What is postcolonial thinking?

An interview with Achille Mbembe
eurozine

The faults in Europe's universalism, especially when confronting its colonial history, have nurtured a variety of critical perspectives in the West. Talking to French magazine Esprit, theorist Achille Mbembe says that postcolonial thinking looks so original because it developed in a transnational, eclectic vein from the very start. This enabled it to combine the anti-imperialist tradition with the fledgling subaltern studies and a specific take on globalization, he says.

Esprit: "Postcolonial theory" is present in Africa, India, Great Britain, Australia and the United States, but hardly at all in France. Can you tell us what it is all about and what lies behind it? How, in particular, does it differ from anti-western and third-world currents of thought?

Achille Mbembe: What's known in the English-speaking world as "postcolonial studies" and "postcolonial theory" is characterised by its heterogeneity, so what constitutes its originality cannot be summed up easily in a few words.

The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond

ALI A. MAZRUI (2005)

State University of New York at Binghamton

Edward W. Said has been described as one of the founders of postcolonial studies. But the claim that Said is a postcolonial innovator should not be interpreted to mean that hiswork does not examine European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. On the contrary, much of the focus in both Orientalism (1979) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) is on the classical era of European imperialism, and about literary interpretations of the colonized peoples, going back to Joseph Conrad and long before him.

V. Y. Mudimbe is, in certain aspects, a thinker in the same tradition as Edward Said. Both of them illustrate that the best time for interpreting colonialism is in the postcolonial era. After all, one can best evaluate the preceding day after the sun has set. In Hegel’s immortal words, “The owl of Minerva spreads out its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Philosophy of Right, 1812). Postcolonial studies include such an assessment of the preceding era of colonialism.

Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa

This remarkable book confronts the philosophical problems of otherness and identity through readings of the parables and fables of a colonized people, the Luba of Zaire. V. Y. Mudimbe poses two overarching questions: how can one think about and comment upon alterity without essentializing its features? And, is it possible to speak and write about an African tradition or its contemporary practice without taking into account the authority of the colonial library that has invented African identities? Mudimbe brings unusual insight to such a discussions: “Here I am on the margin of margins: Black, African, Catholic, yet agnostic; intellectually Marxist, disposed toward psychoanalysis, yet a specialist in Indo-European philology and philosophy.” He uses his own education by Catholic missionairies in Zaire as a framework for exploring interactions between African and Western systems of thought.

Mudimbe examines the relationship between God and human beings in the philosophy and

The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge

What is the meaning of Africa and of being African? What is and what is not African philosophy? Is philosophy part of Africanism? These are the kind of fundamental questions which this book addresses.

Valentin Y. Mudimbe Africa remains the absolute difference—An interview

Valentin Mudimbe: In order to understand “Invention of Africa”, we can use a number of entries, levels of interpretations which were made by scholars, journalists and anthropologists, in order to define the specificity of Africa. We have levels of comprehension and understanding the history of the West; its everyday life, practices and its ethno-philosophy, and indeed the practice of disciplines such as history, sociology, theology and the philosophical level in its two dimensions. I distinguish the semiological from the hermeneutic form. The first is understood as the totality of skills and knowledge that allows one to describe what one is seeing in social science. The second as the totality of skills and knowledge that allows one to read meanings. That is the first entry; the levels of interpretation of what is going on in a given society, which thus could qualify Africa as abnormal. We can also see that abnormality or difference, by using a model, the mode of production. In France particularly, people like Catherine Coquery Vidrovitch, Claude Meillasoux and Emmanuel Terrey, conceived “the lineage mode of production”, to qualify the specificity of Africa on the basis of the Marxist legacy, and the concept of “