African Marxist discourses on the cusp of “globalization”: a preliminary review

ABSTRACT

Founded in 1974, the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE, represented a focused attempt at “devising…strategy for Africa's revolution” and provided a forum for various discussions among African progressive activists and intellectuals of different stripes in the final quarter of the twentieth-century. With a metropolitan location, ROAPE's primary method was to mediate those discussions largely in terms of the international machinations of capitalism. In a 1985 retrospective, the review reflected on the shortcomings of this method. What is significant about these two moments in ROAPE's existence is the coincidence of the exhaustion of the kind of Marxist analysis it promoted with the ascendancy of a new political critique. Inflected with postmodernism and “the cultural turn,” this new political critique is also concerned with questions of diaspora, racial and other minority identities, and its relationship to capitalism is not always one of antagonism. It also eschews specific political affiliations, being forged through the complex historical. The WISER Review and the subsequent Salon of the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism are representative of this political critique. This essay examines both formations as necessary but limited interventions, and assesses their value as theoretical attempts to understand realities on the African continent.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• African politics
• ROAPE
• JWTC
• Biodun Jeyifo
• Positive Review
• Achille Mbembe

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, CAHI, at Indiana University, for funding the research trips that make this work possible. Michael Titlestad kindly answered my questions, and Alex Lichtenstein provided critical comments in response to an early version of this article presented at the “Race, Place and Capitalism in Postcolonial Studies” symposium co-organized by Majed Akhter, Ishan Ashutosh, and Olimpia Rosenthal, at Indiana University on 3–4 April 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is not entirely accurate or apt to characterize the JWTC as a “publication,” since the Salon best approximates the journal-like format usually reserved for that description. At the same time, a one-word characterization of the two institutional initiatives is just as complicated; hence, the multiplicity of tags (“projects,” “initiatives,” and “interventions,”) which I have adopted here, and which I hope will give the reader a fair idea of how I see them.

2. The extreme unevenness of this scholarship, and the equally extreme unevenness of critiques of it, make a proper assessment difficult and at best piecemeal. While the work of individual scholars like Samir Amin, Eskor Toyo, and so on have been important analytical signposts to specific concepts (like class, historical process), a general history of Marxism on the continent is hardly conceived. A global review of socialist history and theory such as Goran Therborn's “After Dialectics” (2007) is a fine example of summative account which could be attempted of African experiences of Marxist ideologies.

3. When I presented an early draft of this essay at a Theory panel during the 2016 conference of the African Literature Association, the scholar Ato Quayson objected to the inclusion of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic as part of “insurrection within” on the grounds that the African continent was not part of the book's concerns. That objection seems to me to miss the point because the context of my critique is the black world, and the thematic concerns of a book are less important than the substantive cultural capital thus generated, proof of which is to be seen in the close relationship between Mbembe and Gilroy and the kinds of political analysis associated with their work.

4. A good account of this history can be found in Wallerstein (1986).

5. A useful comparison here would be New Left Review's interest in modern European Marxisms, best exemplified in Perry Anderson's Reflections on Western Marxism.

6. One of the best interdisciplinary syntheses of these historical processes is Simone and Hecht (1994).

7. For a careful analysis of the pragmatic attitude toward socialism in Lusophone countries, see Chabal (2002).

8. See “Translator's Foreword: A Plea for Leibniz,” in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

9. Hardy's report is written as a series of short, descriptive and impressionistic passages with telegraphic titles. “Diary of a Bad Year,” the section concerning the changes at WISER ends with the following paragraph: “In January 2013, Sarah Nuttall returned to take up the directorship of Wiser. Mbembe accompanied her. A few months after their arrival, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation announced a US$1.5 million grant to support a programme of collaboration between Wiser and the African Studies Centre at the University of Michigan in the US.”

Additional information

Funding

College Arts and Humanities Institute, CAHI, Indiana University.

Notes on contributors

Akin Adesokan

Akin Adesokan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Roots in the Sky, a novel, Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, a critical study, and Celebrating D. O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History, a co-edited volume on the work of Daniel Fagunwa, the pioneer Yoruba novelist.