Bøger af Michael Neocosmos

This book consists of an attempt to clarify the character of an emancipatory politics as what might be called a ''displaced exception'' in Africa both in political theory and in political practice, whereas state (political) subjectivities, by their very nature, reproduce given social placement. Already in 1961, in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon exhorts us (his posthumous comrades) to abandon Eurocentric thinking and to reconnect with dialectical thought in order as he puts it to ''work out new concepts'' and he insists that ''if we want humanity to advance a step farther ... then we must invent and we must make discoveries'' (Fanon, The Wretched p.254).

Au coeur de nos problemes politiques issus d''un capitalisme racial et d''une oppression (neo)coloniale en Afrique aujourd''hui se trouve l''absence de toute vision emancipatrice veritable. Toute tentative de repenser une politique emancipatrice en Afrique doit pouvoir situer une vision universaliste de la liberte parmi les experiences culturelles singulieres que les gens vivent. Les politiques emancipatrices quand elles existaient, bien que pensees dans les luttes pour la liberte ayant lieu dans des contextes historiques particuliers, mettaient toujours en vue une dialectique de ce genre quand elles etaient vraiment basees parmi les traditions populaires. Cependant, seulement une minorite de dirigeants intellectuels et militants comprenait l''importance d''une telle dialectique pour la pensee et l''action. Ce petit livre trace le contour et discute de deux points de vue tres importants sur le role de la culture populaire dans la politique emancipatrice en Afrique. Chacun d''entre eux emane de formes d''exploitation capitalistes coloniales distinctes: le premier a vu le jour dans un contexte colonial classique tandis que le second est directement issu d''un contexte etatique neocolonial. Toute politique emancipatrice est developpee vis-a-vis le pouvoir d''etat et toutes commencent avec un processus de discussion ou est forme un sujet collectif. Un tel sujet politique doit etre fondamentalement informe par et concu en relation avec les cultures populaires. Les deux auteurs ci-inclus ont compris ce principe et mettent la culture populaire au centre de leur pensees politiques. Le premier, Am­lcar Cabral se refere au role principal de la culture dans la lutte contre le colonialisme au Guinee Bissau dans les annees 1970; le second, Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba insiste sur le role central de la culture populaire pour une politique emancipatrice dans la Republique Democratique du Congo aujourd''hui. Malgre la distance temporelle qui les separe, tous les deux developpent au centre de leurs politiques distinctes, une pensee dialectique qui declenche des pensees universalistes depuis la culture populaire dans le present. C''est pour cela que leurs points de vue sont d''une importance capitale pour la pensee de la politique emancipatrice en Afrique aujourd''hui.

This work consists of a brief attempt to orient the study of the neocolonial state in Africa through an assessment of the manner in which it rules its people. It is argued that the state produces different modes of rule by deploying different politics over different parts of the population. In this manner, it can combine a genuinely democratic rule in the image of the West over some while subjecting the majority to colonial forms of domination. Imported political subjectivities from the West and its obsession with human rights discourse are reserved largely for a sphere of civil society in which the right to have rights is conferred upon citizens. In the domains of uncivil society and traditional society, the right to rights is not observed by the state so that different subjectivities, regularly including violence, govern the manner political problems and solutions are addressed both by the state and by people. In consequence, distinct political subjectivities prevail in the conceptualization of popular resistance in all three domains, and it becomes difficult to rally such different concerns and conceptions within an overall anti-neocolonial struggle. Il s'agit d'une brève tentative d'orienter l'étude de l'État néocolonial en Afrique à travers une évaluation de la manière dont il gouverne son peuple. On soutient que l'État produit différents modes de contrôle étatique en déployant différentes politiques sur différentes parties de la population. De cette manière, il peut combiner une règle véritablement démocratique à l'image de l'Occident sur certains tout en soumettant la majorité à des formes coloniales de domination. Les subjectivités politiques importées de l'Occident et son obsession du discours sur les droits de l'homme sont largement réservées à une sphère de la société civile dans laquelle le droit d'avoir des droits est conféré aux citoyens. Dans les domaines de la société incivile et de la société traditionnelle , le droit aux droits n'est pas respecté par l'État, de sorte que différentes subjectivités, y compris régulièrement la violence, régissent la manière dont les problèmes politiques et leurs solutions sont abordés à la fois par l'État et par le peuple. En conséquence, des subjectivités politiques distinctes prévalent dans la conceptualisation de la résistance populaire dans chacun des trois domaines, et il devient difficile de rallier des préoccupations et des conceptions aussi différentes au sein d'une lutte anticoloniale nation

Previous ways of conceiving the universal emancipation of humanity have in practice ended in failure. Marxism, anti-colonial nationalism and neo-liberalism all understand the achievement of universal emancipation through a form of state politics. Marxism, which had encapsulated the idea of freedom for most of the twentieth century, was found wanting when it came to thinking emancipation because social interests and identities were understood as simply reflected in political subjectivity which could only lead to statist authoritarianism. Neo-liberalism and anti-colonial nationalism have also both assumed that freedom is realisable through the state, and have been equally authoritarian in their relations to those they have excluded on the African continent and elsewhere. Thinking Freedom in Africa then conceives emancipatory politics beginning from the axiom that people think'. In other words, the idea that anyone is capable of engaging in a collective thought-practice which exceeds social place, interests and identities and which thus begins to think a politics of universal humanity. Using the work of thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon and many others, along with the inventive thought of people themselves in their experiences of struggle, the author proceeds to analyse how Africans themselves - with agency of their own - have thought emancipation during various historical political sequences and to show how emancipation may be thought today in a manner appropriate to twenty-first century conditions and concerns.

Xenophobia is a political discourse. As such, its historical development as well as the conditions of its existence must be elucidated in terms of the practices and prescriptions that structure the field of politics. In South Africa, its history is connected to the manner citizenship has been conceived and fought over during the past fifty years at least. Migrant labour was de-nationalised by the apartheid state, while African nationalism saw it as the very foundation of that oppressive system. However, only those who could show a family connection with the colonial/apartheid formation of South Africa could claim citizenship at liberation. Others were excluded and seen as unjustified claimants to national resources. Xenophobia's current conditions of existence are to be found in the politics of a post-apartheid nationalism were state prescriptions founded on indigeneity have been allowed to dominate uncontested in condition of passive citizenship. The de-politicisation of a population, which had been able to assert its agency during the 1980s, through a discourse of 'human rights' in particular, has contributed to this passivity. State liberal politics have remained largely unchallenged. As in other cases of post-colonial transition in Africa, the hegemony of xenophobic discourse, the book shows, is to be sought in the character of the state consensus. Only a rethinking of citizenship as an active political identity can re-institute political agency and hence begin to provide alternative prescriptions to the political consensus of state-induced exclusion.