A Foray into African Studies
These remarks were given at a University of California African Studies workshop held at UC Berkleley in March 2022.
I’d like to begin with an epigraph from queer Kenyan intellectual Keguro Macharia, drawn from the article “On Being Area Studied”:
“I am not really sure I have anything to say about area studies — about the maps of the world it created, about the maps of the world it still uses, about how it assembles knowledge, about the academy’s complicity in it, about the role of native informants, about the possibilities of antinomian practices, about decolonization (a term whose current use in online communities makes little sense to me), about earnest US-based scholars who promise not to replicate imperial strategies as they travel around the world to discover, if they dare, that they hold US passports, and this means something they cannot escape. I could think about what that means for those who travel with good intentions, but I do not really see the point. How will the native choose to die?”
Social change, war, violence, and aesthetics. These key terms animate the unwieldy breadth of my research projects. What is war? How can they begin and how do they end? Can there be war in the absence of bloodshed? What is violence? What constitutes socially permissible violence? Can we think through an aesthetics of violence? These trajectories of thought emerge at the intersection of my academic and political occupations. I aspire to maintain with ferocious singularity contemplation of the depth and enormity of black suffering. To orient my desire towards a descent into real hell. To remain in the hold of the ship, despite my fantasies of flight. To demand that we be free of air, despite not knowing any other source of breath.
The cover of my African heritage cannot but superficially dull the weight of my passport, my dollars, my self-interests. I wish not to delude myself about the dangers of my touch, and my gaze as it bears on Africans. Is there any ethical engagement I can engage in, or only room to attempt to manage the violence I carry and provide some pithy recompense to individual Africans and communities?
I’ve never identified as an Africanist or with African studies except to facilitate my parasitic relationship to the resources of the university. The animating desire of African studies seems to me to be to bring the African into the halls of capital “H” history. I’m not interested in writing these people into history — history itself is antiblackness inasmuch as blackness is conjured in the zone of nonbeing, outside of the coordinates of space and time. The specificity of place, the recognition of difference in historical experience, are a few registers through which the antiblackness of history stymies attempts to face starkly what Dionne Brand has articulated as a “tear in the world”¹ instituted by the unrepresentable violence of racial slavery. Respectfully, fuck nuance. On a number of registers, nuance, specificity, and difference simply muddle our ability to grasp the truth of structural positionalities which allow for chaotic and varied manifestations of practice, affect, and thought.
How will the Africanist respond to black refusal that oscillates between hostility, indifference, and tricksterism? Refusal of complicity, refusal of openness, refusal of money, refusal of life, refusal of you? What makes the Africanist of African “resistance” anything but an informant of the state, providing information necessary for the state’s ever more complex campaigns of counterinsurgency? All of this under the shroud of a libidinal fetish for African voices and stories and so on. What makes your so-called recognition of “African agency” do assume that capacities are universal as opposed to constructed in and through violence? Do your readings of African futurity provide you the pleasure of knowing that, rather than ending a fundamentally unethical world, blacks will continue to furnish the raw material for the continuation of a world that will support you, your progeny, your community at our expense?
What am I here to do? The first title for this project was “Violation at the Edge of Representation: The Hidden War in Cameroon.” What I do know from Saidiya Hartman is that I don’t want to graphically rehearse the violence of colonial repression that reaches a level of incoherence that defies representative capacity. What I know is that the easy circulation of such scenes provides a sense of pleasure for the nonblack listener, whether that pleasure is gleeful, fraught, or masochistic.
I apologize to everyone here — this paper was written to jump through particular disciplinary hoops, primarily the tyranny of empiricism and method, and therefore I imagine that I will be disinterested in engaging with some of your comments, though I will be grateful inasmuch as I still need to jump through the hoop of getting this work published.
In the same vein that recent theoretical interventions in black thought have decoupled slavery from forced labor, I work to decouple war as a state, condition, or process, from blood and frozen corpses. Engaging in symptomatic readings of black thought that are birthed in a context where the demands of black people are often in excess of precise articulation allows me to engage in speculative work alongside the unconscious undercurrents animating African antisocial life. Following Denise Ferreira Da Silva, this means rubbing against the grain of a western colonial episteme that associates sameness with unity, and difference with conflict.²
Following Frantz Fanon, antiblackness produces atmospheres of violence,³ from which there is no durable escape even though there may be pockets of momentary reprieve. How do we talk of violence without the understanding that blackness signifies violence itself, that point of singularity in which there is capacity for violation and no capacity to be violated. Black nonviolence is an oxymoron. The notion that there is such thing as disproportional responses to black demands for social change is the result of a faulty analytic. From the social theory of war I aim to develop a sociogenic theory of war. Sociogeny opens the door to understanding war as a phenomenon entangled in the iterative relationships between so-called nature and culture. The Union des Populations du Cameroun — the revolutionary political party in Cameroon that struggled against the French empire for independence and decolonization — was very clear that colonialism was an antagonism as opposed to a conflict.
The anti-imperialist struggles occurring all over the continent, and quite spectacularly in Mali and Burkina Faso, where the grip of French colonialism is being torn from the root. We should be wary as the United States props up the legitimacy of NATO, continues to expand the reach and scope of AFRICOM, and lubricates the NGO-industrial complex.
What is the true nature of decolonization? Some friends of mine quip that if you use the word “decolonize”, and you cannot exchange the word for “destroy,” then we are not speaking the same grammar.
¹A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand
²Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira Da Silva
³Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
