Imperialism Aff and Afro-Centrism Bad - 5th Week

7/27/2019 Imperialism Aff and Afro-Centrism Bad - 5th Week

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Afro-centric Solutions bad and A-to the Imperialism K

Aff Section Affirmative Frontline p. 2-6 Backlines

o Ext off #1 Permutation p. 7

o Ext off #2 Leads to Conflict p. 8o Ext off #3 Precludes Political Action p. 9-11o Ext off #4 Material Focus Good p. 12o Ext off #5 Postcolonialists Wrong p. 13

Specific answerso AT: Mbembe p. 14-18o They Feed Capitalism/Globalization p. 19o They stay Locked in Colonialism p. 20o They Make Revolution Impossible p. 21o The Double Bind of Violence p. 22o They Mask Neo-colonialism p. 23o Depoliticization Turn p. 24o Indigenous Solutions Fail p. 25-26

Neg section Local Good p. 27-28 Postcolonialism Good p. 29-30 Outside Aid Bad p. 31-33 AT: Dirlik p. 34


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Aff irmative Frontl ine (1/5)

1. Permutation: do the plan and all non-mutually exclusive parts of the alternative. This solves best-accepting some forms of essentialized identity is key to creating a unified voice of resistance.Albert Paolini, lecturer in International Relations at LaTrobe University in Australia, 1999, NavigatingModernity: Postcolonialism, Identity, and International Relations, bjx

In postcolonialism, this sensibility informs most attempts at carving out a subversive and radicalspace in opposition to Western dominance and hegemony. Yet its moral and intellectual force hascome to unwind quickly in the late modern age, more so than the emphasis on resistance, with theincreasing acceptance of nonessentialist and hybrid accounts of culture and history. The irony isthat at the general, universal level, the focus on cultural difference has served an important empoweringrole whose coherence weakens considerably once the specific and particular aspects of most cultural

positions are taken into account. Thus the retreat into difference and particularity makes sense onlyat a broad level; once the actual differences and particularities within and between variouspostcolonial cultures are acknowledged, there can be no one authentic or essential voice ofopposition and resistance somehow untainted by the processes of colonialism and modernity. Thisseemingly innocuous point has been difficult to concede. Postmoderns such as Spivak have tried toovercome the problems inherent in attempting to establish an independent subaltern ofpostcolonial voice by utilizing a "strategic essentialism," that is, allowing for some form ofessentialized identity sufficient strategically to fulfill the requirements of opposition and resistanceand simultaneously accepting the impossibility of any authentic or "native" identity. This allows

us, with proper acknowledgment of the necessary caveats, to move beyond a poststructural impasse.More modernist thinkers like Said have found it difficult, even within a postcolonial guise, to let go ofessentialized constructions of subjectivity that lay the groundwork for a differentiated identity.

2. The alternative fails- postcolonialism's hybridity empirically fails to stop wars such as the conflict inSomalia. Renouncing agency in the affairs of Africa has only allowed more violence and death to occur.Adebayo Williams, visiting fellow at Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1997, Third World Quarterly, Vol 18, No 5, pp821-841, 1997, The postcolonial flaneur and other fellow-travellers: conceits for a narrative of redemption,

bjxLacanian psychoanalysis is a revisionist assault on the Freudian concept of a coherent subject. Theconcept of hybridity is a rethreading of a revisionism. Its crisis is thus underwritten by theconceptual impasse of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean philosophy. Underlying the wholeamalgam is the old empiricist problematic with its fragmented and fragmenting technique, itspreference for scattered and isolated facts which spare the mind uncomfortable politicalconclusions. Hence the new critical preference of hybridity for the reading of isolated texts rather

than the totality of literary production. There can be little doubt as to why this methodologicalmonadism, this preference for mini-narratives as opposed to grand narratives and synthesisshould and an ideal breeding ground in an academe still in thrall to new criticism and its benignmutations. Postcolonialism, as it is marked by the concept of hybridity, is a symptom pretendingto be a diagnosis. The intellectual charms of contingency and the renunciation of agency have notstopped the agents of history. Hybridity did not stop three wars between India and Pakistan,despite the fact that the latter was hacked out of the former on the eve of independence. Indeed,neither has hybridity prevented the homogenous clans of Somalia from permanently waging waramong themselves nor did it prevent the grotesque barbarity visited upon US soldiers in thatunhappy land. Hybridity or even assimilation did not confuse a superpower like France as to thereal object and objective of its forty three documented interventions in `postcolonial Africa, andneither did it dissuade the Nigerian military authorities from executing Kenule Saro-Wiwa, whowas making legitimate demands for his distinct nationality within the realities of a multinationalNigeria. Thus it is that an initial beneficial insight into the schizophrenic nature of the self, theoverdetermined instability of race, class, nationalities and their textualisations is turned into a premature

arrival at the place of the golden truth.


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3. Postcolonial criticism upholds the conditions that produced the need forcriticism in the first place. Its focus solely on the local precludes collective

action which is key to challenging domination.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and AnthropologyUniversity of Oregon, 1998, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of GlobalCapitalism, bjx

Postcolonial criticism provides an example of how cultural criticism through an inflationof its claims or an unbridled expression of its scope, may dissipate its critical energies toend up in an uncritical, and narcissistic, celebration of its own novelty. Like itsprogenitor, postmodernsim, postcolonialism has its intellectual basis in the poststructuralistrevolt against the very real limitations of Eurocentric modernity (in both its liberal andMarxist versions), and has answered a very real critical need; not only in calling into questionthe obliviousness to the local of generalized notions of modernity, but also in calling attentionto problems of a novel nature that have emerged with recent transformation in global politicaland social relations. The former includes, in addition to the homogenizing claims of

modernity, its oppositional by-products that reify collective identities of one kind or another,with consequences that are often divisive, at times genocidal. The latter entails both thestructural transformations that have attended the globalization of capitalism, and the relatedreconfiguation of post-World War II economic and political boundaries with the emergence ofnew social forces that find in the scrambling of reified identities outlets for expressing theirown desires for liberation. Postcolonial criticism has quickly spent its critical power,however, as its questioning of totalizing solutions has turned into exclusion fromcriticism of the historical and the structural contexts for the local, without reference towhich criticism itself is deprived of critical self-consciousness and, as it celebrates itself,knowingly or unknowingly also celebrates the conditions that produced it.Whetherpostcolonial criticism has been appropriated by those who did not share its initial criticalintentions is a moot question, as its methodological denial of structures and itsmethodological individualism has facilitated such appropriation. Rather than a critique

of earlier radicalisms from the inside as initially intended, postcolonialism in itsunfolding has turned into a repudiation of the possibility of radical challenges to theexisting system of social and political relations. Its preoccupation with local encountersand the politics of identity rules out a thoroughgoing critique of the structures ofcapitalism, or of other structurally shaped modes of exploitation and oppression, whilealso legitimizing arguments against collective identities that are necessary to strugglesagainst domination and hegemony. Ironically, the call for attention to "difference" hasended up rendering "difference" itself into a metahistorical principle, making it nearlyimpossible to distinguish one kind of "difference" from another politically. Therepudiation of teleology in postcolonial criticism (and postmodernism in general) has createdintellectual spaces for the voicing of alternatives to a Eurocentric modernity, allowingsignificant speech to those silenced earlier, or disdained as castaways from history. On theother hand, the same postcolonialism is quick to undermine such alternatives by denying thepossibility of authenticity of claims to collective identity.


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4. Postcolonial thought locks itself into inaction through its ignorance of non-discursive terms. Supposedly colonial actions such as aid must be adopted as

a first step of decolonisation.JasperGoss, University of New South Wales, 1996, Third World Quarterly, 17:2, 239 - 250,Postcolonialism: subverting whose empire?, ellipses in original, bjx

Yet in positing projects of postcolonialism , many writers, as I have argued, have sought to gobeyond colonialism and have failed to address adequately which historical influences andconditions remain. The problem it seems is that in the rush to find postcolonial states,subjectivities and conditions, few people have set in process projects of decolonisation.44 Decolonisation would come, according to postcolonialists, once postcolonialism hadbeen enunciated and enacted. Yet this is simply question begging. There are some highly`colonial responses that would solve massive inequities (eg adequate distribution ofresources, land, water, food) within the world. These projects of decolonisation, howeverachieved (though liberal and Marxist projects of nationalism have `failed ), would it seemsbe the first step in the realisation of some hoped for condition of postcolonialism. For

instance, community action programmes and non-governmental sponsored projects (amongothers) are surely projects that lead to greater autonomy and independence, factors vital fordecolonisation. That these forms have existed separately from the enunciation ofpostcolonialism should not be forgotten. I am also hesitant to accept that any process ofdecolonisation simply begins in the `text . Postcolonial critics, it seems, have guaranteedthemselves the position of arm chair decolonisers, with the primacy of a textual role beingthe most prominent in anti-colonial struggles. Dirlik asks `not whether this [postcolonial]global intelligentsia can (or should) return to national loyalties but whether...it can generate athorough-going criticism of its own ideology and formulate practices of resistance against thesystem of which it is a product.45 For such a project of radical decolonisation and anti-colonialism I would emphasise the need for new sets of ideas to be developed about therelationships between discourses and social orders. These are of course not simplyseparable and their interrelationships are exceedingly complex. In some cases postcolonialtheory has contributed to formulating new sets of ideas, but until there is a greaterincorporation of the `material (whether real or hybrid) as a social force affected by andaffecting discourses, rather than simply reducing all forms to textual discourses, muchpostcolonialism is doomed to an eternal present; a vicious circle that tells us `howsomething is, but contains deeply contradictory strategies of change since all dominatingreferents are self-determined.Perhaps it is better not simply to seek an either/or positionin postcolonialism, but ratherto work for projects of decolonisation that include self-reflexivity not based solely on discursive terms, but which occur with anacknowledgment that while, for example, colonialism can be a discursive form, discursiveforms are also influenced by classes, genders and ethnicities, which despite theirheterogeneous constructions and histories can still have force as structures and institutions. Inthis way postcolonialism can be read as a project of decolonisation that is informed byanalyses of the relationships between discourses and social orders and thus acts as an anti-colonial force rather than a potentially ambivalent conservative project.


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5. Postcolonialism is inextricably tied with Eurocentrism- postcolonialistintellectuals can't help but overlook the unique circumstances of third world

populations and the potential attractiveness of modernity.Albert Paolini, lecturer in International Relations at LaTrobe University in Australia, 1999,Navigating Modernity: Postcolonialism, Identity, and International Relations, bjx

It is not so much that because of these origins the postmodern is not able to provide insightsinto non-Western societies but, as many critics have noted, that postmodernism proceedsfrom a peculiarly Western experience of disillusionment with modernity that may not beappropriate to societies that are still coming to terms with modernity and its challenge totraditions and the premodern. Thus, the politics that often accompanies thisdisillusionment (ranging from nihilism to a retreat from conventional political action) maynot provide effective or relevant strategies to people and movements attempting tonavigate a different set of demands and opportunities provided by modernity. The veryEurocentrism of Western bias of the postmodern turn may also, ironically, marginalizeor even exclude the ostensible Third World focus of postcolonialism. Dirlik notes that

this is a particular problem for the motif of hybridity. In highlighting the postcolonialintellectual's elevated status in the First World academy, Dirlik argues that these intellectuals'professions of hybridity and in-betweenness as a condition of postcoloniality are somewhathollow: "The hybridity to which postcolonial criticism refers is uniformly between thepostcolonial and the First World, never, to my knowledge, between one postcolonialintellectual and another." One could go beyond the intellectual and ask whether thecondition of hybridity speaks to the intersubjective experience of people on the groundin the various Third World locations. If this is a valid observation of the postcolonialdiscourse, then it suggests a serious shortcoming in the relevance of the motif ofhybridity for postcolonial societies. As it stands, I think Dirlik's criticism needs to bequalified. The First World and the postcolonial are not discrete realisms in the case of which,in the words of Kipling, "never the twain shall meet." The First World or the West is presentin the postcolonial, both in the Western academy and in the Third World village or city, andthe postcolonial, as Dirlik admits, is also present in the First World. The condition ofhybridity is thus inevitably part of the intersubjective space. However, it may be thatpostcolonialism as discourse gives short shrift to the Third World. Dirlik is on surerground in this respect. Indeed, he goes on to argue that postcolonialism tends to "excludefrom its scope most of those who inhabit or hail from postcolonial societies. It does notaccount for the attractions of modernization and nationalism to vast numbers in ThirdWorld populations, let alone to those marginalized by national incorporation in theglobal economy." Dirlik has in mind the inability of postcolonial intellectuals in theWest to see beyond their circumstance and postmodern lenses. One could go further andsuggest that this failure to account for the attraction of modernity results from thepostmodern disenchantment with modernity in the First World, a disenchantment thatspills over in the postcolonial account of hybridity and ambivalence as a global conditionthat incorporates the Third World.


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( ) By insisting on radical change or mere condemnation, their alternative accomplishes nothing and only leavesthe problems they critique in net-worse shape.

Poole 01 (CHARLES POOLE -- Department of Epidemiology @ University of North CarolinaSchool of Public Health Jrl of Epidemiol Community Health 2001;55:156-157 March

available at: http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/55/3/156)

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) describes itself as "an independent federal agencythat conducts foreign assistance and humanitarian aid to advance the political and economic interests of the UnitedStates" (http://www.usaid.gov). The explicit nationalism in this mission statement raises a problem that stretches far

beyond any particular ideology: How should the public health community respond when any nation Aexerts an active interest in the public health of any nation B to further the economic and politicalinterests of nation A?

For Dr Avils, the answer is that when nation A is the United States and nation B is El Salvador, theresponse should be condemnation.1 He concludes from his case study of Ayalde's report on Salvadoran

public health2 and Omran's epidemiologic transition theory3 4 that both extol a harmful, Eurocentric colonialism; failto consider the social, political and economic determinants of public health; and ignore health disparities.

In his critique of epidemiologic transition theory, Dr Avils disregards the fact that the causal response of "patterns of health and disease...to social and economic changes" is thetheory's primary subject matter (page 3).4 He also overlooks the emphasis Omran placed from the start on examining transition disparities by socioeconomic measures such asgender and race: "The epidemiologic transition among the nonwhite population of the U.S. was slower than that among the whites. Whites have always been better off thannonwhites with regard to housing, education, living standards, social and economic levels, nutrition, access to medical care, and other cultural and demographiccharacteristics".(page 33)4

In his critique of Ayalde's report, Dr Avils overlooks much of that report's content. It goes to great lengths to attribute the current state of Salvadoran public health to widespreadpoverty. It links many public health problems, especially those of the rural poor, to the economic conditions of large scale coffee production. It draws dire public healthimplications from the fact that one fifth of the Salvadoran population lives in the United States. And it places great emphasis on the severe and acute public health needs of thethousands of Salvadoran refugees from the armed conflicts, some still in camps, and the thousands more internally displaced persons. (Specific points and page numbers availableupon request.)2

Dr Avils imputes to epidemiologic transition theory a determinism it does not possess. This theory does not assert that any nation must undergo any specific transition. It merelyprovides general descriptions (models) of commonalities shared by populations after they are observed to undergo transitions that are similar in certain ways. Omran describedthree general transition models. In two of them, changing social, economic and political conditions are the only major determinants of changing public health. In the third, targetedpublic health interventions have major effects early on; then social, economic and political changes become the dominant forces, as in the other two models. Omran noted that theparticularistic conditions of the populations that fit this third model, to a greater or lesser degree, are so heterogeneous as to indicate "...the utility of developing submodels,particularly with regard to the varying responses of fertility and socioeconomic conditions to national development programs" (page 536).2

Consequently, Ayalde does not merely apply to El Salvador epidemiologic transition theory as Omran first described it. Instead, given the country's "ambiguous" place among themodels and stages (page 10),2 Ayalde follows Omran's advice and considers the particulars of the Salvadoran situation. Ayalde finds that much depends on the health measure, thedata source, and the population subgroup examined. For example, he notes that one source lists "external causes" (homicide, suicide, accidents, etc) as the country's leading cause

of death (page 10).2 Dr Avils repeats this information uncritically to score a debating point. If one reads Ayalde's report itself, however, one finds that it quite appropriatelyquestions the validity of the original information source for not even including diarrhoea or acute respiratory infections as causes of death. One also finds Ayalde citing analternative source that lists diarrhoea as the leading cause of death among Salvadoran children (page 10).2

The element of epidemiologic transition theory to which Dr Avils takes the strongest exception is thatsome aspects of public health, under some circumstances, can respond favourably to interventionsthat are not structural changes of social, political and economic conditions. He calls "futile and hopeless anytechnical intervention in the health sector that ignores the social and political context of the country." He flatly assertshis "belief that better public health cannot be achieved without improving the social, economic, and political situation"and complains that epidemiological transition theory considers this belief " `unscientific.' "

By contrast, the theory treats Dr Avils' belief as an empirically testable, scientific hypothesis. Ayalde's relevant observations are that vector control in El Salvador greatly reducedmalaria incidence (pages 27-29)2; that poliomyelitis, whooping cough, measles and neonatal tetanus incidence declined dramatically in response to immunisation programmes(pages 32-33)2; that improvements in potable water supplies, sewage treatment and solid waste disposal would produce major reductions in the incidence of acute diarrhoea,cholera and other diseases (pages 33-34, 40-41, 46-47)2; and that effective iodine fortification would greatly reduce goitre prevalence from its current level of one quarter of theSalvadoran population (page 38).2 Each of these measures improves public health. Some preferentially improve the health of the poor. None restructures social, political oreconomic conditions. Together, they refute Dr Avils' hypothesis.

Dr Avils accurately discerns a favourable view of economic development in Omran's exposition of epidemiologic transition theory and in Ayalde's report. But not all economicdevelopment is exploitative development that hurts developing nation B and benefits the economic and political interests of developed nation A. It is hard to interpret Omran'sanalysis of epidemiologic transitions in Japan,3 4 for example, as propaganda for a Eurocentric ideology of neocolonialism. Unfortunately, Dr Avils does not describe theeconomic future he envisions for El Salvador. Is it a return to the subsistence agriculture of the mid-1800s? Or is it merely a different kind of economic development that somehowwould avoid all interaction with the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe?

The answers to these questions would be interesting. But I fear that if Dr Avils' proposal for ideologicalcleansing of public health discourse were to become fashionable, the views at greatest risk oferadication would not be those held by USAID or other institutions of the most powerfulgovernment on earth. More probably, the disappeared views would be minority views such asthose of Dr Avils, which no less deserve exposure to the antiseptic light of day .


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Ext off #1 Permutation

Perm solves- local struggles must acknowledge the global situation in order tochange the political landscape.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University of

Oregon, 1998, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, bjxI propose below, in ways that may have some kinship with postmodernity and postcolonialism, that acontemporary radicalism must take local struggles as its point of departure, and that indigenismas one type of identity formation may provide an appropriate model for such struggles. Localstruggles are already part of the global political landscape, and not for fortuitous reasons. As Iargue in several of the essays below (especially in "The Global in the Local"), the very operations ofcapital that have dislocated earlier divisions of the world, including national boundaries, have creatednew contradictions that have brought problems of the local and the global to the forefront of politicalconsciousness. Likewise, a contemporary radicalism must take as its point of departure these very samecontradictions. But there is more to what I advocate than mere recognition of political realities. Thelocal is the site where action toward new community formations is the most plausible. This is alsowhere indigenous ideals of social relationships and relationships to nature may have the most tooffer, especially in their challenge to the voracious developmentalism of capitalism, which has also

been assimilated to Marxism in its historical unfolding. As I explain below, what I have in mind is notindigenous ideals as they are reified in New Age consumptions of indigenism, but indigenous ideals asthey have been reworked by a contemporary consciousness, where indigenism appears not merely asa reproduction of the past, but as a project to be realized. The difference of this idea of the localfrom that in postcolonial criticism should be evident in its insistence that, under thecircumstances of global capitalism, the local is impossible to conceive without reference to theglobal. It is also lodged in a different kind of knowledge; not that of the exile or the travelingtheorist, but in local knowledge informed by and directed at local community formation. Thatdoes not make exilic knowledge irrelevant, since that knowledge itself speaks directly to contemporaryhistorical circumstances, but regrounds it in the intermediation of social lives conceived locally--anessential necessity, if local struggles are to have any chance of success against the seeminglyinsuperable forces of transnational structures of power.


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Ext off #2 Leads to Confl ict

Leaving Africa to fend for itself will only create internal conflicts that will spreadover the entire region. Outside assistance is essential.Stephen F. Burgess, Associate Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of International Security Studies,

U.S. Air War College, 1998, African Studies Review, Vol. 41, No. 2. (Sep., 1998), pp. 37-61., AfricanSecurity in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Indigenization and Multilateralism, bjxAs the twenty-first century approaches, African security has become the responsibility of Africansthemselves. The withdrawal of outside powers in the wake of the Cold War and the retreat of theUnited Nations, starting with the 1993 setback of UNOSOM I1 in Somalia, confronted Africans withthe dual demands of generating their own national security and organizing multilateral operations in anera of scarce resources and fragile governments. In the next century, the primary security problemwill remain the same: internal conflict and its consequences, including "collapsed states,""spillover" into adjoining countries, and threats to entire regions (Copson 1994, Zartman 1995).In many cases, states that suffer internal conflicts lack the capacity to stabilize themselves andmust be assisted by outside actors if security is to be restored.


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Ext off #3 Precludes Poli tical Action (1/3)

Turn: Collective action is key to ensuring the public health- the alternative leavesthe benefits of public-health science in the hands of the already privileged.

Robert Beaglehole (et al.), WHO Director, Ruth Bonita, Director of Surveillance andNoncommunicable Diseases and Mental Health at WHO, Richard Horton, Orvill Adams, Martin McKee,2004, The Lancet Volume 363, Public health in the new era: improving health through collective action,bjx

Collaboration in partnership with a wide range of groups from many sectors has been the centralfeature of public-health practice since the mid 19th century. At first, collaborative action wasjustified as a way of keeping to a minimum the effect of poverty and its associated ill health on earlywelfare systems. Collaboration across sectors is even more crucial now. In the absence of strongand effective collaborative actions, the benefits of public-health science will continue to be morefully taken up by the already advantaged sections of society, as has happened with tobaccocontrol.22 Governments are key to ensuring collaborative actions to promote population-widehealth improvement because they are ultimately responsible for the health of their populations. Whenthe state downplays this part in favour of individualism and market forces, the practice of public

health is inevitably weakened, slowing progress towards health goals. The public-healthworkforce, because of its broad mandate and skills base, is uniquely placed to improve healththrough formation of policy-led strategies and delivery of interventions that embrace collectiveactions.23

Postcolonial criticism's misapplication of the label of essentialism serves to deny the possibility of meaningfulpolitics.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University of Oregon, 1998,The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, bjx

As if by some devilish design to mock the postcolonial argument, cultural politics in our day exhibits anabundance of such claims to cultural authenticity which, rather than disappear, would seem to beproliferating in proportion to the globalization of postmodernity -- with deadly consequences for millions.Cultural nationalism, ethnicism, indigenism have emerged as markers of cultural politics globally; over thelast decade, ethnicity has moved to the center of politics, overshadowing earlier concerns with class andgender. Claims to cultural authenticity, moreover, have been accompanied by efforts to discover or restoreauthentic pasts as foundations for contemporary identity; most urgently among those who have suffered "thesentence of history." The most basic problem presented by this paradoxical situation is the disjuncturebetween cultural criticism and cultural politics. Even as cultural criticism renders the past into a playthingat the hands of the present, the burden of the pasta haunts contemporary politics in a reassertion of culturalidentities. Postmodern/postcolonial criticism would have little to say on this situation, except to insist evenmore uncompromisingly on its on validity. where the postmodern/postcolonial intellectuals themselves areconcerned, the repudiation of essentialized identities and authentic pasts seems to culminate in alibertarianism which asserts the possibility of constructing identities and histories almost at will in those "in-

between" spaces that are immune to the burden of the past (and the present, in its repudiation of "foundational"structures). Ironically, however, postmodern/postcolonial critics are unwilling to recognize a similar libertythose who seek to invoke the past in the assertion of cultural identities, labeling all such attempts asmisguided (or ideological) essentialisms that ignore the constructedness of the past. That groups which have"suffered the sentence of history" are internally divided and differentiated is not a particularly novel insight; whatseems to be new about the current historical situation is the erasure in the name of difference of differences among

such groups in their efforts to cope with "the sentence of history," especially those efforts that contradict the newideology of postmodernism/postcolonialism. "In-betweenneess," universalized as a human condition and extendedover the past, is thus naturalized in the process, and becomes a new kind of determinism from which there is noescape. At the same time, the label of "essentialism," extended across the board without regard to itssources and goals, obviates the need to distinguish different modes of cultural identity formation that issubversive not only of critical but of any meaningful political judgment.


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Postcolonial thought reinforces dominant structures of power such as capitalismwhich makes it impossible to challenge domination.

ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University ofOregon, 1998, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, bjxThe postcolonialist attacks on Eurocentrism, and especially the legacy of the Enlightenment, haveruffled feathers in those institutions, to be sure. Nevertheless, postcolonialism has beendomesticated with relative ease (in a way, say, Marxism has not) into intra-elite conflicts within thoseinstitutions: between those who appreciate the utility of the postcolonialist argument under conditionsof transnational capitalism, which can no longer be satisfied with Eurocentrism, and those who haverefused to come to terms with recent transformations in global relations. The social and politicalsolutions that have issued from the postcolonialist argument, namely arguments formulticulturalism and diversity against racial and patriarchal domination, resonate with thedemands of a new social and political situation. At the same time, however, the postcolonialistfocus on Eurocentrism to the exclusion of the structural connections between Eurocentric powerand capitalism also provides an alibi against radical critiques of capitalism, shiftingg the debate

over capitalism from the terrain of political economy to the terrain of culture. The postcolonialistfetishization of "difference," compelled by its logic to the level of the individual, moreover,delegitimizes collective oppositions that articulate significant differences at levels of collectiveexperience that the postcolonialist argument rejects for their supposedly "homogenizing" or"essentializing" assumptions. In theoretically repudiating in the name of local subjectivities suchhistorical phenomena as colonialism and imperialism (or nationalist oppositions to it), postcolonialismrelegates to an ideological or cultural Eurocentrism the responsibility for past inequalities andoppressions, which shifts the ground from under movements that challenge the continueddomination of the world by EuroAmerican corporate and political power, that nourish off not

just memories of past inequalities, but their contemporary legacies.

A focus solely on local struggles allows capitalism to manipulate differences ofinterest and power to homogenize populations.

ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University ofOregon, 1998, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, bjx

From the perspective of Global Capitalism, the local is a site not of liberation but manipulation;stated differently, it is a site the inhabitants of which must be liberated from themselves (strippedof their identity) to be homogenized into the global culture of capital (their identities reconstructedaccordingly). Ironically, even as it seeks to homogenize populations globally, consuming theircultures, Global Capitalism enhances awareness of the local, pointing to it also as the site ofresistance to capital. This is nevertheless the predicament of the local. A preoccupation with thelocal that leaves the global outside its line of vision is vulnerable to manipulation at the hands ofglobal capital which of necessity commands a more comprehensive vision of global totality.Differences of interest and power on the site of the local, which are essential to its reconstructionalong non-traditional, democratic, lines, render the local all the more vulnerable to such amanipulation as capital plays on these differences, and the advocates of different visions and

interests seek to play capital against one another. The local in the process becomes the site upon whichthe multifaceted contradictions of contemporary society play out, where critique turns into ideologyand ideology into critique, depending upon its location at any one fleeting moment.


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Postcolonialism has become such an amorphous term so as to erase revolutionary

potential by encompassing multiple contradictory ideas.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University ofOregon, 1998, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, bjx

In its conceptualization of modern history, the postcolonial argument erases the revolutionaryalternatives in recent history by assimilating them to postcoloniality or, more frequently, bysimply ignoring them. Even more profoundly, the epistemological premises of postcoloniality aresuch as to abolish revolutions as meaningful historical events. Indeed, rather than investigate therevolutionary past as a possible condition of its own emergence, the postcolonial argument seeksto project its own utopianized (and, therefore, dehistoricized) self-image upon the past. Perhaps,most tellingly, the emergence of an articulated consciousness of postcoloniality coincideshistorically not with the end of colonialism (which, after all, has taken place over a broad historicalperiod covering two centuries and is not yet over), but with the apparent emergence of a new worldsituation over the last decade, of which the repudiation of revolution is a crucial moment. As my

observations above suggest, the substitution of postrevolutionary for postcolonial also brings into reliefthe ways in which the postcolonial idea resonates with the claims concerning the past in contemporaryculture, which may account for the almost immediate popularity it has acquired in institutions ofcultural production over the last decade. I will say a few words on the latter below, following a briefelaboration of the problem of history in postcolonial criticism. Finally, a word of caution on the scopeof the discussion. What I say below may not apply equally to all people who promote, subscribe to orare in symphathy with postcolonial criticism, and it may apply in some measure to intellectualpositions that are not marked explicitly as postcolonial but are associated more generally with"postmodernism." In its rapid ascendancy as an intellectual phenomenon, postcolonial criticism hascome to encompass diverse positions, with considerable confusion in the understanding and usesof the term. As the editors of a recently published reader observe, "the increasingly unfocuseduse of the term 'postcolonial' over the last ten years to describe an astonishing variety ofcultural, economic and political practices has meant that there is a danger of losing its effectivemeaning altogether. Indeed the diffusion of the term is now so extreme that it is used to refer to notonly vastly different but even opposed activities. In particularthe tendency to employ the term'postcolonial' to refer to any kind of marginality at all runs the risk of denying its basis in thehistorical process of colonialism."


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Ext off #4 Material Focus Good

The postcolonialist alternative ignores global agency to the point of danger- it risksdomination by capital and shows an ignorance of material conditions.Ilan Kapoor, Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies York University, 2002, Third World

Quarterly, 23:4, 647 - 664, Capitalism, culture, agency: dependency versus postcolonial theory, bjxA similar problem arises with postcolonial agency and politics. The emphasis on local discoursesand action tends to result in the neglect of broader influences and impacts (Joss, 1996: 245; seealso Dirlik, 1994: 345; Hall, 1997). Global concerns may be central to the postcolonial analysis ofcultural hegemony and orientalism, but it remains unclear how postcolonial interventions impinge,in turn, on global power. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how the micro-political scale ofpostcolonial agency, as well as the micro-size of its agents, can meaningfully affect macro-politics.The postcolonial suspicion and deconstruction of the nation-state does not help here either.Although not without its limitations, the state may sometimes have to take on an increasinglyimportant role. As the dependentistas insist, the proliferation of multinational capital makes theestablishment of a semi-autonomous state a must if dependency and imperialistic ties are to beminimised. In contrast, the sub-national and decentred character of postcolonial agency risksallowing corporate power to overshadow it, and may even end up aiding, not regulating oraltering, corporate propagation. To conclude this section, I would like to draw attention to the wayin which the dependentista critique brings out the limitations of the types of questions being asked bypostcolonial theory. Postcolonialisms emphasis on cultural and representational issues leads it toignore important material concerns (eg poverty, health, etc). To the extent that it does considermaterialist and capitalist problems, it approaches them epistemologically, shying away from theimportant political task of prioritising or adjudicating among differing narratives (be theyeconomic, cultural, social, environmental). Finally, although it examines globallocal questions,these tend to be one-sided: they illuminate well how global power is reproduced in the local, butwhen it comes to politics, they reveal only local agency, not global consequences.


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Ext off #5 Postcolonialists Wrong

Postcolonial understanding of Africa is lacking- the doctrine is more focused onIndia. The result is a new, far more devastating form of colonialism in Africa.

Pal Ahluwalia, Research SA Chair and Professor of Post-Colonial Studies, Hawke Research Institute,University of South Australia, 2001, Politics and Post-Colonial Theory: African Inflections, bjxIf, for Appiah, post-coloniality is about elites and their mediation in the trade of African culturalcommodities, for Adebayo Williams a key problem with post-colonialism has been its failure toinfuse 'an authentic and well sustained African input into the paradigm' (1997:831). Given thatpost-colonial theory has argued vigorously against the idea of authenticity on the grounds that there areno pure cultures, that cultures continually make and remake themselves, it is difficult to ascertain whatan 'authentic' African input might include. Nevertheless, Williams correctly points out that a largeslice of the post-colonial constituency Africa - has been rendered curiously silent in recent post-colonial formulations. He suggests there could be three reasons for this omission. The first could bethat African scholars are not capable intellectually to deal with the theoretical formulations of post-colonial debates. The second possibility is that the general economic crisis within African universitiesmeans that they are at a considerable disadvantage. The third reason could be that the specific colonial

experience of Africa has meant that the African condition has been theorised in a differentmanner (ibid. 831). Williams points out that the first two of his speculations are not sustainable giventhe crisis in tertiary education in Africa has 'created a diasporic intelligentsia' who have shown thatthey can hold their 'own in all the major institutions of learning in the Western world' (ibid. 831). Tothis, it is important to add that, despite the economic and political tribulations faced by Africanscholars, they have continued none the less to persevere and to produce some of the most importantworks on Africa. It is important, however, to reflect on the third possibility which Williams offers. Forhim, a different trajectory can be traced in the manner in which intellectual traditions in Indiaand Africa developed. The implication of this suggestion is that post-colonialism is associatedunequivocally with India. The intellectual tradition in India, he claims, grew out of the feudalaristocracy, whereas in the case of Africa, the new emerging elite had no 'blood ties to the tribalchieftains' (ibid. 831). The subaltern studies project is traced through such a trajectory, albeit that it isinflected with a 'nativised Marxism'. It is these differences which allow for the centrality ofcolonialism in the case of India and neo-colonialism in the case of Africa. He argues: "Thus,

while the doctrine of postcolonialism is informed by a buoyant optimism that colonialism has, inthe main, been supplanted, the credo of neo-colonialism is suffused with the profound pessimismthat colonialism has merely been transformed into a new and potentially far more devastatingform of colonisation. Postcolonialism is marked by a virtual decoupling of the originalpostcolonial critic from the parent nation-state. The irony does not end here. While thepostcolonial state in the Indian subcontinent - at least in India - has created something new, auniquely Indian political culture despite its foibles, the postcolonial state in Africa has, by andlarge, suffered serious reverses, often leading to the phenomenon of failed states." (Williams1997. 833-4)


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AT: Mbembe (1/5)

Mbembe's alternative is horrible for Africa- his reliance on poststructuralism creates his thought as a textualcul-de-sac and his theoretical engagements ignore the activities and resistance of everyday micropoliticalstruggles.

Jeremy Weate, philosopher, PhD from University of Warwick, 2003, Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Goingbeyond the Text, Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 27-41, projectmuse, bjxThere are three reasons Mbembe's theorization of African power ends up being negativist and thanatographic andrejects the possibility of resistance. First, as indicated, his continued debt to poststructuralist modes of[EndPage 36] analysis and the textual paradigm drive his thinking away from thinking of an alternative site for thegenesis of meaningthat of embodied agencyat the very moment when he is on the cusp of articulating it. Hisnotion of baroque practice ends up being a theoretical cul-de-sac in the text, precisely because it would callfor further theorization of embodiment and its role in resisting inscriptive forms of power. Instead, what wewitness is an opening towards the incorporative away from the inscriptive, only to fall back into semiotic closure.This failure to think the body prevents Mbembe from fully engaging with the relation between embodiment and

power from an existential phenomenological point of view. Despite his avowed intention in the introduction tothink concretely about African lived experience, there is no fleshing out of the kind of theory that wouldhelp him out. On the Postcolony ends with some reflections on the thought of Merleau-Ponty; had it started withan appropriation of the French phenomenologist's account of embodiment, the corporeal schema, intersubjectivityand perhaps even invisibility, a different development of baroque practice might have occurred. Thinking through

the body's relation to formal and informal, positive and negative forms of power, in relation to agency andresistance would have bolstered Mbembe's attempts to move away from privileging a textual approach to power.Here again, we are reminded of the necessity to have a more nuanced account of what is problematic with

binarism. Distinctions between resistance and agency, formal and informal, incorporative and inscriptive in facthave strong analytical power in the face of existential complexity. The key point is not to attempt to reduce anyform of analysis to a set of predetermined binaries, but rather to start with these distinctions in order to understandthe complexities of the situation at a deeper level. For example, with the categories of resistance and domination asguides, it is possible to develop an account of complicity that is neither wholly negative nor wholly positive, butrather shows how, in each situation, the balance of power can be ambiguous, precisely because forces of resistanceand domination are at work. The second reason Mbembe's text is driven back towards disembodied negativityis his overreliance on a specific understanding of the intellectual and what constitutes conceptualcontestation within the political sphere. Mbembe's interest is in locating theoretical and politicalengagement in the writerly sphere of academic, juridical, and overtly political texts, not on the street or theghetto or within the practices of everyday life. In unison with his stunted development of bodily resistance, histhought does not engage with demotic modes of resistance and the micropolitics of daily life. As Benetta

Jules-Rosette writes: "While in the 1960s and 1970s African intellectuals played crucial roles across the continentin shaping independence struggles and new nation-states and in introducing such philosophies as Pan-Africanism,negritude, and African Humanismall critiqued by Mbembethe contemporary plight of bourgeois intellectualsas political and economic refugees has left a void in many African nation-states. In part, this void has been filled

by grassroots intellectuals, [End Page 37] religious leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs. This development is not aproduct of proletarian nostalgia, as Mbembe suggests, but merely a fact of daily life. These organic leaders occupyan empty space of creativity where new ideologies and cultural strategies are shaped and deployed. It is in thismilieu that the responses to the devastation of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid analysed by Mbembe must betraced. (604)" Mbembe refuses to engage with the space of everyday life, and he does not theorize grassrootsresistance. This is an enormous problem for his project, for as Jules-Rosette rightly points out, it is preciselywithin the sphere of everyday culture in Africa that seemingly absolute modes of power are contested andmodified. Moreover, it is only by sidestepping the demotic sphere that Mbembe can lend his dismissal of all

previous forms of thought any semblance of credibility. As has been seen, even a passing attention to thecondensed list of African thinkers and writers mentioned above would soon put paid to his tabula rasa approach.Beyond the writerly sphere, however, nonlinear Africa has already been "writing" itself into history, whetherMbembe's text acknowledges it or not. Whether it is Set Setal graffiti art in Senegal, Mami Watta acrossWest Africa, the sapeurs in Congo, Afrobeat or Fuji musical culture in Nigeria, or an almost limitlesssupply of other cases, African cultural forms have continually sought to engage with and document thetimes.


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AT: Mbembe (2/5)

Mbembe's thought embraces an unconscious patriarchy- feminism is associatedwith creative agency and both are rejected, destroying the possibility of creatingnew avenues of resistance.

Jeremy Weate, philosopher, PhD from University of Warwick, 2003, Achille Mbembe and thePostcolony: Going beyond the Text, Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 27-41, projectmuse, bjxAs Kimberly Segall writes: "To ignore the cultural invasion of legal forms and local adaptions to

themas exemplified in the operations of the postcolonial performative of victimizationthuscourts the charge of a cultural blindness, an academic imperialism. (617-18)" The final reasonMbembe fails to fully open his thought to thinking resistance is because of an unconsciousgender bias that pervades and structures his text. Mbembe is often explicitly scathing offeminism and African feminist analyses of power. For example, in an essay in Public Culture,hewrites of African feminism that "the philosophical poverty of these discourses is notorious, and severalisolated attempts to correct this shortcoming have not succeeded" (631). Unfortunately, his assertion isbacked [End Page 38] by neither argument nor references, so it is impossible to match his claim withfurther argument. However, beyond his obvious distaste for explicit engagement with gender-basedconsiderations, it is at a deeper, structural level that Mbembe's relation to gender is most problematic. I

suggest that the most fundamental reason Mbembe's text is driven by the death-drive ofsuffering, complicity, and perversion is because of an unconscious rejection of the matrix ofcreativity itself. As a masculinist thinker, Mbembe falls into the all-too-common trap ofunconsciously mapping an association between creative agency and the maternal or feminine.Ultimately, Mbembe fails to think the creative power of embodied agency and cultural resistancebecause he unconsciously associates both with feminine modes of being. As a thinker of deathrather than birth, Mbembe places himself within a long tradition within phallocentric Western thought.Rather than the subtleties of the nuanced response, where what appears to be a situation of dominationis reversed by an agent who uses complicity to her own ends, Mbembe can only think complicity aswilling one's own death. Instead of baroque practice being the overture to a sustained theorization ofthe birth of the new and of adaptive strategies of resistance, it falls back into death and destruction.The masculine mask of Thanatos rears its head yet again. Because of all the failures charted abovetheoretical, methodological, corporeal, historiographical, and so onAchille Mbembe's projectof opening up a new epoch of African writing beyond the colonial is, as it stands, doomed to

failure. It commits the double mistake of attempting to erase the past completely, as well as notproviding any substantive ground for further development. On the Postcolony lacks body, in aliteral sense. Mbembe condemns himself to the very "narrative of loss" he had sought to avoid. Acrosshis work, a pattern has emerged, whereby he continually fails to attain the goals he sets himself. In Onthe Postcolony, we are left guessing as to in what the new form of writing Africa would consist.Elsewhere, in his essay "African Modes of Self-Writing," the proclaimed end-result of engaging withAfrican "self-styling" is again not attained. His failure to see beyond de jure limitations, and hisrefusal to engage with everyday praxis and modes of creative resistance mean that his account iscomplicit with the very Western paradigm of the victim that he had sought to avoid.


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AT: Mbembe (3/5)

Mbembe's rejection of the possibility for resistance closes off the possibility of meaningful change for Africa.Jeremy Weate, philosopher, PhD from University of Warwick, 2003, Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going

beyond the Text, Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 27-41, projectmuse, bjx

The question to put to Mbembe, against his overt rejection of domination vs. resistance, is to ask how "play"and "inversion" can have any value for "the masses," if not in terms of resistance to the domination of thepower of the state? Play, in the above passage, cannot function without an underlying teleological form; theintention to "modify whenever possible" musthave an intentional structure in order to support a framework ofmeaningful action. Put the other way, if play were denied an intentional structure framed in terms of resistance todomination, it would be very difficult to see the point of engaging in it. As in Nietzsche, we must be able todistinguish a "positive nihilism" that seeks to overcome (that is, it has an intentional structure) from a"negative nihilism" that remains mired in its own negation (that is, exists without a telos). This distinction canonly be made if one can also distinguish between absolute and relative limitative power. In Mbembe's text,this distinction is never clearly made, which muddies his argument. For example, in the passage just quoted,how can "incontestable power" maintain its unchallengeable status, if it can at the same time be "modified" viaaffirmation? Logic dictates that either power is incontestable, and therefore unmodifiable, or it is not. Resistance isthe name we must give to the force that modifies power. And an acknowledgement of the possibility ofresistance requires also that power itself cannot be absolutely incontestable. The irony in the text above is thatthe very terms Mbembe rejected in polemical fashion in the introduction, "fluidity," "agency," and other

Foucauldian, Gramscian and poststructuralist concepts, he returns to precisely in order to articulate the powerdynamics within African existential contexts at close range and at the same time maintain his refusal to engage with the discourse of resistance. Moresignificantly still, Mbembe's "baroque practices" move underneath and subvert the "written and precise rules" of state power. A different form of writing could emerge through this very moment, generated onthe basis of the body in movement as a power that relativizes the apparent absolute power of the state. Ambiguity and fluidity, the two ciphers for an unacknowledged theorization of resistance in Mbembe'stext, are contrasted with the writing of power. The fluid bodily practices involved in affirming power in order to modify it are therefore the gateway to the "other form of writing" that Mbembe has sought allalong. Instead of the poststructuralist economy of the sign, a text that can always be made visible and articulated, a structure that denigrates the body and materiality for the sake of the visible marker of thesignifier, Mbembe introduces a writing of the body. Here, the body is not an object, violently inscribed by the state as in Foucault's account, but rather a capacity to play and subvert written codifications. Theperformative body is therefore the site of an undoing of the text itself, moving below the level of explicit legibility and juridical capture, towards an underworld of revolutionary possibilities. The potentialraised at this moment in Mbembe's text is therefore nothing less than a rupture in postcolonial theory, away from the textualist/inscriptivist paradigm it has been based on since its inception, and towards what

we can think of as a more materialist and somatic paradigm of "texture" and the "palimpsest." The new postcolonial theory would be [End Page 35]that of writing not from the point of view of clear and written rulesthe Cartesian/Derridean economy ofthe sign, but from an incorporated perspective: the opaque perspective of the baroque practice. Here, instead ofthe ocular proof of the perfectly legible text, a palimpsest presents itselfthat of writing within a material frame,implying a continuum between text and body, instead of scission. Unfortunately, this key moment of possibilityin Mbembe's entire project gets submerged and dissipated as soon as it has been articulated. He does notexplore further the rich potential of the notion of "baroque practice," nor does he discuss or further explorethe notion of play. It is interesting to ask what stunts this line of enquiry in his text. Perhaps the reason whyMbembe does not further theorize his notion of baroque practice is that his denial of the possibility of

resistance would become increasingly untenable. Africa, as an "economy of death," a site of near-infinitesuffering, complicity and horror, cannot fit easily with Africa as a complex site of baroque practices thatcreatively subverts and mangles the overt codes of state power.What remains repressed in Mbembe's text,despite his gestures towards a performative praxis in "The Aesthetics of the Vulgar," is a stronger and moredeveloped ontology of embodied being and an open acknowledgement of the necessity of resistance. Instead,in order to articulate complexity, Mbembe throws the teleological baby of explicit resistance out with thebathwater of binarism. What is elided in this move is an acceptance that power relations may, on an existentiallevel, be complex and messy (or "convivial") at the same time as underlying forces of resistance and dominationmay still operate. Ambiguities in detecting any obvious direction of powerin terms of resistance from below ordomination from above in any given situationshould not preclude a parallel analysis that privileges excavatingthe hidden dynamic within any given situation. It is precisely this move from the visible to the invisible thatMbembe is appealing to in the above passage in terms of practices that move below the explicit written codes of thestate. The failure in Mbembe's thought is to follow this thinking of the invisible through with an understanding ofhow it nuances his own account of power. Instead of simply replacing the binarism of resistance vs. oppressionwith irreducible complicity and a retrenched victim paradigm as he does, what this thinking of the invisible

would open up for articulation and further exploration is a more nuanced and subtle account of complicityitself. Instead of play and baroque practice thought of purely in terms of masochism and negative dialectics, wewould therefore see masochism as but one option within a whole array of possible responses to domination. Oncethe lid of informal practice is lifted, an opaque complex of responses can be theorized, many of which need notinvolve either a thanatographic economy of death or masochism. Unfortunately, in On the Postcolony, this richlynuanced understanding of responses to power is refused. Again, we might question further what it is that pushesMbembe to the brink of thinking play as creative resistance only in order to zigzag away from it.


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AT: Mbembe (4/5)

Mbembe fails- his reliance on postmodernism dilutes resistance until it becomes amockery of its former self.Albert Paolini, lecturer in International Relations at LaTrobe University in Australia, 1999, Navigating

Modernity: Postcolonialism, Identity, and International Relations, bjxThere are notable inconsistencies within Mbembe: power is enclosed in a chaotic, openpostcolony; the commandment is rendered powerless despite its hermetic material power base.Here we witness the intersection of postmodernity/poststructuralism and the politics ofresistance: At once power relations can make sense only in terms of the "intimacy of tyranny,"which is seen by Mbembe as a central feature of postmodern life; further, his representation of thepostcolony is refracted through the poststructural lenses of Foucault and Bakhtin. These twin dynamicscondition the appreciation of resistance: They simultaneously undercut its traditional impetus andcomplicate the understanding of how it operates in the contemporary period. Resistance is recastalong postmodern lines in order to make sense of the "convivial tension" between ruled andrulers. Resistance and hegemony are at once familiar and domesticated. The spatial setting ofresistance moves along a more postmodern path, yet in a temporal sense, undercurrents andtensions from a previous incarnation linger. The contemporary postcolonial stage becomes one inwhich subjectivity and agency are at once diluted and recouped, and consequently resistanceitself becomes mottled and, ironically, a mimicry of its former self.


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AT: Mbembe (5/5)

Mbembe ignores creative spaces for resistance and privileges the dominant forces of the status quo.Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego and director of the Africanand African-American Studies Research Project, 2002, Public Culture 14.3 (2002) 603-605, Afro-Pessimism's Many

Guises, projectmuse, bjxMoving nimbly from Hegelianism to postmodernism, Mbembe fixes a steely gaze on Africa's master narrativesand cultural tropes. He asserts: "On a sociological level, attention must be given to the contemporary everyday

practices through which Africans manage to recognize and to maintain with the world an unprecedentedfamiliaritypractices through which they invent something that is their own and that beckons to the world in itsgenerality" (258). Yet in balancing universalism against particularism, Mbembe covers numerous philosophiesof the invention of Africa with blanket criticisms and provides little discussion of the creative spaces openedup by cultural resistance. [End Page 603] In his classic treatise, L'autre face du royaume, V. Y. Mudimbe (1973:102) develops a troubling metaphor for the condition of the African intellectual: "To adopt an image, everythingtakes place as if the African intellectual were trapped in an elevator that perpetually goes up and down. In

principle, a single gesture would be sufficient to stop the machine, get out, and rent an apartment or room; in sum,live and experience the reality of the world. But apparently, he does not understand that the initiative to escape

belongs to him." Mudimbe's anecdote refers not only to the legacies of colonialism, but also to a restricted menu ofcultural choices in contemporary African societies. When the only options for the preservation of selfhood relyon oppressive political and economic ideologies, one might as well close the elevator door and stay inside.

While in the 1960s and 1970s African intellectuals played crucial roles across the continent in shapingindependence struggles and new nation-states and in introducing such philosophies as Pan-Africanism, ngritude,and African Humanismall critiqued as inadequate by Mbembethe contemporary plight of bourgeoisintellectuals as political and economic refugees has left a void in many African nation-states (Mazuri 1990: 32-38).In part, this void has been filled by grassroots intellectuals, religious leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs. Thisdevelopment is not a product of proletarian nostalgia, as Mbembe suggests, but merely a fact of daily life. Theseorganic leaders occupy an empty space of creativity where new ideologies and cultural strategies are shaped anddeployed. It is in this milieu that the responses to the devastation of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid analyzed

by Mbembe must be traced. The grassroots base of South Africa's antiapartheid movement is a case in point.Another creative space emerges around what Afro-Parisian novelist and social critic Calixthe Beyala (1995: 20-22)terms feminitude, or the cultural and domestic resistance of African women. From Nigerian market women toCongolese cambistes (street bankers), African women have occupied creative spaces from which they haveinfluenced the course of history. Mbembe avoids any systematic discussion of gender as an aspect ofselfhood or subjectivity. Instead, he privileges dominant ideologies, institutions, and public instruments ofpower over private sources of resistance. The absence of any treatment of women's initiatives and unique

inscriptions of selfhood is both a theoretical and empirical lacuna in Mbembe's argument. This oversight hasfurther consequences for the diasporic component of Mbembe's essay. In his critique of traditionalist essentialism,Mbembe downplays [End Page 604] the fact that traditions were, indeed, transmitted across the Middle Passageand may be revived, and even reconstructed, for legitimate cultural purposes. Cynthia Schmidt's (1998) fascinatingresearch on the transmission of Mende chants from the villages of Sierra Leone to the rice paddies of SouthCarolina comes to mind, not just as a Herskovitsian shipboard retention, but as a case of cultural reinvention. The"return" of the African American women songsters to meet their fictive kin in Sierra Leone is a moving example ofself-writing and the hermeneutic reconstruction of culture. This case also illustrates some of the pitfalls andparadoxes surrounding myths of African authenticity, which Mbembe both critiques and tenaciouslyretains. With the African continent pushed to the margins of the contemporary global scene, Mbembe's actof self-writing is a chilling reminder of the continent's fragile future. Far more than an instance of "salvagesocial history," Mbembe's essay places Africa's dire situation in perspective. But it offers no solutions. The onlyhope for Africaand therefore the worldin the turbulent twenty-first century lies in a creative spirit.


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Backlines Feeds Capitalism/Globalization

Globalization has co-opted the postcolonial project- it now represents a new mode ofcolonialism.

Adebayo Williams, visiting fellow at Afrika-Studiecentrum, 1997, Third World Quarterly, Vol 18, No 5,pp 821-841, 1997, The postcolonial flaneur and other fellow-travellers: conceits for a narrative ofredemption, bjx

In this sense, globalisation can be seen as a peculiarly postcolonial, end of empire response by thecolonising metropole and its allies, a logical transformation of the dynamics of capitalism afterthe epoch of colonisation. And this is precisely what places a refocused postcolonial discourse, asthe most historically privileged intellectual response to this development, in the best position toserve as its ideological nemesis. But for now postcolonialism appears more like a casualty than anemesis. Indeed, with the concept of hybridity aping and unconsciously validating the capitalisthomogenisation of global economic structure, with its abolition of the primordial selfsubconsciously underwriting the loss of selfhood under global capitalism, with its hybridisationof racial identity secretly valorising the nation-less and borderless triumphalism of transnationalcapital, and with the downsizing of the subaltern echoing the forcible abolition of the oldunderclass categories in the process of globalisation, postcolonialism appears like a strong ally ofglobal capitalism rather than its profound foe. What began as a radically anti-colonial projecthas transformed into an intellectual facilitator of a new mode of colonisation.

Postcolonial criticism only feeds the capitalist system of domination on which it isbased.DavidSlater, Professor of Social & Political Geography Loughborough University, 1998, Review ofInternational Political Economy, 5:4, 647 - 678, Post-colonial questions for global times, bjx

In his wide-ranging intervention into the debate on post-coloniality and global capitalism, Dirlik(1994) makes the point that there is a need to go beyond the crisis of understanding that has beenproduced by the inability of old categories to account for the world. For Dirlik, post-colonialityrepresents one response to such a need in a world characterized by an unprecedented proliferation ofnew tendencies and instabilities, including the decentring of capitalism nationally, the weakening of

boundaries, the disorganization of a world once conceived in terms of three worlds, the flow of culturewhich is at once homogenizing and heterogenizing, the rearticulation of native cultures into a capitalistnarrative, the emergence of new global information technologies and transnational communities, thepresence of cultural fragmentation and multiculturalism, and the transnationalization of production.However, this important connection between one key meaning of the post-colonial and thechanging world of global capitalism is then juxtaposed to the assertion that postcoloniality is thecondition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism (Dirlik, 1994: 356). It is this kind of somewhatreductionist argument and the critique it has engendered that have helped to create a mood inwhich economic analysis overall has tended to be seen as being tainted in the same way. As aconsequence, much postmodern and post-structuralist literature has been characterized by theevasion of critical economic analysis in general.36


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Backlines Locked in Colonialism

The view that Africa should help itself is locked in a colonial and realist mindset.Michael Chege, director of the Center for African Studies, University of Florida, 2001, SAIS Review21.1 (2001) 225-237, A Realist's Minimal U.S. Policy Toward Africa, projectmuse, bjx

Not surprisingly, the situation in Africa has spawned a growing body in ultra-pessimisticliterature on Africa's future, grounded essentially on the supposedly intractable culture ofAfricans as a people. This literature now traces this perverse African cultural trait back "manycenturies" and claims to speak the truth about Africans as a race even at the risk of being politicallyincorrect. The Economist, for example, in its issue of May 13, 2000, rendered the verdict that Africawas "the hopeless continent." To cite the most poignant contemporary academic examples of thisinterpretation of Africa's current state, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz go to greatlengths to illustrate that, far from being a puzzle, the catastrophic conditions represent anAfrican age-old rationality at its best, using "disorder as a political instrument." In time, accordingto their analysis, Africa will reorder its own political constitution--violently if need be--putting iton a surer footing than any external aid programs have done so far. Indeed, according to JeffreyHerbst, centuries of failure in effective state construction in Africa due to its "harsh" geographic anddemographic attributes now justify reconstituting of African international boundaries (violently attimes) in order to match actual capability of the state to "broadcast power" within genuine national

frontiers. Given the current artificial boundaries and low population density, Africa's chaos willmultiply within ineffective states bereft of the bold nationalistic institutions that came to Europewith war-making over state frontiers in densely peopled lands. If only "Africans" and their externalbenefactors would listen. A close inspection of this stridently pessimistic trend betrays itspolemical characteristics. Whereas the "dependency" arguments of the 1970s and 1980s byWalter Rodney and others saw African and Third World underdevelopment as an economic andsocial tragedy originating primarily, if not entirely, from external sources, present-day culturaldeterminists consider the source of the problem to be predominantly internal and African-made.They dismiss any African success as miniscule and bound to fail in the same tone as dependencyprotagonists derided examples of rising Third-World capitalists as an ephemeral "comprador"farce. U.S. and other external interventions [End Page 226] in Africa are derided as patronizing andineffectual. The dependency theorists at the opposite pole saw them as all-powerful and economicallyperverse. Under the circumstances, adherents to the new paradigm believe that foreign actors can

in good conscience wash their hands of the matter and let Africa sort out its problems out thebest it knows how. It will be all for the good of state maturation in Africa for Africans to at lasttake responsibility for their own mischief. At its worst, this often racially derisive argumentsmacks of the colonial theories at the turn of the nineteenth century, a premise that Daloz andChabal at one point acknowledge. At best, it presents itself as a policy argument based onpolitical realism and the primacy of hard-nosed U.S. national interest. But it should be hard toprove the latter.


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Backlines Makes Revolution Impossible

Postcolonialist ideas that everything is constructed make revolution and criticism of atrocities impossible.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University of Oregon, 1999,Postcolonial Studies, 2:2, 149 - 163, How the grinch hijacked radicalism: further thoughts on the postcolonial, bjx

If the abandonment of revolution has made possible the applicability of postcolonial criticism torevolutionary societies, postcolonial criticism has contributed in turn to the erasure of revolutions, or at theleast to their further discrediting. For the same reason, however, recalling revolutions not only helps us place

postcolonialism historically with greater accuracy than is possible only with reference to the term `colonial . Butthe goal here is not just to historicise postcolonial criticism. Even more important may be the necessity of the

perspective of revolutionary history to a critical evaluation of postcolonial analysis and politics. Ours areconfusing times for anyone who might be foolish enough still to care to distinguish right from left (politicallyconstructed), right from wrong (culturally constructed), or even reality from illusion (it is all in therepresentation). The right-left distinction lost its meaning to the historian of China when, beginning in theeighties, former leftists were rendered into conservatives (and even rightists), and former rightists were re-incarnated as progressive reformers. The same decade witnessed the considerable attenuation of judgementsover right and wrong in debates (again involving China) over the cultural constructedness of human rights; so that it became nearly impossible to criticise the abuse of human beings without opening oneself to charges ofcultural insensitivity or worse, cultural imperialism. With everything being socially, politically or culturallyconstructed, it was inevitable that sooner or later reality itself would be open to questioning; not for the first

time, to be sure, but this time around with the aid of media that could turn deadly wars into Nintendo games.

Postcolonialism erases the possibility for revolution and allows itself to be misappropriated to support newforms of colonialism.ArifDirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology University of Oregon, 1999,Postcolonial Studies, 2:2, 149 - 163, How the grinch hijacked radicalism: further thoughts on the postcolonial, bjx

On the other hand, the projection of the postcolonial argument to the past has rendered the colonial past intojust one more phase on the way to globalisation, while erasing the revolutionary pasts that, for all theirfailures, envisioned alternatives to capitalist globality. The criticism of the nation, that does not distinguish

between different kinds of nationalism , also serves to erase the revolutionary movements that took the nation astheir premise. So does the obliviousness to questions of class. In the light of what I have observed above withreference to the re-evaluation of class formations in earlier national liberation movements, it may beunderstandable why postcolonial critics from formerly colonial societies should be reluctant to speak toissues of class, as they hail for the most part from classes that were(and are) suspect in the eyes of nativists.This makes it all the more imperative to speak to issues of class, however, as postcolonial elites are increasingly

entangled in the transnational class formations produced by global reconfigurations. In the process, thepostcolonial argument is mobilised to serve as an alibi for a cultural colonialism that is so thorough that it isnearly impossible to speak about it, as colonialism itself loses its meaning where it proceeds by consent of thecolonised. However diluted in its dissolution of social differences into generalities about marginality orsubalternity, the postcolonial argument even in its later phase initially retained concern for the underdog; aswitness the affinity postcolonial critics have expressed with the Subaltern historians. By now, however,postcolonial criticism has become absorbed into institutions of power, its arguments appropriated by thosewho may feel marginal in certain ways, but represent new forms of power in others. It may be indicative ofthis assimilation to transnational power that any call to disentangle postcolonialism as an intellectually and

politically critical strategy from its service to new structures of power provokes censorial charges of `left-conservatism, racism , and more colourfully, if in language reminiscent of politburo commissars, monsters arisingfrom the netherlands. 5 It may also explain why First-World muchacho postcolonials should be even moreadamant than Third-World postcolonial intellectuals in the defence of postcoloniality. It is even arguable that,within the discourse of postcoloniality, the literally postcolonial are increasingly marginalised as the postcolonialis abstracted as `method , and appropriated for First-World concerns that have little to do with thecolonial per se.


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Backlines Double Bind of Violence

Postcolonialism's reduction of all analysis to textuality creates an ahistorical eternalpresent. It becomes a double bind of downplaying the real violence of colonialism ortextually replicating such violence.

JasperGoss, University of New South Wales, 1996, Third World Quarterly, 17:2, 239 - 250,Postcolonialism: subverting whose empire?, bjxPostcolonialism has, as a term, become fashionable and, in line with other posts (such as post-industrial or post-feminist), seems to be of particular use in textual studies (as Bhabha, Said andSpivak demonstrate). However, the theory of postcolonialism is at best a mishmash of deeplyconfusing elements drawn from literary criticism, history and philosophy. The importance ofDerrida to postcolonial theory is paramount, though it seems that Bhabha and Spivak (amongothers) have taken Derridas maxim of `there is nothing outside of the text and converted it to`there is nothing but the text . In this sense all relations (colonial, personal, institutional, etc) onlyhave meaning as textual relations, the result being that, as Parry argues, ìn the interests ofestablishing the autarchy of the signifier the narrated event is existentially diminished.27 Havingreached this position of textual àutarchy it is easy to enunciate that all discourses are heterogeneous,having no foundational backing, simply being the result of numerous other discourses interacting

(hybridity). Often postcolonial analysis regards any explanation that seeks a relativity ofcategorisation (eg gender is more important than class in analyses of contemporary Australia 28 ) as aset of colonial discourses which universalise and homogenise. It is exceedingly banal to say thatsocial forces, discourses, etc are heterogeneous. Most people (except perhaps strict base-superstructureMarxists) are cogently aware of this phenomenon (even Leninists understood the importance ofalliances across and within classes). The point is to incorporate some kind of mechanism that providesa comparative and contextual means to theorise relational power and its impact. Postcolonial theoryexplicitly avoids this process ofhistoricisation by solely locating analyses at the local (`subjective) level, creating an ahistorical eternal present. Gates argues that postcolonial theory has createdits own double bind whereby one can choose to: empower the native discursively...downplayingthe epistemic (and literal) violence of colonialism; or play up the absolute nature of colonialdomination, [by] negating the subjectivity and agency of the colonised, thus textually replicatingthe repressive operations of colonialism. 29 The theoretical implications are that one is left in aconstantly ambiguous position as to the impact of colonialism. Even Young, an admirer ofpostcolonial projects, must still raise the question, òf what, if anything, is specific to the colonialsituation if colonial texts only demonstrate the same properties that can be found in any deconstructivereading of European texts .30 If the subaltern cannot speak (according to Spivak) and never will, thenthe situation we are left with is one that half-heartedly acknowledges the social ramifications ofcolonialism but has no way (or seeks none) of locating them within an historical project outside of`local discourses. Ahmad notes the impact of this theoretical turn by arguing that, `[colonialism ] thusbecomes a transhistorical thing, always present and always in the process of dissolution in one part ofthe world or another, so that everyone gets the privilege, sooner or later, at one time or another, ofbeing coloniser, colonised and postcolonial.31 We have arrived at a situation where the differencebetween the coloniser and colonised is not only the result of colonial discourses but in fact can beturned around so that the coloniser is in fact colonised as well. There is no dispute that it is certainlydesirable to make a critique of static and universalist categories (black, white, Third World, etc),but by seeking an eternal regress postcolonial theory problematises every category to the point

at which it has no usefulness whatsoever. As Dirlik states: postcolonialism s repudiation ofstructure and totality in the name of history ironically ends up not in an affirmation ofhistoricity but in a self-referential, universalising historicism that reintroduces through the backdoor an unexamined totality; it projects globally what are but local experiences.32


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Backlines Masks Neo-colonialism

The declaration that we have moved into a new era of postcolonialism masks thepresence of neo-colonial forces and oppresses those still under colonial rule.Kuan-Hsing Chen, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Coordinator of the Center for

Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan, 1996, Cultural Studies, 10:1, 37- 70, Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies:Response to Ang and Stratton, bjx

As an 'Anglo-American' academic product, the postcolonial discourse has in recent years become afashionable enterprise. Granted, postcolonial discourse has successfully taken over, appropriated andthen politicized the energy of postmodernism. But under the condition where places like Hong Kong,Macao and East Timor, among others, are still undeniably colonies, entire thirdworld spacesare deeply saturated by neo-colonial forces (Constantino, 1988), where aboriginals, local andmigrant workers, ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians have always been 'internallycolonized' throughout the world, where large parts have not even begun to go through theprocess of decolonization (partially because of the imposed nation-state building projects which haveswallowed up social energies), to announce the arrival of a post colonial (post-imperialist) era, theformation of a postcolonial culture and society, the shaping of a Global-Postmodern hybrid

subjectivity, is politically not justifiable. Beyond the therapeutic function so that previouscolonizers feel better, postcolonial discourse in effect obscures the faces of a neo-colonialstructure in the process of reconstructing global capitalism, and potentially becomes the leadingtheory of the global hegemonic re-ordering. In short, an all too easy orchestration can generatedevastating effects. One of the strategies commonly adopted by the postcolonial discourse is touniversalize a historical periodization, to forge a total rupture in order to legitimate a new invention,presumably inherited from the discourse of the postmodern. This formulation to suggest that

Imperialism Aff and Afro-Centrism Bad - 5th Week

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