Review: Achille Mbembe, ‘Out of the Dark Night’
Black Pain and Disentanglements
Review of Achille Mbembe’s Out of the Dark Night (Columbia University Press, 2021), 280 pages
Abstract
The object of the book is to examine the wave of African decolonization movements in the twentieth century. By carefully paying attention to the philosophical meaning of the will to community, the book presents the decolonial turn as a concatenation of uneven processes that aim to overhaul Western hegemony. This anticolonial push was animated by the pursuit for an African future that was born out of entanglements between European colonialism and African particularities. Mbembe’s Afropolitan perspective illuminates the many capillary knots that shape old boundaries and define the planetary crises of our age.
Reviewed by Bulelani Jili
Since the publication of On the Postcolony, Mbembe has produced several books that explore the invention of Africa, genealogies of blackness, colonial subjugation, and the racialized capitalism that maintains Africa’s asymmetric integration into global hierarchies. Likewise, his new book, Out of the Dark Night, in six essays and an epilogue, intervenes cogently in postcolonial thought. It also maps out the philosophical underpinning behind our senses of geography, grounding Africa’s place and planetary challenges in the decolonial turn.
In the first two chapters, Mbembe investigates the wave of African decolonization movements during the twentieth century. Rather than simply examining their historical and sociological significance, he aims to discern their philosophical salience. He argues that decolonization, as an event, ushered in a temporal rupture that made possible innumerable futures. In his words, “If decolonization was an event at all, its essential philosophical meaning lies in an active will to community” (p. 2). This will to community served to orient novel ways of becoming (Hegel, 1956) which aimed to dismantle colonial hierarchies and make possible African futures. Echoing Nkrumah (1965) and Léopold (2016), Mbembe maintains a dialectical posture, which suggests that new postcolonial worlds must avoid imitating European modernity; better to invent new futures born out of a marriage between African struggles and European colonialism. Interestingly, it is the very acts of physical and epistemic violence that create zones of créolité where futurity is made possible. And so, he focuses on the temporal ruptures and consequences of decolonization in the present, drawing attention to the supposed inability of scholarship to write these dialectically produced and shared pasts.
Mbembe challenges Hegelian (1956) conceptions of Africa, which represent it as an ahistorical, shadowy continent – located outside of time – ensnared in cyclical processes (Gluckman,1963; Radcliffe-Brown, 1987; Turner, 1957). He demonstrates acutely how it is treated as a world incapable of producing universal knowledge, being no more than a reservation for raw data. Ironically, it is this very data that has allowed modern formations of knowledge. Africa is an epistemological laboratory (Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, 1997) where Hobbesian (1982) conceptions of the state and its absences (Radcliffe-Brown, 1987) are tested and fashioned into general principles. Mbembe claims that “there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship that is keen to describe novelty and originality, multiplicity, singularity, and complexity” (p. 12). Agreeing with Jean and John Comaroff (2012), he sees the continent as the vanguard of world history, a generative site for social theory and global futures. In the context of worldwide environmental crises, growing economic inequality, and political corruption, it seems as though the world is ‘evolving’ into the kinds of societies regularly associated with Africa. In turn, inquiry into African and planetary crises demands that we pay careful attention to the entangled contingencies that make neocolonialism and capitalism resilient. In Mbembe’s view, it is the entangled space between Africa and Europe, colonized and colonizer, which propounds an epistemic vantage point from which to defamiliarize and reimagine politics.
In chapter two, Mbembe argues that decolonization should not be considered a singular event, but “a concatenation of complex, uneven, and variegated processes that unfolded over a long span of time” (p. 42). This perspective aims to recover decolonization’s numerous genealogies: revolution, mystic exaltation, and futurity. He contends that anything less reduces decolonization to a transfer of power from the metropole to local elites rather than seeing it as an epistemic and structural challenge to Western hegemony. Through Fanon (1986), Mbembe offers a definition of decolonization: “radically redefining native being and opening it up to the possibility of becoming a human form of being rather than a thing” (p. 54). Understood from this point of view, decolonization is a struggle against colonial alienation in order to find ways to heal black pain (Mbembe, 2017) and to reconstitute the colonial subject. This becoming – this healing – requires the recovery of endogenous knowledge (Ngugi, 1986) and a realignment of Africa’s place in the global system (Rodney 1972; Wallerstein, 1979). In this sense, decolonization was, and is, a critique of both knowledge and (local and global) institutions.
Decolonization was a movement to bring an end to psychic and material relations of extroversion with Europe. Mbembe notes the centrality of endogenous knowledge to a decolonial praxis. Yet, he expresses doubt about the capacity of indigenous epistemologies to deliver emancipation. The emphasis on indigenous epistemologies was a means to counter the white normative gaze (Morrison, 2019), and also to center Africans as subjects in history able to speak in a universal register from, and about, Africa. In a way, it was an attempt to both acknowledge and analyze how the continent was locked into a distinct and distant past that preserves its alterity (Mudimbe, 1988), and enshrouds its contributions to the human commons. Reasonably, Mbembe has little patience for the cultification of indigenous epistemologies; for one thing, it does not yield economic autonomy, and, for another, it is a repudiation of a dialectically produced, shared past, which he regards to be the ground for new forms of African social transformation. For Mbembe, there is no viable return to a precolonial and precapitalist Africa. Indeed, our sense of that past in many ways is an invention of the present. He imagines the future as the only horizon of possibility, although he gives little evidence to justify this sober optimism.
In chapters three and four, Mbembe focuses on the ramifications and gestures of decolonization by France, only to show that the kind of nation-state that emerged out of this turn was not completely decolonized. Nor have the transformations effected by global capital, tackled in chapter five, fostered decolonization. According to him, France ‘decolonized’ without self-decolonizing. This distinction for Mbembe reveals the truth of “negation without autonomy,” which maintains old asymmetries and leads to novel forms of neocolonial exploitation. What is clear is that racism as a technology of dispossession survives the formal end of colonialism. This argument suggests an explicit kinship between colonial predation and contemporary forms of neoliberal appropriation. Presently, France’s dogmatic approach to universal values of reason, equality, and freedom operates as an obfuscating mechanism to enshroud the racial and colonial violence within its borders and beyond. This inability or unwillingness to decolonize is partly linked with a kind of colonial amnesia but also with a notion of the border. Mbembe views the border as an instrument that constitutes the political body and determines the line of “who is my neighbor, how to treat an enemy, and what to do with the foreigner” (p. 90).
The final chapter of the book speculates about Africa’s future. Echoing an earlier point, Mbembe sees Africa as a central place of postmodern experimentation: a site defined by its fertile soil of possibility, marked by its pluralities, concatenations, imbrication points, and complexities that now function as the harbinger of the world to come. His Afropolitan perspective, like a lighthouse, illuminates the entangled knots between the colonizer and colonized, focusing on those shared sites, “…where there is sometimes a growing realization of the need for an unusual, and to some degree, an unprecedented knowledge” (Said, 1986: p. 159). This dialectical way of thinking excavates and underscores the affiliation that needs translation. For Mbembe, contemporary Africa and its diaspora offer a home to critically reexamine the undulating links between oppression and resistance, local and global, colonizer and colonized, slave and master, core and periphery, one that is grounded in the particularities of the continent and the mobility of its population. The demand for grounded research is not simply about accuracy, it is an approach to the particular as a dynamic process that is irreducible to fixed assumptions and categories. Mbembe’s study pursues intellection on an awkward scale (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003), traversing the sites along which the global meets the local. For him, to disregard mobility, continuities, and overlap is to enshroud knowledge and decouple histories: it is to neglect the interflows of our shared past, mutual present, and possible future.
We can ask: how do we think about, and from, moments of disentanglement? What do Mbembe’s privileged insights into entanglement enable or disable? His focus on entanglement is attractive because it does not demand a complete repudiation of European modernity; but it is a concession to complexity that does not chart a clear path forward. In the same way, Mbembe does not reconcile his optimism about African futures with the ugly entangled history of European colonialism. Indeed, he draws attention to the entanglements between Europe and Africa without comprehensively addressing the gaps, complexities, and knots that defer futures. Like Hughes (1995), we can imagine that dreams deferred eventually fester like a sore only to later explode. For instance, how should we understand the pain vocalized by black student protesters who simply can no longer wait? This pain seems to operate as the psychic bond that engenders real political action and intersubjectivity, while also being understood as that which makes black experiences incommensurable to white folk. To call this view “secessionist” (p. 80) can be perceived as a dismissive remark, which assumes an already established connection and does not take seriously how the bloody catalogue of white supremacy has suffocated the means to imagine one’s pain in an entangled fold, a set of universal threads, where one’s humanity fades into others. And so, how do we think from these moments of entanglement and disentanglement, which do not only draw attention to the relations between the colonizer and colonized, but also speak to its continuing violence?
Without explicating how this will be achieved, Mbembe propounds a politics that utilizes difference as an entanglement that folds people together. Mbembe argues that student politics, which rely on difference, usually interpret decolonial acts as means of disconnection. Although fought in the name of inclusion and justice, movements, particularly under the name of black pain, erect borders on the supposed need for a black politics. Like Biko (2004), student activists view white participation in anti-racist politics as an impediment. Biko justified this position by accenting the socialization of white South Africa: “the people forming the integrated complex have been extracted from various segregated societies with their inbuilt complexes of superiority and inferiority and these continue to manifest themselves even in the ‘nonracial’ set-up of the integrated complex. As a result the integration so achieved is a one-way course, with the whites doing all the talking and the blacks the listening” (Biko, 2004: p. 20). He later points out that white liberals often retreated into class as an analytical substitute for race, a move that refused to accept the role and consequences of white supremacy. By problematizing inclusive strategies towards dismembering apartheid, Biko showed how inclusion, for its own sake, offers an illusion of progress that psychically compensates white liberals while silencing black voices. Nonetheless, the need for a black led movement does not justify a politics predicated on the performance of purity, or an unanimity on blackness, or a competition contingent on determining the relative oppression of individuals and groups. A decolonial politics must seek to manage the oscillating needs of inclusion and exclusion in a movement, precisely as an imperative to construct a sense of the human commons.
Out of the Dark Night is a blend of multidisciplinarity and sheer erudition, which offers a kaleidoscopic view of the history of our time. Mbembe’s Afropolitan perspective on Africa – as a continent rich in epistemic gifts, while concurrently ensnared in the capillary knots that shape old boundaries and define the planetary crises of our age – makes it a singularity. Without question, this book is a welcome addition to social thought.
References
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Bulelani Jili is a PhD candidate at Harvard University as an Oppenheimer Graduate Fellow. His research interests include Africa-China relations, ICT development, Cybersecurity, Privacy Law, Law and Development, and African Political Thought. He is also a Cybersecurity Fellow at the Belfer Center and Research Associate with the China, Law, Development Project at Oxford University. His writing has appeared in leading publications and think tanks like the African Affairs, Mail & Guardian, Africa is a Country, The Elephant, and African Center for Security Studies.
Email: bulelanijili@g.harvard.edu
