6 - Violence and writing in the African postcolony: Achille Mbembe and Sony Labou Tansi

Summary

Although much of the discussion about the relationship between deconstruction and the postcolonial in the previous chapters has challenged and problematized the model of history as a continuous causal flow, or genealogical narratives of intellectual influence and indebtedness, it would be fair to say that we could trace a direct line of descent from Frantz Fanon to the Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe (passing, more indirectly, through Homi Bhabha). We might even say that if Fanon took on the mantle of spokesperson and principal theoretician of the anti-colonialist cause in Africa, Mbembe has similarly assumed the role of the most articulate commentator on the African postcolonial era. The association does not end there, since, for Mbembe, Fanon set the theoretical parameters of any responsible discussion of colonialism and its aftermath. Mbembe says in a footnote to an early essay sketching out his own ‘intellectual biography’, ‘C'est parce que la colonisation fut ce qu'elle fut qu'il nous est interdit d'oublier F. Fanon’ (‘It is because colonization was what it was that we are not allowed to forget F. Fanon’). Fanon articulates the alienation of the colonized African in terms of psychoanalytical structures of desire and identification. Bhabha subsequently theorized this identification as a kind of mutual interdependence that reveals a split subjectivity not only in the colonized but also in the colonizer, which leads to the ‘deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself’.