It has become well nigh impossible to mention some strange specimen called “Africa” in North American academe these days without entering all sorts of caveats and precautionary notes. Time it was when the imperative of a coordinated response to the daunting challenges of Euromodernity provided the inflatus for the production of the transcendental, stabilized Africa we encountered in narratives such as pan-Africanism, nationalism, Négritude, and decolonization.

This transcendental Africa, often troped as ‘Mother Africa’ in early Négritude discourse, found its most engaging locus in the pages of the journal, Présence Africaine. The immediate consequence of this scenario, in terms of the politics of identity, was the emergence of a transnational, engagé crop of nationalists, statesmen, public intellectuals, literati, and culturati in the first half of the 20th century who could crisscross continental and international boundaries of discourse and politics, wearing the toga of a transcendental identity as African intelligentsia. Although subsequent developments such as the dynamics of decolonization, Cold War neo-colonialist intricacies, and the interpellations of the nation-state would subsequently subsume their identities within the national, there remains a sense in which the likes of Alioune Diop, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sékou Touré, and Julius Nyerere continue to occupy a certain discursive space in which their transcendental identity as African statesmen and intelligentsia remains unimpeachable.That this notion of a free floating, transcendental Africa crossed the Atlantic and animated discursive energies in early disciplinary Africanist work in North America is not in doubt. It also true that this model has now become so discredited that any recourse to an unproblematised, transcendental Africa – or African identity – is bound to face serious problems of institutional and disciplinary legitimacy. Indeed, African scholars located in North America, acting as Foucault’s bandwagonish panopticon, may be the first to rush to town, discrediting such work as insensitive to the local, the particular, and the specific. While localized engagements of the continent – with all sorts of hedgings, excuses, and caveats – have become the norm in Africanist disciplinary praxes in North America, I have lately become troubled by the fact that we have accepted the situation as a fait accompli, a pre-condition for the institutional validation of our work. We hardly bother to examine how we got here: where the rain began to beat us, as Chinua Achebe would put it.

I want to hazard a few explanations, albeit from the perspective of a critical theorist/literary critic who has been doing Africa from a North American location in a little over a decade. The road to the atomization of Africa as a discursive category in the North American critical/theoretical establishment started, in a sense, with the scramble for and the appropriation of French Theory. The scenario is sufficiently familiar: the North American institutional establishment found itself reduced to a megaphone in a curious division of labour that consecrated France as the producer of original thought. Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Bourdieu became subjects of the great North American scramble for French theory from the 1960s onwards. Enter Jean-Francois Lyotard with his postmodernist credo of incredulity towards totalizations, discursive monolithisms, and master narratives! After two disastrous Wars, the Western world had grown tired of the Frankenstein it constructed: the White Male and his five hundred years of delusional self-narrativization as Reason, Rationality, Civilization, and Progress. This apathy is what Lyotard puts with so much brio into those memorable words – incredulity towards metanarratives – in La condition postmoderne.

Lyotard’s language came at a time when polymaths like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Anthony Appiah were already taking the West to task for the largely undifferentiated, monolithic Others it produced in the sites of historical conquest. Postcolonial theory, postmodernism, and cultural theory were on the march, detotalizing and deconstructing everything in sight – especially Africa and African identity – out of hermeneutic relevance. These new discourses exercised such an outrageous stranglehold on the North American theoretical space that they were even allowed the luxury of their own law enforcement agency: the essentialism police! In the United States and Canada, the fear of essentialism became the beginning of institutional wisdom and the open sesame to disciplinary validation and relevance.

Suddenly, I am no longer allowed to be African for more than five minutes in a single day just because I move in the discursive circuits of the postcolonial and the postmodern. With their excessive fear of any form of stability, these discourses traffic in such keywords as contingency, shifts, flux, and tentativeness. Culture and any kind of identity is provisional, contingent, constantly shifting, and must be continuously negotiated and renegotiated. In the nature of things, I am allowed to be Nigerian in the morning, African at noon, Black Diasporic subject in the afternoon, and African or Black male in the evening. If I tarry too long in any of these locations, the essentialism police would be on hand to remind me of the dangers of totalization and stabilized identities. And if I dare speak of transcendental African commonalities between Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and me, that would be sacrilege. I would have occluded our differences and nation-statist specificities!

The most problematic consequence of this new politics of knowledge production has been so surreptitious in its workings that very few African intellectuals are mindful of it. Part of the long-term project of postcolonial discourse has been to deconstruct narratives – Western and African – that are deemed to fix Africa as a permanent, unchanging victim of the West and its violent modernity. The category of the colonized has enjoyed particular attention from postcolonial theorists. In thesis after thesis, we are told that one fundamental flaw in early anti-colonial writing, say, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us, and Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is that the colonized is theorized (read essentialized) as an unchanging victim of the West. We are told that fixing the colonized as victim papers over rich histories of colonial ambivalence and initiatives of resistance on the part of the colonized. We are told that power was variegated and multifaceted in the political topography of colonialism and the subaltern in King Leopold’s Congo was not a passive object, perpetually acted upon, s/he also acted and our discursive strategies must unearth these little voices of history or else we essentialize. So far so good.

The story gets a lot more interesting when we make a temporal shift into the so-called postcolonial present of multinational capitalism, transnationalism, and globalization. We have been told by thinkers like Arjun Appadurai and Masao Miyoshi that the condition of this present age is characterized by global fluxes of unprecedented dimensions, the breakdown of national borders and the attendant undermining of the primacy of the nation-state, the rise of Multinational Corporations, the collapse of the traditional boundaries between metropole and periphery, leading to the emergence of a “new continent” of third world immigrants in the West. To these we must add the gains of the information age and the global propinquities they occasion: Youtube can bring a traditional Yoruba naming ceremony live into my North American cultural studies classroom. These fluxes and the constantly shifting positions that inhere in them, we are told, make it impossible to delineate a West that permanently oppresses and an Africa that is permanently oppressed. Reified victim positions just can no longer hold as everything is contingent, fluid, and constantly shifting. The West as a category of discourse is no longer monolithic. We must make way for a third space of ambivalence, hybridity, and flux.

After all, post-Empire Europe is different from the new global incubus, the United States of America. What’s more, “Europe” has expanded significantly to include states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Can Lithuania, Romania, and Latvia be conceptualized as part of a monolithic, unchanging West that is the permanent nemesis of Africa? The continuous recourse to the idea of a transcendental, oppressor-West in Africanist and other third world discourses is, therefore, essentialist and counter-productive. The West needs to be unpacked and localized every time it is invoked. Sound reasoning on the surface. However, dangers lurk when Africanist scholarship embraces these sort of postcolonialist and postmodernist rationalization of our contemporary condition without seeking to understand who has a strategic interest in dissolving the difference between oppressor and oppressed, between victim and victimizer. Whose interest do these discursive maneuvers serve ideologically and politically? When we are told that continuous recourse to colonialism as a modality of engaging the African condition amounts to a back door centering of Europe in the contemporary history of Europe; when we are told to get over it and stop essentialising, who benefits from the erasure of our memory? In the North American context, why do postcolonial and postmodernist theories become tongue-tied when they encounter the Jewish community? Who is the postmodernist thinker that would assert, in the US, that Jewish recourse to and instrumentalization of the historical event of the Holocaust as an explanation of the Jewish present amounts to essentialism and entrapment in the past? Why is the case always different with Africa?

A trip to the Serengeti plains in East Africa will help me better illustrate the dynamics at work here. For when we are told not to essentialize the West and the category of victim, when we are told not essentialize Africa or what it means to be African, there are dynamics at work depending on who is doing the telling! If you are a North American reader of this piece and you have never been on an East African safari, you will please oblige me by switching on your television and changing the channel to Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel. Jeff Corwin or the late Steve Irwin will be on hand to take you on a tour of the Serengeti with me. Perhaps you already know the story. Life in the Serengeti is not a tea party. It is an unending allegory of survival which, tragically, mimics the order of human existence in the last five hundred odd years! Access to and ownership of the means of survival is the name of the game in the Serengeti. Lions, cheetahs, leopards, and opportunistic hyenas are in constant competition for game and space. Sometimes game is plentiful and at other times there is famine! The natural pecking order is of course always respected. Antelopes, impalas, and zebras know their place in the food chain.

Because of the nature of power, the narrative of the Serengeti always comes to us from the perspective of the big cats. They own the story and can shape it according to their will. Lately, the cats of the Serengeti have been unhappy. Led by the lions, they have been grumbling very loudly that the impalas have managed to come up with their own stories. What is more, these stories are patently unfair to the big cats. The impalas would have the whole world believe that they are permanent, never-changing victims in the picture of the Serengeti! Absent from their narrative is the fact that the category of predator is not all encompassing and transcendental. So essentialist is the narrative of the impalas that they are blind to the necessity of establishing ontological differences between lions, cheetahs, and leopards. Only bad faith and cynicism would make the impalas blind to the difference between being eaten by lions and being eaten cheetahs. The two processes are different and cannot be leveled or essentialised into one master narrative of predation. The lions are particularly angry. Apart from trying to accord a dubious transcendental fixity to the identity-category of predator in binary opposition to a dubiously fixed category of prey or victim, the narrative of the impalas glosses over the fact that the lions sometimes democratize oppression in the Serengeti by condescending to eat warthogs and even rabbits in lieu of impalas. The cheetahs of the Serengeti are even more furious. Absent from the narrative of the impalas – which seem to level all cats as predators – is the fact that some cats are more equal than others. After all, they lose a high proportion of their kills to thieving lions and hyenas!

But the impalas are adamant. Counter narrative is the only weapon they have. They find it doubly insulting to be told that there is a difference between being eaten by a lion and being eaten by a cheetah or a leopard. They find it exasperating to be told that not recognizing the difference is being essentialist. The difference may be in the finer details – such as the length of the canines – but as far as the impalas are concerned, it changes nothing about the transcendental, unchanging catritude that is the source of their oppression in the Serengeti. And if impalas, antelopes, and Zebras decide to valorize a collective, transcendental identity as victims of a transcendental, monolithic, and overarching catritude in the Serrengeti, what makes such a narrative essentialist and unworkable? Who stands to gain if it is delegitimized?

Certainly, postcolonialist and postmodernist anti-essentialists in the North American academy, who would have us devote attention to the finer details of the differences between being colonized by Europe and being neo-colonized by the United States in the context of the new unipolar World Order; or who would have us hedge and endlessly qualify attributes like “African”, “African woman” and other indices of identity that our detotalizing hosts do not approve of, have a lot to learn from the impalas of the Serengeti.

Pius Adesanmi, is a scholar of Francophone African and Caribbean literatures and cultures.