1 - (Im)possible Necessities: Reading an African Formation in Contradiction

Summary

One who causes you injury also teaches you wisdom.

—Yoruba proverb

For the African intellectual … the problem is whether—and, if so, how—our cultures are to become modern.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House

Gayatri Spivak, in one of her essays, characteristically puts under the microscope “postcolonial persons” like herself, “from formerly colonized countries,” for whom access to the “so-called culture of imperialism” has been enabling. Enabling, insofar as it warrants them the good fortune of being “able to communicate to each other (and to metropolitans), to exchange, to establish sociality.” Nonetheless, when Spivak goes on to ponder whether, under these fortunate circumstances, “we [shall] assign to that [imperialist] culture a measure of ‘moral luck,’” she has no doubt that “the answer is ‘no.’” Yet, for all that, the critic admits that this is an “impossible no,” on account of the fact that it appears contradictorily within “a structure that one critiques and yet inhabits intimately.” Spivak implies, therefore, that to inhabit the culture of imperialism—and this culture gives us the structure of our international modernity—as a “formerly colonized,” or “postcolonial” person is to be pulled in contrary directions at once. It is to find oneself inside a structure, not of one's (direct) making, that does not afford one the luxury of a standpoint purely outside itself—a structure, that is, that affords no Archimedean standpoint in consciousness and identity. And it is to inhabit this structure under circumstances which impose upon one to simultaneously say to it a reluctant “yes,” in desire and intimacy, and a compromised “no,” in resistance. It is to know, further, that while saying “no” does not and will not put one outside this structure, a failure to say the same amounts to a shirking of an existential obligation, an ethical charge, and the historic necessity to imagine, in the impossible-to-inhabit outside of the structure, the possibility of the unimaginable.

The problem of a modernity that is imaginably and unimaginably African—a conceptually impossible proposition—should emerge in outline here. For in the frontline nationalist thought under consideration in this study, “Africa” and “African nationality” come inscribed on the “no” of Spivak's impossible refusal.