The Politics of Time E-Book
19,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is undergoing a major historical shift: Africa, and the Global South more generally, is increasingly becoming a principal theatre in which the future of the planet plays itself out. But not only this: Africa is at the same time emerging as one of the great laboratories for novel forms of social, economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life. Often arising in unexpected places, these new forms of life materialize in practices that draw deeply from collective memory while simultaneously assuming distinctly contemporary, even futuristic, guises. In November 2017, the second session of the Ateliers de la pensée - Workshops of Thought - was held in Dakar, Senegal. Fifty African and diasporic intellectuals and artists participated and their debates unfolded along numerous thematic lines, approached from the standpoints of many different disciplines. This volume is the result of that encounter. Among the many topics discussed were the concurrence and entanglement of multiple temporalities, the politics of life in the Anthropocene, the project of decolonization, and the preservation and transmission of different ways of knowing. At a time when the world is haunted by the specter of its own end, the contributors to this volume ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize hold of other options for the future - not only for Africa, but for the world. The Politics of Time and its companion volume, To Write the Africa World, will be indispensable works for anyone interested in Africa - its past, present, and future - and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 636
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr
I
From Thinking Identity to Thinking African Becomings
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Against Negation: Saying Who and What We Are
The Question of Becomings: Thinking and Living Pluralism
Religious Pluralism
Cultural Pluralism
Conclusion: Affirming an African Presence in a World of Cultural Diversity
Notes
Notes for a Maroon FeminismFrom the “Body Double” to the Body as Such
Hourya Bentouhami
Liberation: A Struggle against Recognition
“Liberty Is More Valuable than Life” (Harriet Jacobs)
Conclusion: Maroon Revolution and the Experiment of “Equaliberty”
Bibliography
Notes
Weaving, a Craft for ThoughtWriting and Thinking in Africa, or the Knot of the World’s Great Narrative
Jean-Luc Raharimanana
II
Africa and the New Western Figures of Personal Status Law
Abdoul Aziz Diouf
Introduction
The Body of the African Subject in the West
The current state of personal status in the West
The territory of expression of the African body in the West
The Body of the Western Subject in Africa
The presupposed acceptance of the Western body in Africa
Prolegomena to an African
ordre public
that would limit the range of possibilities of the Western body
Notes
Rethinking IslamOr, the Oxymoron of “Secular Theocracy”
Rachid Id Yassine
Bibliography
Notes
The Impossible MeetingA Free Interpretation of J. M. Coetzee’s
Disgrace
Hemley Boum
Notes
III
Circulations
Achille Mbembe
Situations of Enclavement
The Contraction of the World and the Violence of Borders
Let No African Be Treated as a Stranger on the Continent
No State without a Population Abroad
Notes
On the ReturnThe Political Practices of the African Diaspora
Nadia Yala Kisukidi
Desire to Return and Suspicion
Diasporic privilege
Identitarian obsession
Rhetorics of the majority
Thinking the Absent Community
The experience of the absent community
“Home … is many things”: Afro-cosmopolitanism and multiple identities
Return and double presence
Round Trip and Geopolitics of Hope
Afro-diasporic Renaissances: two brief accounts
Round trip and solidarities
Practices
Bibliography
Notes
Reopening Futures
Felwine Sarr
A Reconsidered Relationship to One’s Cultural Resources
On the Need to Reinvent Political Forms
On the Need to Reinvent the Economic
Uchronias and Counterfactuals
Conclusion
Notes
IV
Un/learningRethinking Teaching in Africa
Françoise Vergès
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Emancipation
Imagining the African Campus
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
M
anifesto of
A
telier IV
Notes
The Bewitchment of HistoryMohammed Dib’s
Who Remembers the Sea
Soraya Tlatli
Allegory in the Debate over Postcolonialism
“Terrible and Legendary”
The Bewitchment of History
Allegory according to Benjamin and Adorno
The Sea
Notes
Currency, Sovereignty, DevelopmentRevisiting the Question of the CFA Franc
Ndongo Samba Sylla
Some Historical Context
The Pillars of the FCFA System
The Question of Monetary Sovereignty
On the Economic Impact of the CFA Franc
System of financial repression
Dysfunctional economic arrangement
Mechanism of extraction
The Specious Argument of Economic Stability
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Statistical sources
Notes
V
Memories of the World, Memory-World
Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux
Notes
Cum patior Africa
The Political Production of Regimes of “the Nigh”
Nadine Machikou
Of a Regime of Compassionate Imperialism Whose Essence Is Vertical …
Emotion as a sediment of an apparatus of power
A Suffering that Produces Legitimate Victimhood
… towards a regime of compassionate self-sufficiency whose essence is horizontal
Africa’s subversion of compassion through self-care
Towards the African, that neighbor: contributions of “care”
Notes
The Sahara: A Space of Connection within an Emergent Africa, from the Anthropocene to the Spring of Geo-Cultural Life
Benaouda Lebdai
The Sahara, Space of Exchange
The Sahara, Literary Visions
The Sahara, Geophysical Space
Bibliography
Notes
Migrations, Narrations, the Refugee Condition
Dominic Thomas
Migrations: The Wretched of the Mediterranean
Narrations of Precarity
The Refugee Condition
Notes
VI
Humanity and Animality(Re)thinking Anthropocentrism
Bado Ndoye
Notes
The Tree Frogs’ Distress
Lionel Manga
Traps
Fragile, Handle with Care!
The Cannon Ball
Extended Commensality
Notes
To Speak and Betray Nothing?
Rodney Saint-Éloi
The Paths of the Voice
Ibrahima Wane
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
The Politics of Time
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
To Write the Africa World
Valentin Y. Mudimbe,
The Scent of the Father
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
The Politics of Time
Imagining African Becomings
Edited by
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr
Translated by Philip Gerard
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Politique des temps © 2019 Editions Jimsaan, Dakar, Sénégal
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Excerpt from ‘The Refugee Crisis Isn’t about Refugees. It’s about Us’ by Ai Weiwei, 2 February 2018. Copyright © Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2022
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5109-5 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5110-1 – paperback
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936447
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
PrefaceAchille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr
This book represents a sequel to and continuation of its preceding volume, To Write the Africa World. Authored by many, it is the product of The Ateliers of Thought in Dakar, an autonomous, collaborative platform for intellectual and artistic work that was established in 2016 for the purpose of investigating the present and future of our world from the vantage point of Africa, and of contributing through these efforts to the renovation of critical thought in the contemporary context.
New voyages of thought are being charted across the globe. The routes they take today are not necessarily those of yesterday, when everything routinely passed through Europe. In the Global South, new and original voices are rising up and, with boldly new terms and categories, taking on the challenge of thinking our shared earth. Moreover, although its indicators may have yet to adequately distinguish themselves from the daily noise, a new certainty is slowly but surely imposing itself. Africa is not merely the place where part of the planet’s future is currently playing itself out. Africa is one of the great laboratories from which unprecedented forms of today’s social, economic, political, cultural, and artistic life are emerging.
Often, these new forms of life, thought, and the social come to light in unexpected places. Brought forward by actors who are neither highly visible nor very well known, these forms become concrete in assemblages that draw deeply from the long memory of societies even as they assume strikingly contemporary, indeed futuristic, guises. This polymorphic creativity and the velocity that comes with it cast serious doubt upon bodies of knowledge passed down from the distant and not-so-distant past, at times cruelly exposing their limits. The new forms call for an unprecedented renovation of paradigms and methods, of analytical tools, vocabulary, and discourses – in short, they call for the creation of new languages and bodies of knowledge with the power to mobilize the archives of the Whole-World [Tout-Monde] to provide new intelligibility for the various upheavals in process.
In this book, the authors weigh in on one of the upheavals in process, the upheaval of time [temps] in the plural – which is to say, that of multiple times [des temps] and their entanglement. For it is not only a question of acceleration and runaway systems, but also of times moving at multiple speeds, of times composed of different momentums, continuities, ruptures, to say nothing of different regressions, dispersions, and bifurcations. In short, at least when one looks from Africa, all one sees are times in migration [temps en migrance].
To describe this concatenation of times, the contributors to the present volume have practiced a kind of writing that is itself in movement – even in transit – and that mixes a diverse set of vocabularies. They draw eclectically from works of literature, philosophy, history, geography, art, economics, sociology, pedagogy, and poetry to weave together their problematics, to stretch them further, to translate them and to transpose them. The book has been deliberately composed in several genres, and the reader is invited to move freely between them. Taken together, the different contributions not only express a form of reasoning at once malleable and metamorphic; they trace the lineaments of a common concern – namely, how to envision a politics of time in contemporary conditions.
But what do we mean by “politics of time”? On a planetary scale, we are witnessing the emergence and crystallization of a new cycle in the redistribution of power, resources, and value. Another partition of the world is being charted at the same time as other geo-graphies [géo-graphies] of the Earth are being traced. If this cycle awakens hope in expanded possibilities of life and action for many human groups, it is no less the case that, more or less everywhere, it produces collisions, promotes an unequal redistribution of vulnerability, and provokes new and ruinous compromises with forms of violence belonging at once to the future and to the archaic past.
More than ever, the world is dominated by the specter of its own end and by the fear of obliteration and extinction. With the collapse of grand hopes for transformation, the idea of a happy ending was thrown out, opening the door to a proliferation of cynical fictions, beliefs, and multiple forms of bewitchment. Two forms of disenchanted thinking dominate our era. The first – apocalyptic thinking – invites us to contemplate the coming collapse and to plan for the end. It is concerned with how we will finally come down to earth. The other applies itself to the task of rethinking utopia and the future in the language of technological messianism. Human redemption, so goes the claim, will paradoxically be achieved through technological escalation.
The contributions assembled in this volume distance themselves from these thematics of closure and vertigo. They ask whether one can, by taking Africa as a point of departure, seize hold of any options on the future. In other words, is it possible to politicize time beyond the alternatives of apocalypse and technolatry [technolâtrie]? If so, then how, in what terms, and to what end? Are there different possibilities for inhabiting Africa – and, beyond Africa, the world?
This is no simple task, since in one kind of narrative Africa has long been expelled from the time of history. This is certainly the reason why the greatest part of African thought has devoted so much energy to repoliticizing time. In this context, repoliticizing time has consisted in recovering the traces and reconstructing the memory of the past, not only as proof of historicity but also as a labor on oneself, with the hope that this work of rehabilitation would in the end permit the formation of other ties with oneself and with the world. Repoliticizing time has long consisted in the attempt to seize the past as a transformative force. Creatively reinterpreted and retranslated, such a force was thought capable of opening up new spaces of possibility. It could spark a movement that would carry Africa out of the waiting room of history where the continent’s external masters thought they had confined it. Under such conditions, time would no longer be experienced as an uninterrupted succession of ruptures, constraints, and impossibilities. By reconnecting with the transformative kernel of its past, Africa could at last return to being a power – which is to say, something that contains its own capacity within itself.
The contemporaneity of multiple worlds and of different historical depths has always been a feature of African societies. This volume is no longer concerned with refuting the theses, now old and anachronistic, that history is immobile, or stalled, or waiting to begin.
How might one transform the present and the past into a future? How might one produce a bifurcation in the real? Imagine other African possibilities? Invent ways for passing from the potential to its multiple actualizations? These, we suspect, have been the questions at the heart of the modern study of Africa and its diasporas. How, therefore, can one envision a politics of the future, if not, as a number of contributions to this volume suggest, by reopening a space for the unpredictable and the possibility of an infinity of becomings? It is most certainly not a question of liquidating the past, but rather of attaining that juncture where different times meet, the precise point of their entanglement, of seeking out new ways to inhabit the world and new chains of relations. The time for refutation is over. It is now time for conditional affirmation – that is, for the exploration of other possibilities for a future yet to be written, a future with neither promise nor guarantee, an emergent future rich in possibilities and charged with life.
It is this emergence that the present volume heralds.
