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| Title: | On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony |
| Author: | Karlström, Mikael |
| Year: | 2003 |
| Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
| Volume: | 73 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Period: | March |
| Pages: | 57-76 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Africa Uganda |
| Subjects: | power Ganda (Uganda) State political action Politics and Government |
| About person: | Achille Mbembe (1957-) |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3556873 |
| Abstract: | Achille Mbembe's 'Provisional notes on the postcolony' (1992) has become a canonical contribution to the literature on postcolonial African politics, yet the piece has also proved difficult to digest and build upon. This article focuses on Mbembe's thesis that postcolonial rulers and subjects share an 'aesthetics of power', involving ceremonialism and an emphasis on bodily functions and metaphors. It attempts to disentangle Mbembe's insights into such political dispositions from the State-centrism and radical pessimism of his account by examining its analytical indeterminacies and critically re-evaluating his theoretical deployment of Bakhtin. It then develops an alternative Bakhtinian approach to Mbembe's problematic through an analysis of the public staging of political relations in Buganda (Uganda). The standardized ceremony staged by local communities in Buganda to welcome visiting dignitaries - a ceremonial form here designated 'political hospitality' - projects and enacts legitimate relations of reciprocity and communication between rulers and subjects through performative prestation and the giving and eating of food. It thus lends itself to political ceremonialism and the elaboration of corporeal political metaphors without entailing the pathologies that Mbembe (mis)identifies as intrinsic to such dispositions and discourses. The distorted magnification of this ceremonial pattern by the national State does contribute to the State-society impasse that preoccupies Mbembe. Yet, contrary to Mbembe's bleak vision, such local idioms also provide some grounds for cautious optimism regarding the postcolonial African political predicament. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |
