In Search of Africa(s)

Universalism and Decolonial Thought

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Jean-Loup Amselle, Andrew Brown

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509540303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the postcolonial the first phase of a new universalism, one which would be truly universal because it would be fully inclusive, or is it on the contrary the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation? In addressing this issue Diagne and Amselle also tackle many related themes, such as the concepts of race, culture and identity, the role of languages in philosophy as practised in different cultural areas, the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa, and the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his writings on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. While Amselle seeks to expose the essentialist and culturalist logics that might underlie postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diagne consistently refuses to adopt the trappings of the Afrocentrist and particularist thinker. He argues instead for a total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all 'centrisms' and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time. This volume is a timely contribution to current debates on the postcolonial question and its new decolonial form. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from African studies and Black studies to philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the debates around postcolonial studies and decolonial thought

1
Universalism in questions

Jean-Loup Amselle

Universalism has been, and continues to be, rightly decried insofar as the conquest and colonization of Africa were carried out in the name of the eradication of ‘barbaric customs’ such as slavery, human sacrifice or female genital mutilation.¹ What is described as ‘overarching universalism’ – a phrase that acts as a sort of frozen syntagm – and the corresponding imposition of the rights of man, or, as we say today, human rights, continue to be propagated in the form of campaigns against female genital mutilation, against homophobia and against the treatment meted out to women in the South. These campaigns are led by major international organizations and NGOs, and are taken up in Africa by the ‘secular’ fractions of the elites in each country; they have the disadvantage of arousing the determined opposition of a significant number of the population, who are in favour of maintaining female genital mutilation or are hostile to the emancipation of women and averse to homosexuality. It is also well known that in many cases the legal prohibition of female genital mutilation does not stop this practice from being performed.

Hostility towards any reform of what is supposed to be an immutable ‘tradition’ is also taken up and supported, in Mali, for example, by Muslim leaders of every tendency; they see it as a political marker for confronting the secular faction of the local bourgeoisie, which they describe as kowtowing to the West. So what is to some extent just a political issue between fractions of the ruling class is presented as a clash between Africa and the West, with the consequence of muddying the waters and fostering so-called ‘postcolonial’ positions.²

This phenomenon became clear during Barack Obama’s visit to Dakar, Senegal, in 2013: while the American president was favourable to ‘coming out’ about one’s sexual orientations, whatever they were, the Senegalese president Malick Sall said homosexuality was not one of the ‘African traditions’ and that there was no question of decriminalizing it.³ The imposition from outside of a universalism of human rights in its different forms – whether it be ‘the gay international’, as Joseph Massad put it with regard to homosexuality, or ‘femonationalism’, to use the term put forward by Black feminists⁴ – caused and continues to cause collateral damage within Southern countries, since the obligation to ‘come out’ as encouraged by the West has the effect, in both cases, of penalizing working-class homosexuals and trapping women within an apparent patriarchal dictatorship.

The importance of this damage should be relativized and a proper emphasis placed on the ‘agency’⁵ (the capacity of social actors to respond) of homosexuals in the South, especially in Muslim countries; and the same applies to women’s resistance to the injunctions of ‘White’ feminists from the North. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the imposition of a universalism of human rights is part of the aftermath of the colonial period⁶ and must, as such, be condemned – despite the ambiguities that ran through the Durban conferences in 2001 and 2009.⁷

Unfortunately, criticism of the unilateral imposition of human rights, of this overbearing Western universalism in all its aspects, often has the harmful effect – now as before, during the colonial period – of concealing the need to defend another type of universalism whose importance is obvious in the face of the excesses of cultural relativism associated with the denigration of reason, or what is now called decolonial ‘pluriversalism’.⁸ True, universalism must be rejected to the extent that it is only a Eurocentrism, and therefore a ‘particular’ opposing other ‘particulars’ seeking recognition. This does not, however, mean forgoing the quest for a unity of the different manifestations of capitalism on different continents or the search for potential communication and translation between different cultures.

To begin with, let us introduce the postcolonial thinkers Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose theories are often based on culturalist premises which emphasize the irreducible specificity of different countries or subcontinents such as China or India. As I endeavoured to show in my book L’Occident décroché, Indian historians of the ‘subalternist’ school who initially based their analyses of popular resistance on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci later resorted to other authors such as Michel Foucault and Louis Dumont, thereby giving an essentialist and culturalist flavour to their apprehension of Indian social realities.⁹ Those who oppose this culturalist vision and claim to have discovered a redefined universalism are more discrete: they come from the same Southern countries, but they also teach in the United States. Here I will mention the Indian Marxist thinker Vivek Chibber, professor at New York University. A defender of universalism, he insists that the manifestations of capitalism are basically the same in the East as in the West, in India, Europe and the United States.¹⁰ In a similar way, Nivedita Majumdar showed that the almost exclusive focus on gender at work in the writings of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha had the effect of masking the forms of acquiescence to the tradition that are in some cases demonstrated by so-called ‘subaltern’ women, or of obscuring their class consciousness.¹¹

The American-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, meanwhile, uses other data – basically, cultural data – and has a different theoretical slant, but he too is just as committed, within the context of what he defines as a ‘cosmopolitanism’, to seeking values shared by many cultures. My own concept of universalism is close to his theoretical model.¹²

Another American-Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, is also clearly hostile to cultural relativism: he defends a universalist position based on the biological unity of the human species. For him, there is nothing impossible in the idea of translating Western concepts into African cultures (in this case, Akan)¹³ or African concepts into European languages, even though this latter transference is less common than the former. In this respect, he rejects the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whose strong version, ‘linguistic determinism’, postulates that human actions are necessarily limited by the language in which they are expressed. He is also hostile to the idea of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ put forward by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom to understand a sentence is to understand a language. In both cases, Wiredu believes, the powerful influence of language on thought cannot legitimize any relativism.¹⁴

Souleymane Bachir Diagne goes even further.¹⁵ Indeed, he has developed a theory of the universalism of translation whose major sources of inspiration are Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lévi-Strauss, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas.

In the report he presented in 1958 to his colleagues with the aim of setting up a Chair in Social Anthropology for Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty distinguished two kinds of universalism: overarching universalism and lateral universalism.¹⁶ By ‘overarching universalism’, Merleau-Ponty means the elementary, unconscious structures that Lévi-Strauss detected in kinship, with a focus on the universality of the nature/culture distinction and of the prohibition of incest.¹⁷ To this formalistic mathematics of ‘atoms of kinship’ – a mathematics that is perfectly inhuman, being attached to no given society or culture – Merleau-Ponty opposes a ‘lateral universalism’, based on the concreteness and richness of the society or culture that is the subject of the work of the ‘ethnographer’, a term which has in fact been largely abandoned by contemporary anthropology. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

It’s about building a general reference system where the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized person, and the errors made by one about the other can find their place; it’s about constituting a broadened experience which may in principle become accessible to people of another country and another time.¹⁸

In this case, it is not a matter of applying a mathematical or logical apparatus on unconscious social actors from above, as a grammar is imposed on speakers, thereby flattening out all differences; rather, the aim is to establish an empirical communication between radically distinct cultural spheres. However, for Merleau-Ponty, this process of communication goes further, since he maintains that anthropologists must not only apprehend exotic societies, but also free themselves...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Foreword: In focus: a comparative reading of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle
• Introduction
• 1 Universalism in questions
• 2 On the universal and universalism
• 3 Race, culture, identity
• 4 Africanity, Afrocentrism, representation
• 5 The racial ban on representation
• 6 On cultural and linguistic specificities
• 7 On African languages and translation
• 8 An optimism of translation
• 9 On philosophy in Islam and on the question of a ‘West African Islam’
• 10 The political instrumentalization of a West African Sufi Islam
• 11 West African Sufism revisited
• 12 Thinking/creating Africa
• 13 On the non-existence of Africa … and of Europe
• 14 On Africa and pan-Africanism
• 15 Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s ‘desire for Africa’
• 16 Were human rights born in Africa?
• 17 On the charters of the Mandé
• 18 On various contemporary questions
• Bibliography
• End User License Agreement