Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?

Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial? Author(s): Kwame Anthony Appiah Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1991), pp. 336-357 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343840 Accessed: 03/10/2010 17:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. 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Kwame Anthony Appiah Tu t'appelaisBimbircokak Et tout &taitbien ainsi Tu es denvenu Victor-Emile-Louis-Henri-Joseph Ce qui Autant qu'il m'en souvienne Ne rappelle point ta parent6 avec Roqueffelere "A Mon Mari" -YAMBO OUOLOGUEM, In 1987, the Center for African Art in New York organized a show entitled "Perspectives: Angles on African Art." The curator, Susan Vogel, had worked with a number of "cocurators," whom I list in order of their appearance in the table of contents of the exhibition catalogue: Ekpo Eyo, quondam director of the department of antiquities of the National Museum of Nigeria; William Rubin, director of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and organizer of its controversial exhibit, "Primitivism and TwentiethCentury Art"; Romare Bearden, African-American painter; Ivan Karp, curator of African ethnology at the Smithsonian; Nancy Graves, European-American painter, sculptor, and filmmaker; James Baldwin, who surely needs no qualifying glosses; David Rockefeller, art collector and friend of the mighty; Lela Kouakou, Baule artist and diviner from the Ivory Coast (this a delicious juxtaposition, richest and poorest, side by side); Iba N'Diaye, Senegalese sculptor; and Robert Farris Thompson, Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991) ? 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1702-0001$01.00. 336 All rights reserved. Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 337 Yale professor and African and African-Americanart historian.' In her introductoryessay, Vogel describes the process of selection used to pick artworks for the show. The one woman and nine men were each offered a hundred-odd photographs of "African art as varied in type and origin, and as high in quality, as we could manage" and asked to select ten for the show. Or, I should say more exactly, this is what was offered to eight of the men. For Vogel adds that "in the case of the Baule artist, a man familiar only with the art of his own people, only Baule objects were placed in the pool of photographs"(P, p. 11). At this point we are directed to a footnote to the essay, which reads: Showing him the same assortment of photos the others saw would have been interesting, but confusing in terms of the reactions we sought here. Field aesthetics studies, my own and others, have shown that African informants will criticize sculptures from other ethnic groups in terms of their own traditional criteria, often assuming that such works are simply inept carvings of their own aesthetic tradition. [P, p. 17 n. 2] I shall return to this irresistible footnote in a moment. But let me pause to quote further, this time from the words of David Rockefeller, who would surely never "criticizesculptures from other ethnic groups in terms of [his] own traditionalcriteria,"discussingwhat the catalogue calls a "Fantifemale figure": I own somewhat similar things to this, and I have always liked them. This is a rather more sophisticated version than the ones that I've seen, and I thought it was quite beautiful. . . . the total composition has a very contemporary, very Western look to it. It's the kind of thing, I think, that goes very well with ... contemporaryWesternthings. It would look very good in a modern apartment or house. [P, p. 138] We may suppose that Rockefeller was delighted to discover that his final judgment was consistent with the intentions of the sculpture's creators. For a footnote to the earlier checklist-the list of artworks 1. Perspectives:Angles on African Art (exhibition catalogue, Center for African Art, New York, 1987), [p. 9]; hereafter abbreviated P. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For Truth in Semantics (1986), Necessary Questions(1989), and In My Father's House(forthcoming), a collection of essays on African cultural politics. His first novel, AvengingAngel,was published in 1990. 338 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial ultimately chosen for the show-reveals that the Baltimore Museumof Art desires to "makepublic the fact that the authenticity of the Fante figure in its collection has been challenged." Indeed, work by Doran Ross suggests this object is almost certainly a modern piece produced in my hometown of Kumasiby the workshop of a certain FrancisAkwasi, which "specializesin carvings for the international market in the style of traditional sculpture. Many of its works are now in museums throughout the West, and were published as authentic by Cole and Ross"(yes, the same Doran Ross) in their classic catalogue, TheArts of Ghana (P, p. 29). But then it is hard to be surewhat would please a man who gives as his reason for picking another piece, this time a Senufo helmet mask, "I have to say that I picked this because I own it. It was given to me by President Houphouet Boigny of the Ivory Coast"(P, p. 143); or who remarks"concerningthe market in African art": the best pieces are going for very high prices. Generally speaking, the less good pieces in terms of quality are not going up in price. And that's a fine reason for picking the good ones rather than the bad. They have a way of becoming more valuable. I look at African art as objects I find would be appealingto use in a home or an office. ... I don't think it goes with everything, necessarily-although the very best perhaps does. But I think it goes well with contemporaryarchitecture. [P, p. 131] There is something breathtakinglyunpretentious in Rockefeller's easy movement between considerationsof finance, aesthetics, and decor. In these responses, we have surely a microcosm of the site of the African in contemporary-which is, then, surely to say, postmodern-America. I have quoted so much from Rockefeller not to emphasize the familiar fact that questions of what we call "aesthetic" value are cruciallybound up with market value, nor even to draw attention to the fact that this is known by those who play the art market. Rather I want to keep clearly before us the fact that David Rockefeller is permitted to say anythingat all about the arts of Africa because he is a buyerand because he is at the center,while Lela Kouakou, who merely makes art and who dwells at the margins, is a poor African whose words count only as parts of the commodification2-both for those of us who consti2. I should insist now, the first time that I use this word, that I do not share the widespread negative evaluation of commodification; its merits, I believe, must be assessed case by case. Certainly critics such as Kobena Mercer (for example, in his "Black Hair/ Style Politics," New Formations 3 [Winter 1987]: 33-54) have persuasively criticized any reflexive rejection of the commodity form, which so often reinstates the hoary humanist opposition between the "authentic" and the "commercial." Mercer explores the avenues by which marginalized groups have manipulated commodified artifacts in culturally novel and expressive ways. Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 339 Baule tute the museum public and for collectors, like Rockefeller-of I in of how it is that African want to remind short, art." important you, art is a commodity. But the cocurator whose choice will set us on our way is James Baldwin, the only cocurator who picked a piece that was not in the mold of the Africa of "Primitivism." The sculpture that will be my touchstone is a Yoruba piece that carries the museum label, Man with a Bicycle(fig. 1). Here is some of what Baldwin said about it: This is something. This has got to be contemporary. He's really going to town! It's very jaunty, very authoritative. His errand might prove to be impossible.... He is challenging something-or something has challenged him. He's grounded in immediate reality by the bicycle. . . . He's apparently a very proud and silent man. He's dressed sort of polyglot. Nothing looks like it fits him too well. [P, p. 125] Baldwin's reading of this piece is, of course and inevitably, "in terms of [his] own ... criteria," a reaction contextualized only by the knowledge that bicycles are new in Africa and that this piece, anyway, does not look anything like the works he recalls seeing from his earliest childhood at the Schomburg Museum in Harlem. His response torpedoes Vogel's argument for her notion that the only "authentically traditional" African-the only one whose responses, as she says, could have been be refused a choice among Africa's art found a century ago-must cultures because he-unlike the rest of the cocurators, who are Americans and the European-educated Africans-will use his "own ... criteria." The message is that this Baule diviner, this authentically African villager, does not know what we, authentic postmodernists, now know: that the first and last mistake is to judge the Other on one's own terms. And so, in the name of this relativist insight, we impose our judgment: that Lela Kouakou may not judge sculpture from beyond the Baule culture zone, because he, like all the other African "informants" we have met in the field, will read them as if they were meant to meet those Baule standards. Worse than this, it is nonsense to explain Kouakou's responses as deriving from an ignorance of other traditions-if indeed he is, as he no doubt is supposed to be, like most "traditional" artists today, if he is, for example, like Francis Akwasi of Kumasi. Kouakou may judge other artists by his own standards (what on earth else could he, could anyone, do save make no judgment at all?), but to suppose that he is unaware 3. Once Vogel has thus refused Kouakou a voice, it is less surprising that his comments turn out to be composite also. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is no single Lela Kouakou who was interviewed like the other cocurators. Kouakou is, in the end, quite exactly an invention, thus literalizing the sense in which "we," and more particularly "our" artists, are individuals while "they," and "theirs," are ethnic types. FIG.1.-Man witha Bicycle,Yoruba,Nigeria, 20th century.Wood, 353/". Collection of The Newark Museum, Purchase 1977 Wallace M. Scudder Bequest Fund and The Members' Fund. Photo: Jerry Thompson, 1986. Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 341 that there are other standards within Africa (let alone without) is to ignore a piece of absolutely basic cultural knowledge, common to most precolonial as well as to most colonial and postcolonial cultures on the continent: the piece of culturalknowledge that explains why the people we now call "Baule"exist at all. To be Baule, for example, is, for a Baule, not to be a white person, not to be Senufo, not to be French.4 But Baldwin's Man with a Bicycledoes more than give the lie to Vogel's strange footnote; it provides us with an image that can serve as a point of entry to my theme, a piece of contemporaryAfrican art that will allow us to explore the articulation of the postcolonial and the postmodern. Man witha Bicycleis described as follows in the exhibition catalogue: Manwith a Bicycle Yoruba, Nigeria 20th century Wood and paint H. 35 /4in. The Newark Museum The influence of the Western world is revealed in the clothes and bicycle of this neo-traditional Yoruba sculpture which probably representsa merchant en route to market. [P, p. 23] It is this word neotraditional-a word that is almost right-that provides, I think, the fundamentalclue. But I do not know how to explain this clue without first saying how I keep my bearings in the shark-infested waters around the semantic island of the postmodern. The task of chasing the word postmodernism through the pages of Jean-FrangoisLyotard and FredricJameson and Jiirgen Habermas,in and out of the VillageVoiceand the TLSand even the New YorkTimes Book Review is certainly exhausting. Yet there is, I think, a story to tell about all these stories-or, of course, I should say, there are many, but this, for the moment, is mine-and, as I tell it, the Yorubabicyclistwill eventuallycome back into view. I do not (this will come as no surprise) have a definition of the postmodern to put in the place of Jameson's or Lyotard's, but there is now a rough consensus about the structureof the modern/postmodern dichotomy in the many domains-from architecture to poetry to philosophy to rock music to the movies-in which it has been invoked. In each of these domains there is an antecedent practice that laid claim 4. It is absolutely crucial that Vogel does not draw her line according to racial or national categories: the Nigerian, the Senegalese, and the African-American cocurators are each allowed to be on "our" side of the great divide. The issue here is something less obvious than racism. 342 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial to a certain exclusivityof insight, and in each of them "postmodernism" is a name for the rejection of that claim to exclusivity,a rejection that is almost alwaysmore playful, though not necessarilyless serious, than the practice it aims to replace. That this will not do as a definitionof postmodernism follows from the fact that in each domain this rejection of exclusivityassumesa particularshape, one that reflects the specificities of its setting. To understand the various postmodernismsthis way is to leave open the question of how their theories of contemporary social, cultural, and economic life relate to the actual practices that constitute that life-to leave open, then, the relations between postmodernism and postmodernity.5 It is an important question why this distancing of the ancestors should have become so central a feature of our cultural lives. The answer surely has to do with the sense in which art is increasingly commodified. To sell oneself and one's products as art in the marketplace, one must, above all, clear a space in which one is distinguished from other producers and products-and one does this by the construction and the marking of differences. To create a market for bottled waters, for example, it was necessary, first, to establish that subtle (even untastable) differences in mineral content and source of carbonationwere essential modes of distinction. It is this need for distinctions in the market that accounts for a certain intensification of the long-standing individualism of postRenaissance art production: in the age of mechanical reproduction, aesthetic individualism,the characterizationof the artwork as belonging to the oeuvre of an individual,and the absorption of the artist'slife into the conception of the work can be seen precisely as modes of identifying objects for the market. The sculptor of the man with a bicycle, by contrast, will not be known by those who buy this object; his individual life will make no difference to the future history of his sculpture. (Indeed, he surely knows this, in the sense in which one knows anything whose negation one has never even considered.) Nevertheless, there is somethingabout the object that serves to establish it for the market:the availabilityof Yoruba culture and of stories about Yoruba culture to surroundthe object and distinguishit from "folkart"from elsewhere. Postmodern culture is the culture in which all postmodernisms operate, sometimes in synergy, sometimes in competition; and because contemporary culture is, in a certain sense to which I shall return, 5. Where the practice is theory-literary or philosophical-postmodernism as a theoryof postmodernitycan be adequate only if it reflects to some extent the realities of that practice, because the practice itself is fully theoretical. But when a postmodernism addresses,say, advertisingor poetry, it may be adequateas an account of them even if it conflicts with their own narratives,their theories of themselves. For, unlike philosophy and literarytheory, advertisingand poetry are not largely constituted by their articulated theoriesof themselves. Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 343 transnational,postmodern culture is global-though that emphatically does not mean that it is the culture of every person in the world. If postmodernism is the project of transcending some species of modernism, which is to say some relatively self-conscious, self-privilegsculptor of Man ing project of a privileged modernity, our neotraditional witha Bicycleis presumably to be understood, by contrast, as premodern, that is, traditional.(I am supposing, then, that being neotraditional is a way of being traditional; what work the neo- does is matter for a later moment.) And the sociological and anthropological narrativesof tradition through which he or she came to be so theorized is dominated, of course, by Max Weber. Weber's characterizationof traditional (and charismatic)authority in oppositionto rational authority is in keeping with his general characterization of modernity as the rationalization of the world; and he insisted on the significanceof this characteristicallyWestern process for the rest of humankind: A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universalhistory, is bound to ask himself to what combinationof circumstancesthe fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universalsignificanceand value.6 Now there is certainly no doubt that Western modernity now has a universal geographicalsignificance. The Yoruba bicyclist-like Sting and his Amerindian chieftains of the Amazon rain forest or Paul Simon and the Mbaqangamusiciansof Graceland-is testimony to that. But, if I may borrow someone else's borrowing, the fact is that the Empire of Signs strikes back. Weber's "as we like to think" reflects his doubts about whether the Western imperiumover the world was as clearly of universalvalue as it was certainly of universalsignificance; and postmodernism fully endorses his resistance to this claim. The man with a bicycle enters our museums to be valued by us (Rockefeller tells us how it is to be valued), butjust as the presenceof the object reminds us of this fact, its contentreminds us that the trade is two-way. I want to argue that to understand our-our human-modernity, we must first understand why the rationalization of the world can no longer be seen as the tendency either of the West or of history, why, simply put, the modernist characterizationof modernity must be chal6. Max Weber, The ProtestantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1930), p. 13. 344 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial lenged. To understand our world is to reject Weber's claim for the rationality of what he called rationalization and his projection of its inevitability; it is, then, to have a radically post-Weberian conception of modernity. T. S. Eliot abhors the soullessness and the secularization of modern society, the reach of Enlightenment rationalism into the whole world. He shares Weber's account of modernity and more straightforwardly deplores it. Le Corbusier favors rationalization-a house is a "machine for living in"-but he, too, shares Weber's vision of modernity. And, of course, the great rationalists-the believers in a transhistorical reason Kant on, are the source of Weber's triumphing in the world-from Kantian vision. Modernism in literature, architecture, and philosophythe account of modernity that, on my model, postmodernism in these domains seeks to subvert-may be for reason or against it, but in each domain rationalization, the pervasion of reason, is seen as the distinctive dynamic of contemporary history. But the beginning of postmodern wisdom is to ask whether Weberian rationalization is in fact what has occurred historically. For Weber, charismatic authority-the authority of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah-is antirational, yet modernity has been dominated by just such charisma. Secularization hardly seems to be proceeding: religions grow in all parts of the world; more than ninety percent of North Americans still avow some sort of theism; what we call "fundamentalism" is as alive in the West as it is in Africa and the Middle and Far Easts;Jimmy Swaggart and Billy Graham have business in Louisiana and California as well as in Costa Rica and Ghana. What we can see in all these cases, I think, is not the triumph of Enlightenment Reason-which would have entailed exactly the end of charisma and the universalization of the secular-not even the penetration of a narrower instrumental reason into all spheres of life, but what Weber mistook for that: namely, the incorporation of all areas of the world and all areas of even formerly "private" life into the money economy. Even in domains like religion where instrumental reason would recognize that the market has at best an ambiguous place, modernity has turned every element of the real into a sign, and the sign reads "for sale." If Weberian talk of the triumph of instrumental reason can now be seen to be a mistake, the disenchantment of the world, that is, the penetration of a scientific vision of things, describes at most the tiny-and in the United States quite marginal-world of the higher academy and a few islands of its influence. What we have seen in recent times in the their end of religions-but United States is not secularization-the commodification; and with that commodification religions have reached further and grown-their markets have expanded-rather than died. 7:5-P r. :B :;:?0.4 '?51 ......IIP~:~ ... .i;:? u~r~r~s l~-~sl :i~Xaa.r~a~i~sa 11 ?~~L~ I~II~-----?~CI--?I~.... IT: ?VN" FIG.2.-In August 1990, after I had completed this piece, I found this figure on sale at the Ghana National CulturalCenter in Kumasi.It exemplifies and expresses my argument in ways too obvious to require spelling out. It is a "traditional"Akan Akuabadoll, a kind often sold to tourists. When I inquiredwho had carved it, the saleswomanpointed out a man who happened to be passing by outside the shop. He gave me his card, and so I am able to record that this piece ("fromthe collection of Anthony Appiah,"as the museumworld might have it) is more importantlythe workof Gyau Apraku,manager of Acarv Enterprise,a carver from Foase-Atwimain Ashanti. Photo: CCI Photographics. 346 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial Postmodernismcan be seen, then, as a retheorization of the proliferation of distinctions that reflects the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity, the need to clear oneself a space. Modernismsaw the economization of the world as the triumph of reason;postmodernismrejects that claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same proliferation of distinctionsthat modernityhad begun. That, then, is how I believe the issue looks from here. But how does it look from the postcolonial spacesinhabited by Man witha Bicycle? I shall speak about Africa, with confidence both that some of what I have to say will work elsewhere in the so-called Third World and that it will not work at all in some places. And I shall speak first about the producersof these so-calledneotraditionalartworksand then about the case of the African novel, because I believe that to focus exclusively on the novel (as theorists of contemporary African cultures have been inclined to do) is to distort the cultural situation and the significance of postcolonialitywithin it. I do not know when Man witha Bicyclewas made or by whom; African art has, until recently, been collected as the property of "ethnic" groups, not of individualsand workshops, so it is not unusual that not one of the pieces in the "Perspectives"show was identified in the checklist by the name of an individualartist, even though many of them are twentieth-century works. (And no one will be surprised, by contrast, that most of them are kindly labeled with the names of the people who own the largely private collections where they now live.) As a result I cannot say if the piece is literallypostcolonial, produced after Nigerian independence in 1960. But the piece belongs to a genre that has certainlybeen produced since then: the genre that is here called neotraditional. Simply put, what is distinctive about this genre is that it is produced for the West. I should qualify. Of course, many of the buyers of first instance live in Africa; many of them are juridically citizens of African states. But African bourgeois consumers of neotraditional art are educated in the Western style, and, if they want African art, they would often rather have a "genuinely"traditionalpiece, by which I mean a piece that they believe to be made precolonially, or at least in a style and by methods that were already established precolonially. These buyers are a minority. Most of this art-traditional because it uses actual or supposed precolonial techniques but neo-(this, for what it is worth, is the explanation I promised earlier) because it has elements that are recognizably colonial or postcolonial in reference-has been made for Western tourists and other collectors. The incorporation of these works in the West's museum culture and its art market has almost nothing, of course, to do with postmod- Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 347 ernism. By and large, the ideology through which they are incorporated is modernist: it is the ideology that brought something called "Bali"to Antonin Artaud, something called "Africa"to Pablo Picasso, and something called "Japan"to Roland Barthes. (This incorporation as an official Other was criticized, of course, from its beginnings: hence Oscar Wilde's observation that "the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.")7What is postmodernist is Vogel's muddled conviction that African art should not be judged "in terms of [someone else's] traditional criteria."For modernism, primitive art was to be judged by putatively universal aesthetic criteria, and by these standardsit was finally found possible to value it. The sculptors and painters who found it possible were largely seeking an Archimedean point outside their own cultures for a critique of a Weberian modernity. For postmodernisms,by contrast, these works, however they are to be understood, cannot be seen as legitimated by culture- and history-transcendingstandards. The neotraditional object is useful as a model, despite its marginality in most African lives, because its incorporationin the museum world (as opposed to the many objects made by the same hands that live peacefully in nonbourgeois homes: stools, for example) reminds one that in Africa, by contrast, the distinction between high culture and mass culture, insofar as if it makes sense at all, corresponds, by and large, to the distinction between those with and those without Western-style formal education as culturalconsumers. The fact that the distinction is to be made this way-in most of sub-SaharanAfrica, excluding the Republic of South Africa-means that the opposition between high culture and mass culture is available only in domains where there is a significant body of Western formal training. This excludes (in most places) the plastic arts and music. There are distinctions of genre and audience in African music, and for various cultural purposes there is something we call "traditional"music that we still practice and value; but village and urban dwellers alike, bourgeois and nonbourgeois, listen, through discs and, more important, on the radio, to reggae, to MichaelJackson, and to King Sonny Ad6. And this means that, by and large, the domain in which such a distinction makes the most sense is the one domain where that distinction is powerful and pervasive: namely, in African writing in Western languages. So that it is here that we find, I think, a place for consideration of the question of the postcoloniality of contemporary African culture. 7. OscarWilde, "The Decay of Lying:An Observation,"Intentions(London, 1909), p. 45. 348 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial Postcolonialityis the condition of what we might ungenerously call a compradorintelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Westerntrained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalismat the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa. All aspects of contemporaryAfrican cultural life-including music and some sculpture and painting, even some writings with which the West is largely not familiar-have been influenced, often powerfully, by the transition of African societies throughcolonialism, but they are not all in the relevant sense postcolonial. For the post-in postcolonial, like the post-in postmodern, is the post-of the space-clearinggesture I characterizedearlier, and many areas of contemporaryAfrican cultural life-what has come to be theorized as popular culture, in particularare not in this way concerned with transcending, with going beyond, coloniality. Indeed, it might be said to be a mark of popular culture that its borrowings from internationalcultural forms are remarkablyinsensitive to, not so much dismissiveof as blind to, the issue of neocolonialism or "cultural imperialism." This does not mean that theories of postmodernismare irrelevantto these forms of culture, for the internationalization of the market and the commodification of artworks are both central to them. But it does mean that these artworks are not understood by their producers or their consumers in terms of a postmodernism:there is no antecedent practice whose claim to exclusivity of vision is rejected through these artworks.What is called "syncretism" here is a consequence of the international exchange of commodities, but not of a space-clearinggesture. Postcolonial intellectuals in Africa, by contrast, are almost entirely dependent for their support on two institutions:the African university, an institution whose intellectual life is overwhelmingly constituted as Western, and the Euro-American publisher and reader. Even when these writers seek to escape the West-as Ngugi wa Thiong'o did in attempting to construct a Kikuyu peasant drama-their theories of their situation are irreduciblyinformed by their Euro-Americanformation. Ngugi's conception of the writer'spotential in politics is essentially that of the avant-garde,of left modernism. Now this double dependence on the university and the European publisher means that the first generation of modern African novelsthe generation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Camara Laye's L'Enfant noir-were written in the context of notions of politics and culture dominant in the French and British university and publishing worlds in the 1950s and 1960s. This does not mean that they were like novels written in Western Europe at that time, for part of what was held to be obvious both by these writers and by the high culture of CriticalInquiry Winter1991 349 Europe of the day was that new literatures in new nations should be anticolonial and nationalist. In one respect, these early novels seem to belong to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary nationalism; they are theorized as the imaginative recreation of a common cultural past that is crafted into a shared tradition by the writer. They are in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, whose Minstrelsyof the ScottishBorder was intended, as he said in the introduction, to "contributesomewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally."8The novels of this first stage are thus realist legitimations of nationalism: they authorize a "return to traditions" while at the same time recognizing the demands of a Weberianrationalizedmodernity. From the later sixties on, such celebratory novels become rare.9 For example, Achebe moves from the creation of a usable past in Things Fall Apartto a cynical indictment of politics in the modern sphere in A Man of thePeople.But I would like to focus on a francophone novel of the later sixties, a novel that thematizes in an extremely powerful way many of the questions I have been asking about art and modernity: I mean, of course, Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoirde violence.This novel, like many of the second stage of which it is a part, represents a challenge to the novels of the first stage: it identifies the realist novel as part of the tactic of nationalist legitimation and so it is-if I may begin a catalogue of its ways-of-being-post-this-and-that-postrealist. Now postmodernism is, of course, postrealist also. But Ouologuem's postrealism is motivated quite differently from that of such postmodern writers as, say, Thomas Pynchon. Realism naturalizes:the originary "African novel," such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Laye'sL'Enfantnoir,is "realist."Therefore, Ouologuem is against it; he rejects, indeed assaults,the conventions of realism. He seeks to delegitimate the forms of the realist African novel, in part, surely, because what it sought to naturalizewas a nationalismthat, by 1968, had plainly failed. The national bourgeoisie that took the baton of rationalization, industrialization, and bureaucratization in the name of nationalism, turned out to be a kleptocracy. Their enthusiasm for nativism was a rationalizationof their urge to keep the national bourgeoisies of other 8. Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the ScottishBorder: Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads(London, 1883), pp. 51-52. 9. Somewhat along these lines, Neil Lazarus's Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction(New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 1-26, offers a useful periodization of African fiction in relation to the "greatexpectations"of the independenceera and the "mourning after." 350 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial nations, and particularly the powerful industrialized nations, out of their way. As Jonathan Ngate has observed, the world of Le Devoirde violenceis one "in which theefficacyof the call to the Ancestors as well as the Ancestors themselves is seriously called into question."'0That the novel is in this way postrealist allows its author to borrow, when he needs them, the techniques of modernism, which, as we learned from Jameson, are often also the techniques of postmodernism. It is helpful to remember at this point how Ouologuem is described on the back of the Editionsdu Seuil first edition: Ne en 1940 au Mali. Admissiblea l'Ecole normale superieure. Licenci6 es Lettres. Licenci6 en Philosophie. Dipl6m6 d'Etudes superieures d'Anglais. Prepare une these de doctorat de Sociologie." Borrowingfrom Europeanmodernismis hardlygoing to be difficult for someone so qualified. To be a Normalien is indeed, in Christopher Miller's charming formulation, "roughly equivalent to being baptized by Bossuet.""2 Miller's discussion of Le Devoir de violence in Blank Darkness focuses usefully on theoretical questions of intertextuality raised by the novel's persistent massaging of one text after another into the surface of its own body. Ouologuem's book contains, for example, a translationof a passage from Graham Greene's 1934 novel It's a Battlefield(translated and improved, according to some readers!)and borrowings from Guy de Maupassant'sBoule de Suif (hardly an unfamiliar work to francophone readers; if this latter is a theft, it is the adventuroustheft of the kleptomaniac,who dares us to catch him at it). The book's first sentence artfully establishes the oral mode, by then an inevitable convention of African narration, with words that Ngate rightly describes as having the "concisionand the strikingbeauty and power of a proverb"(FAF,p. 64), and mocks us in this moment because the sentence echoes the beginning of Andr6 Schwarz-Bart'sdecidedly un-African 1959 Holocaust novel, Le Dernierdesjustes, an echo that more substantial later borrowingsconfirm.'" 10. Jonathan Ngate, FrancophoneAfrican Fiction: Reading a Literary Tradition (Trenton, N.J., 1988), p. 59; hereafter abbreviated FAF. 11. Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris, 1968), back cover; hereafter abbreviated D. 12. Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, 1985), p. 218. 13. Ngate's focus on this initial sentence follows Aliko Songolo, "The Writer, the Audience and the Critic's Responsibility: The Case of Bound to Violence,"in Artist and Audience:African Literatureas a Shared Experience,ed. Richard O. Priebe and Thomas Hale (Washington, D.C., 1979); cited in FAF, p. 64. Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 351 Nos yeux boivent l'6clat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'6tonnent de pleurer. Maschallah! oua bismillah!... lante de la n6graille-honte Un recit de l'aventure sang- aux hommes de rienl-tiendrait aishmentdans la premiere moiti6 de ce sicle; mais la viritable histoire des Negres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tot, avec les Sa'lfs, en l'an 1202 de notre are, dans l'Empire africain de Nakem. [D, p. 9] Nosyeux la lumiere d'6toiles mortes. Une biographie re;oivent de mon ami Ernie tiendrait aishmentdans le deuxieme quart du xxe mais veritable histoire d'Ernie L6vy commence tres tSt, . . . siecle; la dans la vieille cite anglicane de York. Plus pr6cisement:le 11 mars 1185.14 The reader who is properly prepared will expect an African holocaust. These echoes are surely meant to render ironic the status of the rulers of Nakem as descendantsof AbrahamEl HiYt,"leJuif noir"(D, p. 12). The book begins, then, with a sick joke against nativism at the unwary reader's expense. And the assault on realism is-here is my second signpost-postnativist; this book is a murderous antidote to a nostalgia for Roots.As Wole Soyinka has said in a justly well-respected reading, "the Bible, the Koran, the historic solemnity of the griot are reduced to the histrionics of wanton boys masqueradingas humans."15 It is tempting to read the attack on history here as a repudiation not of roots but of Islam, as Soyinkadoes when he goes on to say: A culture which has claimed indigenous antiquity in such parts of Africa as have submitted to its undeniable attractionsis confidently proven to be imperialist;worse, it is demonstrated to be essentially hostile and negative to the indigenous culture. . .. Ouologuem pronounces the Moslem incursion into black Africa to be corrupt, vicious, decadent, elitist and insensitive. At the least such a work functions as a wide swab in the deck-clearing operation for the commencement of racialretrieval.'6 14. For this comparisonI have made my own translations,which are as literal as possible: Oureyesdrink the flash of the sun, and, conquered,surprisethemselvesby weeping. Maschallahloua bismillahl... An account of the bloody adventure of the niggertrash-dishonor to the men of nothing-could easilybeginin the first half of this century;but true historyof the Blacks begins very much earlier, with the Saifs, in the year 1202 of our era, in the Africankingdomof Nakem. [D, p. 9; my emphasis] Oureyesreceive the light of dead stars. A biographyof my friend Ernie couldeasily begin in the second quarter of the 20th century;but the true historyof Ernie L6vy begins much earlier,... in the old Anglican city of York. More precisely:on the 11 March 1185. [AndreSchwarz-Bart,LeDernierdesjustes(Paris, 1959), p. 11; my emphasis] 15. 100. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge, 1976), p. 16. Ibid., p. 105. 352 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial But it seems to me much clearer to read the repudiation as a repudiation of national history, to see the text as postcolonially postnationalist as well as anti- (and thus, of course, post-) nativist. Indeed, Soyinka's reading here seems to be driven by his own equally representative tendency to read Africa as race and place into everything.17 Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi-who is, if anyone is, the hero of this novel-is, after all, a son of the soil, but his political prospects by the end of the narrative are less than uplifting. More than this, the novel explicitly thematizes, in the anthropologist Shrobenius (an obvious echo of the name of the German Africanist Leo Frobenius, whose work is cited by Leopold Senghor) the mechanism by which the new elite has come to invent its traditions through the "science" of ethnography: en franSaYffabula et l'interpr&te traduisit, Madoubo rl6pta les le de raffinant subtilites faisaient bonheur Shrob6nius, qui gais, 6crevisse humaine frappee de la manie tatonnante de vouloir ressusciter, sous couleur d'autonomie culturelle, un univers africain qui ne correspondait a plus rien de vivant; . . . il voulait trouver un sens metaphysique a tout.... Il considerait que la vie africaine &taitart pur. [D, p. 102] Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated, Madoubo repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe-cultural autonomy, he called it-which had lost all living reality; ... he was determined to find African life, he held, was metaphysical meaning in everything.... pure art.'8 At the start we had been told that "there are few written accounts, and the versions of the elders diverge from those of the griots, which differ in turn from those of the chroniclers" (BV, p. 6). Now we are warned off the supposedly scientific discourse of the ethnographers.19 Because Le Devoir de violenceis a novel that seeks to delegitimate not only the form of realism but the content of nationalism, it will to that extent seem to us, misleadingly, postmodern: misleadingly, because what we have here is not postmodernism but postmodernization; not an 17. I have discussed this matter in "Soyinka and the Philosophy of Culture," in Philosophyin Africa: Trendsand Perspectives,ed. P. O. Bodunrin (Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1985), pp. 250-63. 18. Ouologuem, Bound to Violence, trans. Ralph Manheim (London, 1968), p. 87; hereafter abbreviated BV. 19. Here we have the literary thematization of the Foucauldian theory proposed by V. Y. Mudimbe in his important recent intervention, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis,Philosophy,and the Orderof Knowledge(Bloomington, Ind., 1988). Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 353 aesthetics but a politics, in the most literal sense of the term. After colonialism, the modernizerssaid, comes rationality;that is the possibility the novel rules out. Ouologuem's novel is typical of novels of this second stage in that it is not written by someone who is comfortable with and accepted by the new elite, the national bourgeoisie. Far from being a celebration of the nation, then, the novels of the second, postcolonial, stage are novels of delegitimation:they reject not only the Western imperiumbut also the nationalist project of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie. And, so it seems to me, the basis for that project of delegitimation cannot be the postmodernist one: rather, it is grounded in an appeal to an ethical universal. Indeed it is based, as intellectual responses to oppression in Africa largely are based, in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering, a fundamental revolt against the endless misery of the last thirty years. Ouologuem is hardly likely to make common cause with a relativismthat might allow that the horrifying new-old Africa of exploitation is to be understood, legitimated, in its own local terms. Africa's postcolonial novelists, novelists anxious to escape neocolonialism,are no longer committed to the nation; in this they will seem, as I have suggested, misleadingly postmodern. But what they have chosen instead of the nation is not an older traditionalismbut Africathe continent and its people. This is clear enough, I think, in Le Devoir de violence.At the end of the novel Ouologuem writes: Souvent il est vrai, I'ame veut rover l'6cho sans pass6 du bonheur. Mais,jet6 dans le monde, I'on peut s'empecher de songer que SaYf,pleur6 trois millions de fois, renaft sans cesse a l'Histoire, sous les cendres chaudes de plus de trente R6publiquesafricaines. [D, p. 207] Often, it is true, the soul desires to dream the echo of happiness, an echo that has no past. But projected into the world, one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics. [BV,pp. 181-82] If we are to identify with anyone, it is with the "la n6graille," the niggertrash, who have no nationality. For them one republic is as good (which is to say as bad) as any other. Postcolonialityhas become, I think, a condition of pessimism. Postrealistwriting, postnativistpolitics, a transnationalrather than a nationalsolidarity-and pessimism:a kind of postoptimismto balance the earlier enthusiasm for Ahmadou Kourouma's Suns of Independence. Postcoloniality is after all this: and its post-, like that of postmodernism, is also a post- that challenges earlier legitimating narratives. And it challenges them in the name of the suffering victims of "more than thirty African republics." 354 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists (just as there is, of course, no American culture without African roots). And there is a clear sense in some postcolonial writing that the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a monolithic West-the binarism of Self and Other-is the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without. In Le Devoir de violence, in Ouologuem's withering critique of "Shrob6niusologie," there were already the beginnings of this postcolonial critique of what we might call "alteritism," the construction and celebration of oneself as Other: "voila l'art negre baptis6 'esth6tique' et marchande--oye -dans l'univers imaginaire des '6changes vivifiants' I" (D, p. 110) ["henceforth Negro art was baptized 'aesthetic' and hawked in the imaginary universe of 'vitalizing exchanges'" (BV, p. 94)]. After describing the fantasmatic elaboration of some interpretative mumbo jumbo "invented by Saff," Ouologuem then announces that "l'art negre se forgeait ses lettres de noblesse au folklore de la spiritualite mercantiliste, oye oye oye" (D, p. 110) ["Negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of mercantile intellectualism, oye, oye, oye" (BV, p. 94)]. Shrobenius, the anthropologist, as apologist for "his" people; a European audience that laps up this exoticized Other; African traders and producers of African art, who understand the necessity to maintain the "mysteries" that construct their product as "exotic"; traditional and contemporary elites, who require a sentimentalized past to authorize their present power: all are exposed in their complex and multiple mutual complicities. "temoin: la splendeur de son art-, la grandeur des empires du Moyen Age constituait le visage vrai de l'Afrique, sage, belle, riche, ordonnee, non violente et puissante tout autant qu'humanisteberceau meme de la civilisation egyptienne." Salivant ainsi, Shrob6nius, de retour au bercail, en tira un double profit: d'une part, il mystifia son pays, qui, enchant6, le jucha sur une haute chair sorbonicale, et, d'autre part, il exploita la sentimentalit6 n6grillarde-par trop heureuse de s'entendre dire par un Blanc que "l'Afrique 6tait ventre du monde et berceau de civilisation". La n6graille offrit par tonnes, cons6quemment et gratis, masques et tresors artistiques aux acolytes de la "shrob6niusologie". [D, p. 111] "witness the splendor of its art-the true face of Africa is the grandiose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom, beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it is here that we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization." Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 355 Thus drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benefit on his return home: on the one hand, he mystified the people of his own country who in their enthusiasm raised him to a lofty Sorbonnical chair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality of the coons, only too pleased to hear from the mouth of a white man that Africa was "the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization." In consequence the niggertrash donated masks and art treasures by the ton to the acolytes of "Shrobeniusology."[BV,pp. 94- 95] A little later, Ouologuem articulates more precisely the interconnections of Africanist mystificationswith tourism and the production, packaging,and marketingof African artworks. Une 6cole africaniste ainsi accroch6e aux nues du symbolisme magico-religieux, cosmologique et mythique, 6tait n6e: tant et si bien que durant trois ans, des hommes-et quels hommes!: des fantoches, des aventuriers,des apprentisbanquiers,des politiciens, des voyageurs, des conspirateurs,des chercheurs-"scientifiques", dit-on, en verit6 sentinelles asservies, montant la garde devant le monument "shrob6niusologique" du pseudo-symbolisme negre, accoururentau Nakem. Debj, I'acquisitiondes masques anciens 6tait devenue probl6matique depuis que Shrobenius et les missionnaires connurent le bonheur d'en acqubrir en quantitY.SaYfdonc-et la pratique est courante de nos jours encore-fit enterrer des quintaux de masques hativement executes a la ressemblance des originaux, les engloutissant dans des mares, marais, 6tangs, mar6cages, lacs, limons-quitte a les exhumer quelque temps apr~s,les vendant aux curieux et profanes a prix d'or. Ils 6taient, ces masques, vieux de trois ans, charges,disait-on, du poids de quatre sieclesde civilisation. [D, p. 112] An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico-religious, cosmological, and mythical symbolism had been born: with the result that for three years men flocked to Nakem-and what adventurers, apprentice bankers, politicians, men•-middlemen, salesmen, conspirators-supposedly "scientists," but in reality enslaved sentries mounting guard before the "Shrobeniusological" monument of Negro pseudosymbolism. Already it had become more than difficult to procure old masks, for Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the good fortune to snap them all up. And so Saif-and the practice is still current-had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight, or sunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumed later on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunters. These three-year-old masks were said to be charged with the weightoffour centuriesof civilization. [BV, pp. 95-96] 356 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonial Ouologuem here forcefully exposes the connections we saw earlier in some of Rockefeller's insights into the international system of art exchange, the international art world: we see the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value-the "baptism" of "Negro art" as "aesthetic"-meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture, a commodification that requires, by the logic of the space-clearing gesture, the manufacture of Otherness. (It is a significant bonus that it also harmonizes with the interior decor of contemporary apartments.) Shrobenius, "ce marchand-confectionneur d'idbologie," the ethnographer allied with Saif-image of the "traditional" African ruling caste-has invented an Africa that is a body over against Europe, the juridical institution; and Ouologuem is urging us vigorously to refuse to be thus Other. Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionistsdemanded of it. The rale that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, its better-documented plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like be from the rale modernist art-must for distinguished significance what in the Third that World; might be it is, postmodernism might play I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life. For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist. 20. SaraSuleri,MeatlessDays(Chicago, 1989), p. 105. CriticalInquiry Winter1991 357 And I am grateful to James Baldwin for his introduction to the Man witha Bicycle,a figure who is, as Baldwinso rightly saw, polyglotspeaking Yoruba and English, probably some Hausa and a little French for his trips to Cotonou or Cameroon, someone whose "clothes do not fit him too well." He and the other men and women among whom he mostly lives suggest to me that the place to look for hope is not just to the postcolonial novel, which has struggled to achieve the insights of Ouologuem or Mudimbe, but to the all-consuming vision of this lessanxious creativity. It matters little whom the work was madefor; what we should learn from is the imagination that produced it. Man witha Bicycleis produced by someone who does not care that the bicycle is the white man's invention: it is not there to be Other to the Yoruba Self; it is there because someone cared for its solidity; it is there because it will take us further than our feet will take us; it is there because machines are now as African as novelists . .. and as fabricated as the kingdom of Nakem.21 21. I learned a good deal from trying out earlier versionsof these ideas at an NEH Summer Institute on "The Future of the Avant-Gardein Postmodern Culture,"under the directionof SusanSuleimanand AliceJardineat Harvardin July 1989; at the African Studies Association (under the sponsorship of the Society for African Philosophy in North America) in November 1989, where Jonathan Ngate's response was particularly helpful;and, as the guest of Ali Mazrui,at the Braudel Center at SUNY-Binghamtonin May 1990. As usual, I wish I knew how to incorporatemore of the ideas of the discussants on those occasions.