Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Adesanmi, Pius

Introduction: Afropessimisni and temporality

One fundamental consequence of the tragic failure of the postcolonial nation-state in Africa has been the elaboration of discursive positions underpinned by sentiments of despair and hopelessness. With one developmentalist thesis after another crumbling under the weight of civil wars, famine, poverty, social inertia, and political stasis, it has become the norm in various Africanist disciplines to homogenize the continent's postcolonial space as one uniform site of dysfunctionality.1 Underpinning the reasons often proffered for this pervasive Afropessimism is the belief that "the African condition"2 can only be understood from the perspective of what Simon Gikandi calls "the schemata of difference" (455), difference, that is, from the teleological ethos of the Occident. Thus, an entire discursive symbology has evolved to place the temporal frame of the African postcolony within a largely unproblematized sign of negativity. This is the difficulty of speaking "rationally" about Africa that Achille Mbembe evokes in the introduction to On the Postcolony.

In an effort to transcend both Afropessimist representations of the African condition and the Eurocentric paradigms that underlie some of them, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz propose in Africa Works an analytical grid designed to reveal the "continuities in their historicity." Although their study focuses on articulations of agency in the informal infra-State contexts of African postcolonies, Chabal and Daloz are able to show that Afropessimism devolves from scholarly practices and discursive formations that are too often fixated on the tragedy of Africa's colonial past and the imperfect modernity of the nation-state it engendered. The trouble with such positions is that they often underestimate the dynamism of the present, subsuming its independent vitality within the causal instrumentality of a colonial past that is made to function as an exegetical grid for every aspect of the postcolonial condition. Chabal and Daloz, on the other hand, while acknowledging the significance of the past, do not downplay the vitality of a present marked by the interweaving of Africa's colonial and postcolonial realities.

If the need to overcome the passé inclinations of Afropessimism also bespeaks a certain anxiety regarding temporality, as one clearly sees in Africa Works, it is because every attempt to privilege what Fredric Jameson calls "the ontology of the present" (215) carries the risk of unsettling altogether the authority of the African past. That is, if, as Jameson suggests, "ontologies of the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past"-the reference to Edouard Glissant's well-known notion of vision prophétique du passé ("the prophetic vision of the past") (227) is obvious-what then happens to the past of subject peoples, a past that requires precisely the sort of creative engagement that Jameson dismisses? How does one proceed to valorize this past without making the present its prisoner? This dilemma was largely responsible for the initially lukewarm attitude of African (ist) scholarship to postcolonial theory, a body of knowledge that has never quite been able to overcome the semantic import of its problematic prefix.3

Achille Mbembe, postcolonial temporality, and durée

Achille Mbembe is one African scholar who has engaged the anxieties of postcolonial temporality in a manner that accounts for the overlapping of past and present while maintaining their distinct functionality. His seminal book On the Postcolony engages the modalities of self-fashioning in the African present, modalities determined at once by local issues and, more generally, by the status of Africa as a subaltern Other of the West. By theorizing the political structure of the African present as a postcolony, Mbembe inevitably affirms the politics of temporality, since a postcolony is, of necessity, related temporally to what had been a colony:

The notion "postcolony" identifies specifically a given historical trajectory-that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence . . . the postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence. (102, emphasis added)

Although scholars as diverse as Judith Butler, Tejumola Olaniyan, and Fernando Coronil have disagreed with many of Mbembe's formulations regarding the nature of power and the articulations of resistance in the African postcolony,4 he has nevertheless been able to foreground the temporal coherence of the postcolony as a phase that has been worked over by imperialism but whose socio-political dynamics are constantly shaped and mediated by multiple, overlapping modes of self-fashioning in which the past and the present function relationally: