Description
Book SynopsisThese essays on postcolonial subjectivities cross the frontiers of critical theory by illuminating the contradictory predicaments Africans confront in strikingly different parts of the continent at the start of the 21st century. The focus is on the making of subjectivities as a process which is political, a matter of subjugation to state authority; moral, reflected in the conscience and agency of subjects who bear rights, duties and obligations; and realised existentially, in the subjects' consciousness of their personal or intimate relations. The notion of agency is interrogated, without lapsing into the new Afro-pessimism. The essays recognise postcolonies troubled by state decline and increasing exploitation, dispossession and marginalisation, but avoid Afro-pessimism's reduction of subjects to mere victims. Even more against the grain of conventional postcolonial studies is the radical questioning of the force of 'modern subjectivism' in struggles for control of identity, autonomy and explicit consciousness, and through artistic self-fashioning in globally driven consumption. With substantial cases based on autobiography, personal experience and long-term scholarly fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Botswana and Cameroon, the book opens out a fresh field for comparative research and theory on postcolonial transformations in intersubjectivity. This is to take seriously the people's perception, so widespread in postcolonial Africa, that to live life to the full is to live it in interdependence, in conviviality, if possible; that care and respect for others - indeed, civility - is a precious, and indeed, precarious condition of survival and as such is the object of recognised strategies for its conscious defence; and that because significant others are opaque - never being totally knowable - uncertainty, ambivalence and contingency are inescapable conditions of human existence.
Trade Review'An inspirational collection of themes and methods for future researchers in Africa.' Richard Fardon, SOAS, University of London 'A lively collection of essays on a topic that could hardly be more timely or challenging. It will be widely read and discussed, and will help scholars in several disciplines to understand questions of consciousness and identity in contemporary Africa.' James Ferguson, University of California, Irvine
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Postcolonial Subjectivities: The Personal, The Political and the Moral - Richard Werbner
- Part I: Consciousness, Conscience and the Other
- 1. Nuriaty, the Saint, and the Sultan: Virtuous Subject and Subjective Virtuoso of the Post-Modern Colony - Michael Lambek
- 2. "I am like a movie star in my street": Photographic Self-creation in Postcolonial Kenya - Heike Behrend
- 3. The Making and Unmaking of Consciousness: Nuba and Gamk Strategies for Survival in a Sudanese Borderland - Akira Okazaki
- 4. Gendered Violence and the Militarization of Ethnicity: A Case Study from South Sudan - Sharon Elaine Hutchinson and Jok Madut Jok
- Part II: Uncertainties, subjection and the subjunctive
- 5. 'A child is one person's only in the womb': Domestication, Agency and Subjectivity in the Cameroonian Grassfields - Francis B. Nyamnjoh
- 6. Uncertain Citizens: Herero and the New Intercalary Subject in Postcolonial Botswana - Deborah Durham
- 7. Subjectivity and Subjunctivity: Hoping for Health in Eastern Uganda - Susan Reynolds Whyte
- 8. Ancestral Incests and Postcolonial Subjectivities in the Karembola (Madagascar) - Karen Middleton
- Afterword: Provoking Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa - Paul Stoller
