Obverse Denominations: Africa?
Let us note first of all the polemical mood in which Achille Mbembe’s “African Modes of Self-Writing” (Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239– 73) is styled. A response that any polemical piece encourages is the desire to isolate its more extreme propositions for refutation. A refutation could also be undertaken on methodological grounds. One could say that the essayist has not taken account of enough scholarship, that the polemical propositions have been carelessly established, and that the entire set of questions could have been better posed in a different light.
But such a response would signally fail to register interest in the essay in its fundamental purpose, which is to get us thinking rigorously about what we mean when we invoke an “African” identity. The autochthonous denominations of this identity, as Mbembe shows, have led to a fixation with narratives of victimhood and with an interpretation of history as sorcery—that Africans have been accidentalized and mutilated by historical processes over which they have had little or no control.
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