Writing the World from an African Metropolis

Sarah Nuttall and

There is a manner about Johannesburg, it makes the impression of a metropolis.
Sarah G. Millin, The South Africans

This special issue of Public Culture is, and is not, about Africa. It is, and is not, about Johannesburg. It is an exercise in writing the worldliness—or the being-in- the-world—of contemporary African life forms.

Life in Motion

To write, said Maurice Blanchot, is the same thing as to form. To a large extent, to write is to bring to the surface something that is not yet there or that is there only as latent, as potential. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, we take the world to be “the infinite resolution of sense into fact and fact into sense”—the ongoing negotiation, that is, between what is and what could be.1 To write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world, or as a fragment thereof, is a compelling and perplexing task. When we were asked to edit a special issue of Public Culture on Africa, it quickly became clear to us that producing such an issue without a profound reinterrogation of Africa as a sign in modern formations of knowledge would have little value, both for Public Culture’s readers and for us as editors.

Why? Because Africa as a name, as an idea, and as an object of academic and public discourse has been, and remains, fraught. It is fraught in ways that go beyond even the paradigm of orientalism first introduced by Edward Said to speak to the staging of the difference of the non-West from the West. Indeed, Africa is not only perpetually caught and imagined within a web of difference and absolute otherness.2 More radically, the sign is fraught because Africa so often ends up epitomizing the intractable, the mute, the abject, or the other-worldly.3 So overdetermined is the nature of this sign that it sometimes seems almost impossible to crack, to throw it open to the full spectrum of meanings and implications that other places and other human experiences enjoy, provoke, and inhabit.4 The obstinacy with which scholars in particular (including African scholars) continue to describe Africa as an object apart from the world, or as a failed and incomplete example of something else, perpetually underplays the embeddedness in multiple elsewheres of which the continent actually speaks.

There are many explanations for the failure of contemporary scholarship to describe the novelty and originality of this continent in all its complexity, to pay sufficient attention to that which is unknown about it, or to find order in the apparent mess of its past and the chaos of its present. It suffices to mention a few. First is the fact that the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present (the creativity of practice) is always ahead of the knowledge produced about them. In addition, these compositional acts always move in multiple and unforeseen directions. What binds societies, made up of multiple assemblages and disjunctive syntheses, is some kind of artifice they come to believe in.5 They have, thus, the capacity to continually produce something new and singular, as yet unthought, which cannot always be accommodated within established conceptual systems and languages.

When it comes to scholarship on Africa, the encounter with what we cannot yet “determine” because it has not yet become or will never be definite—an encounter with indeterminacy, provisionality, and the contingent—assumes the proportions of an epistemological abyss. It is not simply that life changes rapidly and vast domains of human struggle and achievement are hardly the object of documentation, archiving, or empirical description—and even less so of satisfactory narrative or interpretive understanding. It is also that uncertainty and turbulence, instability and unpredictability, and rapid, chronic, and multidirectional shifts are the social forms taken, in many instances, by daily experience.6

Yet the conceptual categories with which to account for social velocity, the power of the unforeseen and of the unfolding, are in need of refinement. So too is the language with which to describe people’s relentless determination to negotiate conditions of turbulence and to introduce order and predictability into their lives. There have been limits to the capacity of the epistemological imagination to pose questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon; to draw on multiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; to open a space for broader comparative undertakings; and to account for the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change. Where empirical work and local studies are carried out, generally they are poorly informed theoretically. As fresh questions emerge and new dramas take shape, the social sciences manifest a surprising lack of openness toward the humanities. Historical and political scholarship is not combined with fundamental philosophical inquiry, and this has led to a dramatic “thinning” of “the social.” The latter is still understood as a matter of order and contract rather than as the locus of experiment and artifice.

A second reason for the failure of contemporary scholarship to describe Africa’s complexity is the relegation of the continent to the twin provinces of anthropology and development studies. To a large extent, in the division of intellectual labor inherited from the nineteenth century, both disciplines constitute sciences of alterity and difference. If one of anthropology’s many tasks is to understand forms of originality, development studies are mainly concerned with the pragmatics of prescription and the taxonomies of social engineering, state building, and good governance. In spite of recent efforts in anthropology, in particular, to use concepts that allow for a creative tension between subject and object (the reflexive turn), these two disciplines’ foundational assumptions are still the unconscious belief that particular modes of describing reality are appropriate to “modern” societies, on the one hand, and to nonliterate, underdeveloped, and “residual” worlds, on the other hand. In this view, there can be no authentic description of Africa that does not touch on witchcraft, kinship, poverty, or chieftaincy.This compartmentalization of knowledge undergirds the obsession with Africa’s uniqueness, and it feeds the overwhelming neglect of how the meanings of Africanness are made.

Third are the effects of the crisis of representation affecting the human sciences in general. In Europe and North America, this crisis arose principally from postmodern challenges to the disciplines’ ability to describe an objective world and to understand meaningfully any lived experience.7 Paradoxically, in Africa the origins of the crisis can be said to originate in the fact that the postmodern challenge has always been weak and the archives scholars rely on always too thin. As far as the nature of theory and the nature of Africa are concerned, functionalism and instrumentalism have always been the order of the day. At no time have the analytical and normative strands of functionalist, neoliberal, and Marxist political economy been eclipsed by cultural studies, postcolonial, or postmodern criticism.8 As the African predicament becomes ever more complex, the manifestations of the crisis are to be found in a loss of the virtues of curiosity and astonishment at what the (African) world might be. The refusal to recognize that all knowledge is contingent on other knowledges has left the continent at the mercy of stolid analyses on the one hand and rapid surveys, off-the-cuff remarks, and anecdotes with sensational value on the other. This translates into an implicit view of Africa as a residual entity, the study of which does not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of the human condition in general.

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Notes

Carol Breckenridge, the former editor of the journal, first suggested that Public Culture run a special issue on Africa. The current editor and executive editor, Beth Povinelli and Dilip Gaonkar, not only vigorously endorsed the project but also helped in shaping it intellectually. In particular, ongoing discussions with Beth Povinelli in Johannesburg and New York enriched the issue’s rationale. These discussions also prompted a wider conversation about writing the world from the global South that extended beyond the ambit of this particular issue. Public Culture’s editorial committee provided challenging comments on, and constructive criticisms of, each of the essays. Kaylin Goldstein has been a superb interlocutor and manager of the production process. We have benefited greatly from James Rizzo’s copyediting skills. The Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) has been an extraordinarily conducive environment from which to produce this issue. We owe a great intellectual debt to all of our colleagues, specifically Deborah Posel, Jon Hyslop, Liz Walker, Ivor Chipkin, Graeme Reid, Irma Duplessis, Tom Odhiambo, and Robert Muponde. We would also like to thank Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, Paul Gilroy, Dominique Malaquais, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Vron Ware for their intellectual companionship during a semester spent at Yale University. Isabel Hofmeyr, Jon Hyslop, and Lindsay Bremner all commented on the introduction. Funding for the images in this issue has come from a grant from AIRE-Développement, a French institute for research on development based in Paris.

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 9.
2. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
3. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–4.
4. Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 239–73.
5. Cornelius Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
6. In such contexts, as Jane I. Guyer argues, “people’s decisions have to be deeply and intelligently reasonable without, however, benefiting from the luxury of being based on calculation of discrete and stable variables (as per rational choice theories). Temporal horizons may have to shift suddenly as new configurations of power, price, and plausible social action form and reform.” Introduction to Money Struggles and City Life: Devaluation in Ibadan and Other Urban Centers in Southern Nigeria, 1986–1996, ed. Jane Guyer, La Ray Denzer, and Adigun A. B. Agbaye (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002), xi.
7. See Joan W. Scott, “After History?” and William H. Sewell Jr., “Whatever Happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History?” in Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
8. On the nature of these debates in other area studies, see Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds., Postmodernism and China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); and Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, eds., Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).