On interregna: Tejumola Olaniyan and the radical normality of theory

Abstract

In this brief meditation on Tejumola Olaniyan’s theoretical writing, I explore the entanglements between Olaniyan’s widely-cited concept of the “postcolonial incredible” and the notion of an “interregnum,” drawn from Antonio Gramsci. By reconsidering Olaniyan’s use of terms like “overthrow,” “presupposed,” and “normality,” I argue that Olaniyan theorizes the crisis of African postcolonial politics as a crisis of modernity itself. Given that Gramsci used the concept of interregnum to describe a transitional context in which some old order was already dying, while a new one could not yet be born, I ask what it might mean for Olaniyan and the subjects he has researched, such as Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Femi Osofisan—or indeed any radical activist, rebel, or theorist—to overthrow the transition.

Keywords:

• Africa
• postcolonial
• crisis
• Gramsci
• norms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a particularly rich and precise, if ungenerous, rendition of Gramsci’s thought and the process by which it has been co-opted for the “cultural turn,” see Timothy Brennan, “Antonio Gramsci and Postcolonial Theory: ‘Southernism.’”

2 The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, which lost the United States’ 2020 election, spent two months attempting to overthrow the incoming president, Joseph R. Biden, during the transition period between the outgoing administration’s loss and the incoming administration’s inauguration. See Zeynep Tufekci.

3 For recent examples of astute analyses of Gramscian interregna, although focused less on those spaces dominated by modernity and more on those spaces that have benefited from it—labeled the “Liberal International Order” by one analyst—see Milan Babic, “Let’s Talk about the Interregnum: Gramsci and the Crisis of the Liberal World Order,” and Rue Møller Stahl, “Ruling the Interregnum: Politics and Ideology in Nonhegemonic Times.”

4 For more analysis of the way that Gramsci’s context informed his ideas about the interregnum, see Gilbert Achcar, “Morbid Symptoms: What Did Gramsci Mean and How Does it Apply to Our Time?”

5 This is Adam Smith’s phrase, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is meant to characterize the supposedly stabilizing and even moral outcomes created by a myriad of market transactions taking place at once. Its logic is, to say the least, highly contested.

6 See Olaniyan’s analysis of Soyinka’s The Open Sore of Continent in the introduction to State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (8).

7 See Arrest the Music! (191).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew H. Brown

Matthew H. Brown is Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on media and politics in modern Africa. He is the author of Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), which explores the relationship between state television and commercial filmmaking in Nigeria. His other publications include research on popular culture, print literature, music, and literary and critical cultural theory, while his teaching covers African literature, screen media, popular culture, and theories of African cultural studies.