is the post in postmodernism the post in postclonial critical inquiry 17.2. 1991

7/28/2019 Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postclonial Critical Inquiry 17.2. 1991

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Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?Author(s): Kwame Anthony AppiahSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1991), pp. 336-357Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343840

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Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- inPostcolonial?

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Tu t'appelaisBimbircokakEt tout &tait ien ainsiTu es denvenu Victor-Emile-Louis-Henri-JosephCe quiAutantqu'ilm'en souvienneNe rappelle point ta parent6avecRoqueffelere -YAMBO OUOLOGUEM,A Mon Mari"

In 1987, the Center for African Art in New York organized a showentitled "Perspectives: Angles on African Art." The curator, SusanVogel, had worked with a number of "cocurators," whom I list in orderof their appearance in the table of contents of the exhibition catalogue:Ekpo Eyo, quondam director of the department of antiquities of theNational Museum of Nigeria; William Rubin, director of the depart-ment of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art andorganizer of its controversial exhibit, "Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art"; Romare Bearden, African-American painter; Ivan Karp,curator of African ethnology at the Smithsonian; Nancy Graves, Euro-pean-American painter, sculptor, and filmmaker; James Baldwin, whosurely needs no qualifying glosses; David Rockefeller, art collector andfriend of the mighty; Lela Kouakou, Baule artist and diviner from theIvory Coast (this a delicious juxtaposition, richest and poorest, side byside); Iba N'Diaye, Senegalese sculptor; and Robert Farris Thompson,

CriticalInquiry 17 (Winter 1991)? 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1702-0001$01.00. All rights reserved.

336


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1991 337Yaleprofessorand African and African-Americanart historian.' In herintroductoryessay, Vogel describes the processof selection used to pickartworks for the show. The one woman and nine men were eachoffered a hundred-odd photographs of "African art as varied in typeand origin, and as high in quality, as we could manage"and asked toselect ten for the show. Or, I should say more exactly, this is what wasoffered to eight of the men. For Vogel adds that "in the case of theBaule artist, a man familiaronly with the art of his own people, onlyBauleobjectswere placedin the pool of photographs" P, p. 11).At thispoint we are directed to a footnote to the essay,whichreads:

Showing him the same assortment of photos the others saw wouldhave been interesting, but confusing in terms of the reactions wesought here. Field aesthetics studies, my own and others, haveshown that African informantswill criticize sculpturesfrom otherethnic groups in terms of their own traditional criteria, oftenassuming that such works are simply inept carvings of their ownaesthetictradition.[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 wordsof David Rockefeller,who would surely never "criticizesculpturesfrom other ethnic groupsin termsof [his]own traditionalcriteria,"discussingwhat the cataloguecallsa "Fanti emale figure":I own somewhat similar things to this, and I have always likedthem. This is a rather more sophisticated version than the onesthat I've seen, and I thought it was quite beautiful. . . . the totalcompositionhas a very contemporary,very Westernlook to it. It'sthe kind of thing, I think, that goes very well with ... contempo-raryWesternthings.It would lookverygood ina modernapartmentor house. [P,p. 138]

We may suppose that Rockefeller was delighted to discover that hisfinal judgment was consistent with the intentions of the sculpture'screators. For a footnote to the earlier checklist-the list of artworks1. 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 literatureat Duke University, is the author of a number of books, includingForTruth in Semantics(1986), Necessary Questions(1989), and In My Father'sHouse(forthcoming),a collection of essayson African culturalpolitics.His firstnovel,AvengingAngel,waspublishedin 1990.


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338 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonialultimatelychosen for the show-reveals that the BaltimoreMuseumofArt desires to "makepublic the fact that the authenticityof the Fantefigure in its collection has been challenged." Indeed, work by DoranRosssuggeststhis object is almostcertainlya modernpiece producedinmy hometown of Kumasiby the workshopof a certain FrancisAkwasi,which "specializes n carvingsfor the international market in the styleof traditional sculpture. Many of its works are now in museumsthroughout the West, and were published as authentic by Cole andRoss"(yes, the same Doran Ross) in their classiccatalogue, TheArtsofGhana (P, p. 29).But then it is hard to be sure what wouldplease a man who gives ashis reasonfor pickinganotherpiece, this time a Senufo helmet mask,"Ihave to say that I picked this because I own it. It was given to me byPresident Houphouet Boigny of the Ivory Coast"(P, p. 143); or whoremarks"concerning he market in Africanart":

the best pieces are going for very high prices. Generallyspeaking,the less good pieces in terms of qualityare not going up in price.And that's a fine reason for pickingthe good ones rather than thebad. They have a wayof becoming more valuable.I look at African art asobjectsI find wouldbe appealingto usein a home or an office. ... I don't think it goes with everything,necessarily-although the very best perhaps does. But I think itgoes well withcontemporaryarchitecture.[P, p. 131]There is something breathtakinglyunpretentious in Rockefeller'seasymovement between considerationsof finance, aesthetics,and decor. Inthese responses,we have surelya microcosmof the site of the Africanin contemporary-which is, then, surelyto say,postmodern-America.I have quoted so much from Rockefeller not to emphasize thefamiliar fact that questions of what we call "aesthetic" value arecruciallybound up with marketvalue,nor even to draw attention to thefact that this is knownby those who play the art market. Rather I wantto keep clearlybefore us the fact that David Rockefeller is permittedtosay anythingat all about the arts of Africa because he is a buyerandbecause he is at the center,while Lela Kouakou,who merely makesartand who dwells at the margins, is a poor African whose words countonly aspartsof the commodification2-both for those of us who consti-

2. I should insist now, the first time that I use this word, that I do not share thewidespread negative evaluation of commodification; its merits, I believe, must be assessedcase by case. Certainly critics such as Kobena Mercer (for example, in his "Black Hair/Style Politics," New Formations3 [Winter 1987]: 33-54) have persuasively criticized anyreflexive rejection of the commodity form, which so often reinstates the hoary humanistopposition between the "authentic" and the "commercial." Mercer explores the avenuesby which marginalized groups have manipulated commodified artifacts in culturally noveland expressive ways.


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FIG.1.-Man witha Bicycle,Yoruba,Nigeria,20th century.Wood, 353/". Collectionof The NewarkMuseum,Purchase 1977 Wallace M. ScudderBequest Fund and TheMembers' Fund. Photo: Jerry Thompson, 1986.


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1991 341that there are other standards within Africa (let alone without) is toignore a piece of absolutelybasicculturalknowledge, common to mostprecolonial as well as to most colonial and postcolonial cultures on thecontinent:the piece of culturalknowledge that explainswhythe peoplewe now call "Baule"exist at all. To be Baule, for example, is, for aBaule,not to be a whiteperson,not to be Senufo, not to be French.4But Baldwin'sMan with a Bicycledoes more than give the lie toVogel's strange footnote; it providesus with an image that can serve asa point of entry to my theme, a piece of contemporaryAfrican art thatwill allow us to explore the articulation of the postcolonial and thepostmodern.Man witha Bicycles described as follows in the exhibitioncatalogue:

Manwith a BicycleYoruba,Nigeria 20th centuryWood andpaint H. 35 /4in.The Newark MuseumThe influence of the Western world is revealed in the clothes andbicycle of this neo-traditional Yoruba sculpture which probablyrepresentsa merchant en route to market.[P,p. 23]

It is thiswordneotraditional-awordthat isalmostright-that provides,I think, the fundamentalclue.

But I do not know how to explain this clue without first sayinghowI keep my bearings in the shark-infested waters around the semanticislandof the postmodern. The task of chasing the word postmodernismthrough the pages of Jean-FrangoisLyotardand FredricJameson andJiirgen Habermas, n and out of the VillageVoice nd the TLSand eventhe New YorkTimes Book Review is certainly exhausting. Yet there is, Ithink, a storyto 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, theYorubabicyclistwilleventuallycome back into view.I do not (this will come as no surprise)have a definition of thepostmodern to put in the place of Jameson'sor Lyotard's,but there isnow a rough consensus about the structureof the modern/postmoderndichotomy in the many domains-from architecture to poetry tophilosophyto rock music to the movies-in which it has been invoked.In each of these domainsthere is an antecedent practice that laidclaim

4. It is absolutely crucial that Vogel does not draw her line according to racial ornational categories: the Nigerian, the Senegalese, and the African-American cocuratorsare each allowed to be on "our" side of the great divide. The issue here is something lessobvious than racism.


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342 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonialto a certainexclusivityof insight,and in each of them "postmodernism"is a name for the rejectionof that claimto exclusivity,a rejection that isalmostalwaysmore playful, though not necessarily essserious,than thepractice it aims to replace. That this will not do as a definition f post-modernismfollows from the fact that in each domain this rejection ofexclusivityassumes a particularshape, one that reflects the specificitiesof its setting. To understand the variouspostmodernismsthis wayis toleave open the question of how their theories of contemporarysocial,cultural,and economic life relate to the actualpracticesthat constitutethat life-to leave open, then, the relations between postmodernismand postmodernity.5It is an important question whythis distancing of the ancestorsshould have become so central a feature of our cultural lives. Theanswer surely has to do with the sense in which art is increasinglycommodified. To sell oneself and one's products as art in the market-place, one must, above all, clear a space in which one is distinguishedfrom other producers and products-and one does this by theconstruction and the marking of differences. To create a market forbottled waters, for example, it was necessary, first, to establish thatsubtle (even untastable)differences in mineral content and source ofcarbonationwereessentialmodesof distinction.It is this need for distinctions in the market that accounts for acertain intensification of the long-standing individualism of post-Renaissance art production: in the age of mechanical reproduction,aesthetic individualism,the characterizationof the artworkas belong-ing to the oeuvre of an individual,and the absorptionof the artist'slifeinto the conception of the workcan be seen preciselyas modes of iden-tifying objects for the market. The sculptorof the man with a bicycle,by contrast,will not be knownby those who buy thisobject;his individ-ual life will make no difference to the future history of his sculpture.(Indeed, he surelyknowsthis, in the sense in whichone knowsanythingwhose negation one has never even considered.)Nevertheless, there issomething bout the object that servesto establish it for the market:theavailabilityof Yoruba culture and of stories about Yoruba culture tosurround the objectanddistinguish t from "folkart"from elsewhere.Postmodern culture is the culture in which all postmodernismsoperate, sometimesin synergy, sometimes in competition;and becausecontemporary culture is, in a certain sense to which I shall return,

5. Where the practice is theory-literary or philosophical-postmodernism as atheoryf postmodernitycan be adequateonly if it reflects to some extent the realitiesofthat practice,because the practiceitself is fully theoretical.But when a postmodernismaddresses,say, advertisingor poetry, it maybe adequateas an account of them even if itconflictswith their own narratives, heir theories of themselves.For, unlikephilosophyand literarytheory,advertisingand poetryare not largelyconstitutedy their articulatedtheories of themselves.


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1991 343transnational,postmodernculture is global-though that emphaticallydoes not mean that it is the cultureof every person in the world.

If postmodernism is the project of transcending some species ofmodernism,which is to say some relativelyself-conscious,self-privileg-ing projectof a privileged modernity,our neotraditionalculptorof Manwitha Bicycles presumablyto be understood, by contrast, as premod-ern, that is, traditional.(I am supposing,then, thatbeing neotraditionalis a way of being traditional;what work the neo- does is matter for alater moment.) And the sociological and anthropologicalnarrativesoftradition through which he or she came to be so theorized is domi-nated, of course,by MaxWeber.Weber's characterizationof traditional(and charismatic)authorityin oppositiono rationalauthority is in keeping with his general charac-terization of modernity as the rationalization of the world; and heinsistedon the significanceof this characteristicallyWesternprocessforthe rest of humankind:

A product of modern Europeancivilization,studying any problemof universalhistory, is bound to askhimself to what combinationofcircumstances he fact should be attributed that in Westernciviliza-tion, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena haveappeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of developmenthavinguniversalsignificanceand value.6

Now there is certainly no doubt that Western modernity now has auniversal geographical ignificance. The Yoruba bicyclist-like Stingand his Amerindianchieftainsof the Amazon rain forest or PaulSimonand the Mbaqangamusiciansof Graceland-is testimonyto that. But, ifI mayborrow someone else's borrowing, the fact is that the EmpireofSigns strikes back. Weber's "as we like to think" reflects his doubtsabout whether the Western imperium ver the world was as clearly ofuniversalvalue as it wascertainlyof universalsignificance;nd postmod-ernism fully endorses his resistance to this claim. The man with abicycle enters our museumsto be valued by us (Rockefellertells us howit is to be valued),butjust as the presence f the object remindsus of thisfact, its content emindsus that the trade is two-way.I want to argue that to understand our-our human-modernity,we must first understandwhy the rationalization of the world can nolonger be seen as the tendency either of the West or of history, why,simply put, the modernist characterizationof modernity must be chal-6. Max Weber, TheProtestantEthicand theSpirit of Capitalism,trans. Talcott Parsons(London,1930),p. 13.


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344 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcoloniallenged. To understand our world is to reject Weber's claim for therationality of what he called rationalization and his projection of itsinevitability; it is, then, to have a radically post-Weberian conception ofmodernity.

T. S. Eliot abhors the soullessness and the secularization of modernsociety, the reach of Enlightenment rationalism into the whole world.He shares Weber's account of modernity and more straightforwardlydeplores it. Le Corbusier favors rationalization-a house is a "machinefor living in"-but he, too, shares Weber's vision of modernity. And, ofcourse, the great rationalists-the believers in a transhistorical reasontriumphing in the world-from Kant on, are the source of Weber'sKantian vision. Modernism in literature, architecture, and philosophy-the account of modernity that, on my model, postmodernism in thesedomains seeks to subvert-may be for reason or against it, but in eachdomain rationalization, the pervasion of reason, is seen as the distinctivedynamic of contemporary history.But the beginning of postmodern wisdom is to ask whetherWeberian rationalization is in fact what has occurred historically. ForWeber, charismatic authority-the authority of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, CheGuevara, Kwame Nkrumah-is antirational, yet modernity has beendominated by just such charisma. Secularization hardly seems to beproceeding: religions grow in all parts of the world; more than ninetypercent 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 Middleand Far Easts;Jimmy Swaggart and Billy Graham have business in Louis-iana and California as well as in Costa Rica and Ghana.What we can see in all these cases, I think, is not the triumph ofEnlightenment Reason-which would have entailed exactly the end ofcharisma and the universalization of the secular-not even the penetra-tion of a narrower instrumental reason into all spheres of life, but whatWeber mistook for that: namely, the incorporation of all areas of theworld and all areas of even formerly "private" life into the money econ-omy. Even in domains like religion where instrumental reason wouldrecognize that the market has at best an ambiguous place, modernityhas turned every element of the real into a sign, and the sign reads "forsale."

If Weberian talk of the triumph of instrumental reason can now beseen to be a mistake, the disenchantment of the world, that is, the pene-tration of a scientific vision of things, describes at most the tiny-and inthe United States quite marginal-world of the higher academy and afew islands of its influence. What we have seen in recent times in theUnited States is not secularization-the end of religions-but theircommodification; and with that commodification religions have reachedfurther and grown-their markets have expanded-rather than died.


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.i;:?i~Xaa.r~a~i~sa~r~r~s~-~sl 11?~~L~~II~-----?~CI--?I~........IIP~:~IT:

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FIG.2.-In August 1990, after I had completed this piece, I found this figure on sale at theGhana NationalCulturalCenter in Kumasi.It exemplifiesand expressesmy argumentin waystooobvious to requirespelling out. It is a "traditional"Akan Akuabadoll, a kind often sold to tourists.WhenI inquiredwho had carvedit, the saleswomanpointedout a man who happenedto be passingby outsidethe shop. He gave me his card,and so I am able to record that thispiece ("from he collec-tion of AnthonyAppiah,"as the museumworldmight have it) is more importantly he work of GyauApraku, managerof AcarvEnterprise,a carver from Foase-Atwima n Ashanti. Photo: CCIPhoto-graphics.


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346 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,PostcolonialPostmodernismcan be seen, then, as a retheorizationof the prolif-eration of distinctionsthat reflects the underlying dynamicof culturalmodernity,the need to clear oneself a space. Modernism saw the econ-omizationof the worldas the triumphof reason;postmodernismrejectsthat claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same proliferation ofdistinctionsthat modernityhadbegun.That, then, is how I believe the issue looks from here. But howdoes it look from the postcolonial spacesinhabitedbyManwitha Bicycle?I shallspeakabout Africa,with confidence both that some of whatI have to saywill workelsewhere in the so-called Third World and thatit will not work at all in some places. And I shall speak first about theproducersof these so-calledneotraditionalartworksand then about thecase of the Africannovel, because I believe that to focus exclusivelyonthe novel (as theorists of contemporary African cultures have beeninclined to do) is to distort the culturalsituation and the significanceofpostcolonialitywithinit.I do not know whenMan witha Bicyclewas made or by whom;Afri-can art has, until recently, been collected as the property of "ethnic"groups, not of individualsand workshops,so it is not unusualthat notone of the pieces in the "Perspectives"how was identified in the check-list by the name of an individualartist, even though manyof them aretwentieth-centuryworks. (And no one will be surprised,by contrast,that most of them arekindlylabeled with the names of the people whoown the largely private collections where they now live.) As a result Icannot say if the piece is literallypostcolonial, producedafter Nigerianindependence in 1960. But the piece belongs to a genre that hascertainlybeen producedsince then: the genre that is here calledneotra-ditional.Simply put, what is distinctive about this genre is that it isproducedfor the West.I shouldqualify.Of course, manyof the buyersof first instancelivein Africa; many of them are juridically citizens of African states. ButAfricanbourgeois consumers of neotraditional art are educated in theWestern style, and, if they want African art, they would often ratherhave a "genuinely" raditionalpiece, by which I mean a piece that theybelieve to be made precolonially,or at least in a style and by methodsthat were alreadyestablishedprecolonially.These buyersare a minor-ity. Most of this art-traditional because it uses actual or supposedprecolonial techniquesbut neo- this,for whatit is worth, is the explana-tion I promised earlier) because it has elements that are recognizablycolonial or postcolonial in reference-has been made for Western tour-ists and other collectors.The incorporation of these works in the West's museum cultureand its art market has almost nothing, of course, to do with postmod-


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CriticalInquiry Winter1991 347ernism.Byand large, the ideology through whichthey are incorporatedis modernist: it is the ideology that brought something called "Bali" oAntonin Artaud,somethingcalled "Africa" o Pablo Picasso,and some-thing called "Japan" o Roland Barthes. (This incorporation as anofficial Other was criticized, of course, from its beginnings: henceOscarWilde's observationthat "thewhole of Japanis a pure invention.There is no such country, there are no such people.")7What is post-modernistis Vogel's muddledconvictionthat African art should not bejudged "interms of [someone else's] traditional criteria."For modern-ism, primitive art was to be judged by putatively universalaestheticcriteria,and by these standards t wasfinally found possible to value it.The sculptorsand painters who found it possible were largely seekingan Archimedean point outside their own cultures for a critique of aWeberian modernity. For postmodernisms,by contrast, these works,however they are to be understood, cannot be seen as legitimated byculture- and history-transcending tandards.The neotraditionalbject is usefulas a model, despite its marginalityin most Africanlives,becauseits incorporation n the museum world(asopposed to the many objects made by the same hands that live peace-fully in nonbourgeois homes: stools, for example) reminds one that inAfrica, by contrast, the distinction between high culture and massculture, insofar as if it makes sense at all, corresponds,by and large, tothe distinction between those with and those without Western-styleformaleducationasculturalconsumers.The fact that the distinction is to be made this way-in most ofsub-SaharanAfrica, excluding the Republic of South Africa-meansthat the opposition between high culture and massculture is availableonly in domains where there is a significant body of Western formaltraining. This excludes (in most places) the plastic arts and music.There are distinctionsof genre and audience in African music,and forvarious culturalpurposesthere is something we call "traditional"musicthat we still practice and value; but village and urban dwellers alike,bourgeois and nonbourgeois, listen, through discs and, more impor-tant, on the radio, to reggae, to MichaelJackson, and to King SonnyAd6.And this means that, by and large, the domain in which such adistinctionmakes the most sense is the one domain where that distinc-tion is powerful and pervasive:namely, in African writing in Westernlanguages.So that it is here that we find, I think,a place for considera-tion of the question of the postcoloniality of contemporary Africanculture.

7. OscarWilde,"The Decayof Lying:An Observation,"ntentionsLondon, 1909),p. 45.


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348 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,PostcolonialPostcoloniality s the condition of what we might ungenerouslycalla compradorntelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-

trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade incultural commoditiesof world capitalismat the periphery. In the Westthey are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriotsknowthem both through the West they present to Africa and through anAfricathey have inventedfor the world, for each other, and for Africa.All aspectsof contemporaryAfricanculturallife-including musicand some sculpture and painting, even some writings with which theWest is largely not familiar-have been influenced, often powerfully,by the transitionof African societies through olonialism,but they arenot all in the relevant sense postcolonial.For the post-in postcolonial,like the post- n postmodern, is the post-of the space-clearinggesture Icharacterizedearlier,and manyareasof contemporaryAfrican culturallife-what has come to be theorized as popularculture, in particular-are not in this way concerned with transcending,with going beyond,coloniality.Indeed, it might be saidto be a markof popularculturethatits borrowingsfrom internationalculturalforms are remarkably nsen-sitive to, not so much dismissiveof as blind to, the issue of neocolonial-ism or "cultural imperialism."This does not mean that theories ofpostmodernismare irrelevant to these forms of culture, for the interna-tionalization of the market and the commodification of artworksareboth central to them. But it doesmean that these artworks are notunderstood by their producers or their consumers in terms of a post-modernism: here is no antecedent practice whose claim to exclusivityof vision is rejected through these artworks.Whatis called "syncretism"here is a consequence of the internationalexchange of commodities,but not of a space-clearinggesture.Postcolonialintellectualsin Africa,by contrast,are almostentirelydependent for their supporton two institutions: he Africanuniversity,an institution whose intellectual life is overwhelminglyconstituted asWestern, and the Euro-Americanpublisher and reader. Even whenthese writers seek to escape the West-as Ngugi wa Thiong'o did inattempting to construct a Kikuyu peasant drama-their theories oftheir situationare irreducibly nformedby their Euro-American orma-tion. Ngugi'sconceptionof the writer'spotential in politicsis essentiallythat of the avant-garde,of left modernism.Now this double dependence on the universityand the Europeanpublishermeans that the first generation of modern African novels-the generation of Chinua Achebe's ThingsFall Apart and CamaraLaye's L'Enfant noir-were written in the context of notions of politicsand culture dominant in the French and British university and publish-ing worlds in the 1950s and 1960s. This does not mean that they werelike novels written in Western Europe at that time, for part of what washeld to be obvious both by these writers and by the high culture of


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CriticalInquiry Winter1991 349Europe of the day was that new literatures in new nations should beanticolonialand nationalist. In one respect, these early novels seem tobelong to the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literarynationalism; they are theorized as the imaginative recreation of acommon cultural past that is crafted into a shared tradition by thewriter.They are in the tradition of Sir WalterScott, whoseMinstrelsyfthe ScottishBorder was intended, as he said in the introduction, to"contributesomewhatto the historyof my native country;the peculiarfeaturesof whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolv-ing into those of her sister and ally."8The novels of this first stage arethus realist legitimations of nationalism:they authorize a "return totraditions" while at the same time recognizing the demands of aWeberian rationalizedmodernity.

From the later sixties on, such celebratory novels become rare.9Forexample, Achebe moves from the creationof a usablepast in ThingsFall Apart o a cynicalindictment of politics in the modern sphere in AMan of thePeople.But I would like to focus on a francophone novel ofthe later sixties, a novel that thematizes in an extremely powerful waymany of the questions I have been asking about art and modernity: Imean, of course, YamboOuologuem's Le Devoirde violence.This novel,like many of the second stage of which it is a part, represents a chal-lenge to the novelsof the firststage:it identifies the realist novel as partof the tactic of nationalist legitimation and so it is-if I may begin acatalogueof itsways-of-being-post-this-and-that-postrealist.Now postmodernism is, of course, postrealist also. But Ouolo-guem's postrealism is motivated quite differently from that of suchpostmodernwritersas, say, Thomas Pynchon. Realismnaturalizes: heoriginary "African novel," such as Achebe's ThingsFall Apart andLaye'sL'Enfantnoir, s "realist."Therefore, Ouologuem is againstit; herejects, indeed assaults,the conventionsof realism.He seeksto delegiti-mate the forms of the realist African novel, in part, surely, becausewhat it sought to naturalizewasa nationalismthat, by 1968, had plainlyfailed. The nationalbourgeoisie that took the baton of rationalization,industrialization, and bureaucratization in the name of nationalism,turned out to be a kleptocracy.Their enthusiasmfor nativism was arationalizationof their urge to keep the nationalbourgeoisies of other

8. Walter Scott, Minstrelsyof the ScottishBorder:Consistingof Historical and RomanticBallads London,1883),pp. 51-52.9. Somewhat along these lines, Neil Lazarus's Resistance in Postcolonial AfricanFiction(New Haven, Conn., 1990), pp. 1-26, offers a useful periodizationof Africanfictionin relation to the "greatexpectations"of the independenceeraand the "mourningafter."


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350 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,Postcolonialnations, and particularly the powerful industrialized nations, out oftheir way. As Jonathan Ngate has observed, the world of Le Devoirdeviolences one "inwhich theefficacyf the call to the Ancestorsas well asthe Ancestors themselves is seriouslycalled into question."'0That thenovel is in this way postrealist allows its author to borrow, when heneeds them, the techniques of modernism,which, as we learned fromJameson, are often also the techniquesof postmodernism.It is helpfulto rememberat this point how Ouologuem is describedon the back ofthe Editionsdu Seuil first edition:

Ne en 1940 au Mali. Admissiblea l'Ecole normalesuperieure.Licenci6 es Lettres. Licenci6 en Philosophie. Dipl6m6 d'Etudessuperieuresd'Anglais. Prepare une these de doctorat de Sociolo-gie."

Borrowingfrom Europeanmodernism is hardlygoing to be difficult forsomeone so qualified. To be a Normalien is indeed, in ChristopherMiller'scharming formulation, "roughlyequivalent to being baptizedby Bossuet.""2Miller's discussion of Le Devoir de violencein Blank Darkness focusesusefullyon theoretical questionsof intertextualityraisedby the novel'spersistent massagingof one text after another into the surface of itsown body. Ouologuem'sbook contains, for example, a translationof apassage from Graham Greene's 1934 novel It's a Battlefieldtranslatedand improved, according to some readers!)and borrowings from Guyde Maupassant'sBoulede Suif (hardly an unfamiliar work to franco-phone readers;if this latter is a theft, it is the adventurous theft of thekleptomaniac,who dares us to catch him at it). The book'sfirst sentenceartfullyestablishes the oral mode, by then an inevitable convention ofAfrican narration, with words that Ngate rightly describes as havingthe "concisionand the strikingbeautyandpower of a proverb" FAF,p.64), and mocks us in this moment because the sentence echoes thebeginning of Andr6 Schwarz-Bart'sdecidedly un-African 1959 Holo-caust novel, Le Dernierdesjustes, an echo that more substantial laterborrowingsconfirm.'"

10. Jonathan Ngate, FrancophoneAfrican Fiction:Reading a LiteraryTradition(Tren-ton, N.J., 1988), p. 59; hereafter abbreviated FAF.11. Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris, 1968), back cover; hereafterabbreviated 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, theAudience and the Critic's Responsibility: The Case of Bound to Violence," n Artist andAudience:AfricanLiteratureas a SharedExperience,ed. Richard O. Priebe and Thomas Hale(Washington, D.C., 1979); cited in FAF, p. 64.


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Critical Inquiry Winter 1991 351Nos yeux boivent l'6clat du soleil, et, vaincus, s'6tonnent depleurer. Maschallah! oua bismillah!... Un recit de l'aventure sang-

lante de la n6graille-honte aux hommes de rienl-tiendraitaishmentdans la premiere moiti6 de ce sicle; mais la viritable histoiredes Negres commence beaucoup, beaucoup plus tot,avec les Sa'lfs,en l'an 1202 de notre are, dans l'Empireafricainde Nakem. [D, p.9]Nosyeuxre;oivent la lumiere d'6toilesmortes. Une biographiede mon ami Ernie tiendrait aishmentdans le deuxieme quart du xxesiecle; mais la veritable histoired'Ernie L6vy commence tres tSt, . . .dans la vieille cite anglicanede York. Pluspr6cisement: e 11 mars

1185.14The reader who is properlypreparedwill expect an African holocaust.These echoes are surelymeant to render ironic the status of the rulersof Nakemas descendantsof AbrahamEl HiYt,"leJuif noir"(D,p. 12).The book begins, then, with a sick joke against nativism at theunwary reader's expense. And the assault on realism is-here is mysecond signpost-postnativist; this book is a murderous antidote to anostalgia for Roots.As Wole Soyinkahas said in ajustly well-respectedreading, "the Bible, the Koran, the historic solemnity of the griot arereduced to the histrionicsof wanton boys masqueradingas humans."15It is tempting to read the attackon historyhere as a repudiationnot ofroots but of Islam,asSoyinkadoes when he goes on to say:

A culture which has claimed indigenous antiquityin such parts ofAfricaas have submitted to its undeniable attractions s confidentlyproven to be imperialist;worse, it is demonstratedto be essentiallyhostile and negative to the indigenous culture. . .. Ouologuempronounces the Moslem incursioninto black Africa to be corrupt,vicious, decadent, elitist and insensitive. At the least such a workfunctions as a wide swab in the deck-clearing operation for thecommencementof racialretrieval.'614. For this comparisonI have made my own translations,which are as literal aspossible:Oureyesdrink the flashof the sun, and,conquered, surprise hemselvesby weeping.Maschallahloua bismillahl .. An accountof the bloody adventureof the nigger-trash-dishonor to the men of nothing-could easilybegin n thefirst half of thiscentury;but true historyof the Blacks begins very much earlier, with the Saifs, in theyear 1202 of our era, in the Africankingdomof Nakem.[D,p. 9;myemphasis]Oureyes eceive the light of dead stars.A biographyof my friend Ernie couldeasilybeginin thesecond quarter of the 20th century;but the truehistoryof Ernie L6vy beginsmuchearlier, .. in the old Anglican cityof York. Moreprecisely:on the 11 March1185. [AndreSchwarz-Bart, e Dernier esjustesParis, 1959),p. 11;myemphasis]15. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge, 1976), p.100. 16. Ibid.,p. 105.


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352 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,PostcolonialBut it seems to me much clearer to read the repudiation as a repudia-tion of national history, to see the text as postcolonially postnationalistas well as anti- (and thus, of course, post-) nativist. Indeed, Soyinka'sreading here seems to be driven by his own equally representativetendency to read Africa as race and place into everything.17Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi-who is, if anyone is, the hero ofthis novel-is, after all, a son of the soil, but his political prospects bythe end of the narrative are less than uplifting. More than this, thenovel explicitly thematizes, in the anthropologist Shrobenius (anobvious echo of the name of the German Africanist Leo Frobenius,whose work is cited by Leopold Senghor) the mechanism by which thenew elite has come to invent its traditions through the "science" ofethnography:

SaYf abula et l'interpr&te traduisit, Madoubo rl6pta en fran-gais, raffinant les subtilites qui faisaient le bonheur de Shrob6nius,6crevisse humaine frappee de la manie tatonnante de vouloirressusciter, sous couleur d'autonomie culturelle, un univers afri-cain qui ne correspondait a plus rien de vivant; . . . il voulaittrouver un sens metaphysique a tout.... Il considerait que la vieafricaine &taitart pur. [D, p. 102]Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated, Madouborepeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight ofShrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania forresuscitating an African universe-cultural autonomy, he calledit-which had lost all living reality; ... he was determined to findmetaphysical meaning in everything.... African life, he held, waspure art.'8

At the start we had been told that "there are few written accounts, andthe versions of the elders diverge from those of the griots, which differin turn from those of the chroniclers" (BV,p. 6). Now we are warned offthe supposedly scientific discourse of the ethnographers.19Because LeDevoirdeviolence s a novel that seeks to delegitimate notonly the form of realism but the content of nationalism, it will to thatextent seem to us, misleadingly, postmodern: misleadingly, becausewhat we have here is not postmodernism but postmodernization; not an

17. I have discussed this matter in "Soyinka and the Philosophy of Culture," inPhilosophy n Africa:Trends and 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 byV. Y. Mudimbe in his important recent intervention, The Inventionof Africa:Gnosis,Philos-ophy,and theOrderofKnowledge Bloomington, Ind., 1988).


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1991 353aesthetics but a politics, in the most literal sense of the term. Aftercolonialism,the modernizerssaid,comes rationality; hat is the possibil-ity the novel rules out. Ouologuem's novel is typical of novels of thissecond stage in that it is not written by someone who is comfortablewith and accepted by the new elite, the nationalbourgeoisie. Far frombeing a celebration of the nation, then, the novels of the second,postcolonial,stage are novels of delegitimation: they reject not only theWestern imperium ut also the nationalist project of the postcolonialnationalbourgeoisie. And, so it seems to me, the basis for that projectof delegitimation cannot be the postmodernist one: rather, it isgrounded in an appeal to an ethical universal. Indeed it is based, asintellectual responses to oppression in Africa largely are based, in anappeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering, a fundamentalrevolt against the endless miseryof the last thirty years. Ouologuem ishardlylikely to make common cause with a relativismthat might allowthat 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 neoco-lonialism,are no longer committedto the nation;in this they will seem,as I have suggested, misleadingly postmodern. But what they havechosen insteadof the nation is not an older traditionalismbut Africa-the continent and its people. This is clear enough, I think, in LeDevoirdeviolence.At the end of the novel Ouologuem writes:

Souvent il est vrai, I'ame veut rover l'6cho sans pass6 dubonheur. Mais,jet6 dansle monde, I'onpeut s'empecherde songerque SaYf, leur6trois millionsde fois, renaftsans 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 happi-ness, an echo that has no past. But projected into the world, onecannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, isforever reborn to historybeneath the hot ashes of more than thirtyAfricanrepublics.[BV,pp. 181-82]

If we are to identify with anyone, it is with the "la n6graille," theniggertrash,who have no nationality.For them one republicis as good(whichis to sayasbad)as anyother. Postcolonialityhasbecome, I think,a condition of pessimism.Postrealistwriting, postnativistpolitics, a transnationalather thana nationalsolidarity-and pessimism:a kind of postoptimism o balancethe 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 chal-lenges them in the name of the suffering victims of "more than thirtyAfrican republics."


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354 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,PostcolonialIf 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, thatthere is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African culture awaitingsalvage by our artists (just as there is, of course, no American culturewithout African roots). And there is a clear sense in some postcolonialwriting that the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a monolithicWest-the binarism of Self and Other-is the last of the shibboleths ofthe 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 postco-lonial critique of what we might call "alteritism," the construction andcelebration of oneself as Other: "voila l'art negre baptis6 'esth6tique' etmarchande--oye -dans l'univers imaginaire des '6changes vivifiants' I"(D, p. 110) ["henceforth Negro art was baptized 'aesthetic' and hawkedin the imaginary universe of 'vitalizing exchanges'" (BV, p. 94)]. Afterdescribing the fantasmatic elaboration of some interpretative mumbojumbo "invented by Saff," Ouologuem then announces that "l'art negrese forgeait ses lettres de noblesse au folklore de la spiritualite mercantil-iste, oye oye oye" (D, p. 110) ["Negro art found its patent of nobility inthe folklore of mercantile intellectualism, oye, oye, oye" (BV, p. 94)].Shrobenius, the anthropologist, as apologist for "his" people; a Euro-pean audience that laps up this exoticized Other; African traders andproducers of African art, who understand the necessity to maintain the"mysteries" that construct their product as "exotic"; traditional andcontemporary elites, who require a sentimentalized past to authorizetheir present power: all are exposed in their complex and multiplemutual complicities.

"temoin: la splendeur de son art-, la grandeur des empires duMoyen Age constituait le visage vrai de l'Afrique, sage, belle, riche,ordonnee, non violente et puissante tout autant qu'humaniste-berceau meme de la civilisation egyptienne."Salivant ainsi, Shrob6nius, de retour au bercail, en tira undouble profit: d'une part, il mystifia son pays, qui, enchant6, lejucha sur une haute chair sorbonicale, et, d'autre part, il exploita lasentimentalit6 n6grillarde-par trop heureuse de s'entendre direpar un Blanc que "l'Afrique 6tait ventre du monde et berceau decivilisation".La n6graille offrit par tonnes, cons6quemment et gratis,masques et tresors artistiques aux acolytes de la "shrob6niusolo-gie". [D, p. 111]"witness the splendor of its art-the true face of Africa is the gran-diose empires of the Middle Ages, a society marked by wisdom,beauty, prosperity, order, nonviolence, and humanism, and it ishere that we must seek the true cradle of Egyptian civilization."


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CriticalInquiry Winter 1991 355Thus drooling, Shrobenius derived a twofold benefit on hisreturn home: on the one hand, he mystifiedthe people of his own

country who in their enthusiasmraised him to a lofty Sorbonnicalchair, while on the other hand he exploited the sentimentality ofthe coons, only too pleasedto hear from the mouth of a white manthat Africa was "the womb of the world and the cradle of civiliza-tion."In consequence the niggertrash donated masksand art trea-suresby the ton to the acolytesof "Shrobeniusology."BV,pp. 94-95]A little later, Ouologuem articulates more precisely the intercon-nections of Africanistmystificationswith tourism and the production,packaging,andmarketingof Africanartworks.

Une 6cole africaniste ainsi accroch6eaux nues du symbolismemagico-religieux, cosmologique et mythique, 6tait n6e: tant et sibien que durant trois ans, des hommes-et quels hommes!: desfantoches, des aventuriers,des apprentis banquiers,des politiciens,des voyageurs,des conspirateurs,des chercheurs-"scientifiques",dit-on, en verit6 sentinelles asservies,montant la garde devant lemonument "shrob6niusologique"du pseudo-symbolisme negre,accoururentau Nakem.Debj, I'acquisitiondes masquesanciens 6tait devenue probl6-matique depuis que Shrobenius et les missionnairesconnurent lebonheur d'en acqubriren quantitY.SaYfdonc-et la pratique estcourante de nos jours encore-fit enterrer des quintaux demasqueshativement executes a la ressemblance des originaux, lesengloutissant dans des mares, marais, 6tangs, mar6cages, lacs,limons-quitte a les exhumer quelquetempsapr~s, es vendant auxcurieux et profanes a prix d'or. Ils 6taient, ces masques,vieux detrois ans, charges,disait-on, du poids de quatresieclesde civilisation.[D,p. 112]

An Africanist school harnessed to the vapors of magico-reli-gious, cosmological, and mythical symbolismhad been born: withthe result that for three years men flocked to Nakem-and whatmen-middlemen, adventurers, apprentice bankers, politicians,salesmen, conspirators-supposedly "scientists," but in realityenslaved sentries mounting guardbefore the "Shrobeniusological"monumentof Negro pseudosymbolism.

Already it had become more than difficult to procure oldmasks, for Shrobenius and the missionaries had had the goodfortune to snap them all up. And so Saif-and the practice is stillcurrent-had slapdash copies buried by the hundredweight, orsunk into ponds, lakes, marshes, and mud holes, to be exhumedlater on and sold at exorbitant prices to unsuspecting curio hunt-ers. These three-year-old masks were said to be charged with theweightoffour centuriesof civilization.[BV,pp. 95-96]


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356 KwameAnthonyAppiah Postmodern,PostcolonialOuologuem here forcefully exposes the connections we saw earlier insome of Rockefeller's insights into the international system of artexchange, the international art world: we see the way in which an ideol-ogy of disinterested aesthetic value-the "baptism" of "Negro art" as"aesthetic"-meshes with the international commodification of Africanexpressive culture, a commodification that requires, by the logic of thespace-clearing gesture, the manufacture of Otherness. (It is a significantbonus that it also harmonizes with the interior decor of contemporaryapartments.) Shrobenius, "ce marchand-confectionneur d'idbologie,"the ethnographer allied with Saif-image of the "traditional" Africanruling caste-has invented an Africa that is a body over against Europe,the juridical institution; and Ouologuem is urging us vigorously torefuse to be thus Other.

Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treatedas an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20Perhapsthe predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intel-lectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are,indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with themanufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in theworld of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it toour fellows. This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmod-ern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is alltoo close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of it. The rale that Africa, like the rest of the Third World,plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documentedsignificance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the ralepostmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it is,I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because wepronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changingeveryday practices of African cultural life.For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will notsee themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economicdecline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition,disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity growsapace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama,music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural productionof many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences sovigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonialnovelist.

20. SaraSuleri,MeatlessDays Chicago,1989),p. 105.


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CriticalInquiry Winter1991 357And I am grateful to James Baldwin for his introduction to theManwitha Bicycle, figure who is, as Baldwin so rightly saw,polyglot-speakingYorubaand English,probablysome Hausaand a little Frenchfor his trips to Cotonou or Cameroon, someone whose "clothes do notfit him too well." He and the other men and women among whom hemostly lives suggest to me that the place to look for hope is not just tothe postcolonial novel, which has struggled to achieve the insights ofOuologuem or Mudimbe,but to the all-consumingvision of this less-anxious creativity. It matters little whom the work was madefor; whatwe should learn from is the imagination that produced it. Man witha

Bicycles producedby someone who does not care that the bicycle is thewhite man's invention: it is not there to be Other to the YorubaSelf; itis there because someone cared for its solidity;it is there because it willtake us further than our feet will take us; it is there because machinesare now as African as novelists . .. and as fabricated as the kingdomofNakem.21

21. I learneda good deal from tryingout earlier versionsof these ideasat an NEHSummer Instituteon "The Future of the Avant-Garde n PostmodernCulture,"underthe directionof SusanSuleimanandAliceJardineat Harvard nJuly 1989;at the AfricanStudies Association (under the sponsorshipof the Society for African Philosophy inNorth America)in November 1989, whereJonathan Ngate's response wasparticularlyhelpful;and, as the guest of Ali Mazrui,at the BraudelCenterat SUNY-Binghamton nMay1990. As usual,I wishI knew howto incorporatemore of the ideasof the discussantson thoseoccasions.

is the post in postmodernism the post in postclonial critical inquiry 17.2. 1991

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