Of Poetics, Politics, and Fragments: Mamadou Diouf and the Burden of History
Cary Fraser
Similarly, Mamadou’s observation that “postcolonial literature and epistemologies as well as the cultural turn allow us to think about Africa outside the colonial and nationalist libraries of victimhood, backwardness, non-responsiveness to progress, modernity, authenticity, redress…” is well taken. However, scholars may also need to exercise care to ensure that the cultural turn does not become an epistemological trap – Africans may be perceived as incapable of rising above the ‘limitations’ of culture. In the Western academy, there has been a long tradition of cultural explanations of Africans and their descendants as devoid of “reason” – thus they are assumed to exist “outside of intellect” and “outside of history.” Perhaps, we need to ensure that the cultural turn and postcolonial epistemologies help to lead us out of “the Heart of Darkness” that has enshrouded the study of Africa and its peoples in the Western academy.
As Aimé Césaire and Mamadou both have recognized, Africans, their descendants outside of Africa, and Africanists of all persuasions, need to restructure the terms of engagement which shape the study of Africa and its role in the shaping of global human history. Africa has been the site of multiple realities and multiple imaginaries over time, and the scholarly enterprise’s ability to capture those complexities will do much to create “a community of mutual intellectual intelligibility on the continent” and among its multiple diasporas. To return to Mamadou’s observation about religious syncretism, and my suggestion about the need to study the phenomenon among African-descent communities in the Atlantic World, pluralism and syncretism have been manifest in the cultural traditions of African communities and these phenomena may provide some insights into the creation of avenues of ‘mutual intellectual intelligibility.’
Mamadou’s assessment of contemporary politics in Africa raises the interesting question of the role of intellectuals in reshaping debates about governance, and the structures of governance, on the continent. To what extent can the diasporic intellectual presence be invoked in these debates? Is it possible to imagine the intellectual diaspora as a ‘community of elders’ with whom political actors and citizens in these countries can engage in shaping public policy? How can the diaspora serve as channels of accountability for domestic governance? Would it be important for the intellectuals in the diaspora to serve as one wing of the “Fourth Estate” charged with shaping the public arena and debates within that arena? To what extent can the diaspora be encouraged to shape debates through the educational process and in classrooms within African educational institutions? Given the contemporary technologies of distance education, is such a role possible for the members of the diaspora in the academy?
This exchange between Moses and Mamadou ranged widely and with great insight into the intellectual challenges that shape the production of knowledge about Africa. It is a conversation that opens ways of thinking about the education of the next generation of scholars in the academy – in Africa and internationally – since Africa has been at the crossroads of the global system that was created by Islamic imperial expansion and its successors among the North Atlantic states. With the contemporary rise of Asia, the dynamics of the changing international system will continue to exert influences upon the development of Africa – in ways that parallel and diverge from the past. Thus African history, for the current generation of scholars like Mamadou, and their future counterparts will find the field enormously productive and useful for shaping the debates about the present and the future.
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