Thinking the State from Africa: Political Theory, Eurocentrism and Concrete Politics

ABSTRACT

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project that we have underway at University of Western Cape, to rethink Political Theory and Philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last two years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and ‘decolonizing knowledge’. The second part of this paper will offer a description of a course that I have been teaching at Honours and Masters level on Political Violence and the Modern State. In recounting these two projects I wish to contribute to possible ways we might reconstitute the genealogy of the modern state from an African vantage point, and therefore to think about how this might be done in a way that is not Eurocentric.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Laurence Piper and the South African Political Science Association (SAAPS) for the invitation to present the talk on which this paper is based at the SAAPS 13th National Colloquium, 2016. The author wishes to also thank the participants for their feedback at the plenary session of the 3rd International Conference on Postcolonial Higher Education at Habib University, Karachi, Pakistan, where a version of the paper was presented.

Notes

1 The range of works on the subject would include writings as diverse as those by Cheikh Anta Diop (1989) [1974]; Immanuel Wallerstein.

2 The project is titled Citizenship and Justice, and is generously funded with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York. I am the Principal Investigator of the project, run in collaboration with the Departments of Political Studies and Philosophy, at the University of the Western Cape.

3 As discussed in Diagne (2011).

4 Cf Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958); Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (1961); Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1978).

5 Cavanagh (2013).

6 See Mkandawire (2005); Kohn and MacBride (2016).

7 The course is Pol 710/806, The State and Political Violence, a combined Honours and Masters course. I inherited the title of the course from its previously existing course code and course title.

8 Michel Foucault describes normalisation as the process through which power exacts maximum effects with minimal force, as elaborated in (1995).

9 In the subfield of International Relations the work of Robert Vitalis, and Siba N. Grovogui has been pioneering in locating the discipline in a political field shaped by colonial and imperial political logics. Cf Vitalis (2015); Grovogui (1996).

10 A theory of cultural diffusion, for example, might be one way this account describes the movement and spread of ideas.

11 The injunction to think about the state genealogically, as a history of the modern state and its colonial subjects, is an idea I am indebted to Mahmood Mamdani for encouraging, and I first encountered it in his graduate course ‘The Modern State and the Colonial Subject’ at Columbia University.

12 Geuss (2009).

13 Hanke, Lewis (1974).

14 Skinner (2008); Geuss (2009); Dunn (1982).

15 The distinction between antiquarian, monumental and critical histories are distinctions made by Nietzsche ([1874] 1980).

16 Tilly et al. (1985).

17 Todorov (1982); Chatterjee (2012).

18 If I was to only consider epistemic violence I would suggest aspects of Mbembe’s (2001), and the entirety of Mudimbe’s (1988).

19 Mignolo and Vasquez (2013).

20 The major and most prolific scholar here has been the Zimbabwean historian now based in South Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni. See among a number of his articles and books, his (2015). A network of scholars has also been formed around the approach, the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN).

21 See, for example, Lalu (2009).

22 I have tracked some of these debates in Pillay (2009) Translating South Africa, race, colonialism and apartheid, in Peter Vale and Heather Jacklin, eds. Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-Apartheid Knowledge, Kwazulu-Natal: UKZN Press.

23 Particularly important for me has been Dipesh Chakrabarty’s historical study of jute workers in colonial Bengal to theorise anew a relationship between capitalism, culture and colonialism in his pioneering (1989); for a theorisation of the relationship between colonial knowledge and colonial rule, Chatterjee’s (1986), and (1993) remains important. Although outside of subaltern studies, and allied study that was also useful was Dirks (1987) . While these historical inflections on the relationship between colonial rule and colonial knowledge in South Asia enables a thinking on episteme and institution, and the ways in which modes of rule and legacies of difference are animated, the relationship between colonial rule and a rule of difference premised on race and ethnicity as distinctions about settler and native, would require a different kind of enquiry to the one that animated subaltern studies in its South Asian pre-occupations.

24 Said (1993).

25 Stuart Hall’s rethinking of Marxism, via Gramsci, in relation to ethnicity and race, has also been instructive. Cf Halls (1993) essay ‘New Ethnicities’.

26 Scott (1995).

27 Lugard (1922); see also Mantena (2010).

28 Mamdani (1996, 2009, 2013).

29 cf Burke (1967); Hood, King and Peele (2014).

30 While the piece we read in the course is work in progress from Mehta’s forthcoming book on Gandhi, his (1999), is also useful.

31 Prakash (1994).