race and Class, Dispositio/n, and Intervention. We arrived at a disturbing conclusion: African appearances in those hallowed sites were few and far between. We ended our discussion both thoroughly dissatisfied with what we considered the reality of Africa's absence from 'the pre-occupation of postcolonial studies', to borrow the title of a significant volume edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. (5)

I do not know what direction Garuba's reflections on the issue have taken since that discussion but my own thoughts have evolved in such a way as to disagree with our approach to the question and the seemingly de-contextualized conclusions we reached at the time. In what follows, I explore an intricate network of situations, circumstances and politics that have combined to produce what I will call an appearance of African absence from the sites of postcolonial knowledge production. I will argue that the trouble with Africa is not so much in the area of production as in the area of naming and privileging what has been produced. The pre-eminence of India will be explained as a consequence of a certain strategy of infliction that I will recommend as desirable in the African situation. My submissions will intersect with those of Williams and Ahluwalia, interrogating them as necessary.

While thinkers have come to postcolonial theory from every imaginable discipline and have proceeded to use it over the years for myriad ideological purposes, it is still possible to identify certain recurring transcendental tropes in the thought of most practitioners of postcolonial discourse. We can, for instance, agree on the point that virtually everyone involved in postcolonial theorizing has had to confront the problem posed by the temporal determination of the concept. The problem is occasioned by the semantic implication of the prefix 'post' which, if left unproblematized, tends to imply a linear structuring of the time of the other, something that becomes significant only after a supposed overcoming of colonialism. The questions--When is the postcolonial? Where does it begin?--have been posed to the point of iterative superfluity. Another recurrent issue that specialists have had to confront is the question of geography. Because of the centrality of the historical process of empire to postcolonial theory, questions have arisen about the geographical boundaries of empire. Why does the argument always focus on the British empire? What right do we have to exclude the geographical (and temporal) spaces covered by the Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, French and Spanish empires? What about the pre-colonial empires of western Sudan and the forest kingdoms that flourished in Africa between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries? The empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhay and Kanem Bornu were, after all, imperial political formations that conquered their neighbours and turned them into vassals in a process that was very much colonial in nature. And we know that the subjugated peoples articulated strategies of resistance and subversion. Why do such strategies not figure in our reflections as anti-imperialist and postcolonial praxes? Who says they cannot, should not?

Above the common tropes found in postcolonial argument towers the all important question of the geographical and institutional location of those who produce the knowledges which tend to be privileged as postcolonial. And this is where the problems related to African participation commence. It must be borne in mind that postcolonial theory emerged in an internationalist context marked by the reconfiguration of the idioms of political, economic and cultural interaction. These global realignments are indicated in a range of tropes. With the so-called decline of the nation-state, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the triumphalist consecration of homo occidentalis americanus as the world's only superpower, and the advent of a late-capitalist order supervised by transnational and multinational corporations (TNCs and MNCs), (6) we witness the symbolic shift from 'borders', as boundary-maintaining mechanisms, to 'interactive contact zones' (7) or 'borderlands'. (8) These developments, regulated and determined by Appadurai's famous 'five scapes', (9) have eventuated in a massive flow of migrant populations from ex-colonial spaces to the metropolitan centres of Euro-America, occasioning the emergence of third worlds within the First World. Globalization, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are the buzzwords the academy has fashioned to apprehend these novel realities.

The re-concentration of the global indices of cultural determination in the West have two consequences for postcolonial theory. First, the writers whose works provide the raw material for postcolonialism's theoretical preoccupations tend to be writers based in the West, involved, as it were, in the quotidian politics of diasporic subjecthood and identity. Chinua Achebe, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Kazuo Ishiguro, Edwige Danticat, Hanif Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Okri, Jack Mapanje, Buchi Emecheta, Isabelle Allende, Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry tend to attract more postcolonial studies perspectives than their ex-centric counterparts based in Africa, Asia and Latin America. (10) In the cultural contexts of globalization and transnationalism, these writers' works are described as having carved out 'a new international and inter-cultural space of representation', to borrow the expression of Liselotte Glage and Ruediger Kunow. (11) The second consequence is that the thinkers whose works are considered emblematic of postcolonial theorizing also tend to be based in the West. Diasporic writers and intellectuals have thus come to be constructed as virtually the sole producers of postcolonial knowledge. Historian Arif Dirlik has been largely instrumental in making the problematic equation of the postcolonial with the diasporic. In his now classic essay, 'The Postcolonial Aura', the postcolonial, he asserts, begins 'when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe'. Although he claims that this statement, proferred in answer to a well-known...