Afro-Pessimism's Many Guises
Achille Mbembe’s brilliant exercise in Afro-pessimism, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” (Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239–73) is neither about the self nor about writing. Rather, Mbembe substitutes ideologies without agency for concepts of the self. Is time really the only subjectivity, as Mbembe asserts at the opening of his article, or is he proposing an eschatological ideology of doom for Africa? Ideologies do not define and inscribe the self. They are, instead, robes—or trappings—for the presentation of self.
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