But it is in relation to Africa that the notion of...

October 25, 2011

“But it is in relation to Africa that the notion of ‘absolute otherness’ has been taken farthest. It is now widely acknowledged that Africa as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world. In several respects, Africa still constitutes one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposes to be its identity. And Africa, because it was and remains that fissure between what the West is, what it thinks it represents, and what it thinks it signifies, is not simply part of its imaginary significations, it is one of those significations. By imaginary significations, we mean ‘that something invented’ that, paradoxically, becomes necessary because ‘that something’ plays a key role, both in the world the West constitutes for itself and in the West’s apologetic concerns and exclusionary and brutal practices towards others.” Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 2. (via erkjhnsn)