What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities | Charles Ngwena

Charles Ngwena

Description

What is Africanness: Contesting nativism in culture, race and sexualities, by Charles Ngwena, Professor of Law at the Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, is a peer-reviewed monograph aiming to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation in and beyond South Africa about who is African and what is African. It aims to implicate a reductive sameness in the naming of Africans (‘nativism’) by showing its teleology and effects; and offers an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. The book develops an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africanness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. It interrogates the making of Africa in colonial discourses and the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within. The arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity by addressing an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. The book develops an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings.CommentsCharles Ngwena’s timely and original book is a wonderful read, rich in theory and insight, and an essential companion for those interested in exploring the ‘multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities’ that constitute the diversity of ‘Africanness’ and African identities. – Professor Cathi Albertyn, School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Editor, South African Journal on Human RightsThis is a brilliant exploration of liberating and affirming ways to speak of African identities and sexualities, reminding us there can be creative beauty where pain and dispossession have resided. – Rudo Chigudu, Centre for Human Rights, University of PretoriaThis is a masterpiece! Not only does the author capture the discourse and debates on “Africanness”, he aptly examines them before offering his views on “decentring the race of Africanness” with the important recognition of “Africa as land of diverse identifications”. – Prof Serges Djoyou Kamga, Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA

Sujets

• Economie
• développement
• Politics
• Relations internationales
• Développement
• Géopolitique
• Sexuality
• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité

Informations

• Publié par: PULP (Pretoria University Law Press)
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781920538828
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

2018

What is Africanness? Contesting nativism in race, culture and sexualities

Published by: Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) The Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) is a publisher at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, South Africa. PULP endeavours to publish and make available innovative, high-quality scholarly texts on law in Africa. PULP also publishes a series of collections of legal documents related to public law in Africa, as well as text books from African countries other than South Africa. This book was peer reviewed prior to publication.

For more information on PULP, see www.pulp.up.ac.za

Printed and bound by: Pinetown Printers, South Africa

To order, contact: PULP Faculty of Law University of Pretoria South Africa 0002 Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] [e-mail] www.pulp.up.ac.za

Cover: Yolanda Booyzen, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria

ISBN: 978-1-920538-82-8

© 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE DEDICATION

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PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS INTRODUCING THE ‘MANYNESS’ OF 1 AFRIC1 ANNESS 1 Introduction 1 2 Nativism 4 2.1Theocratic vision 4 2.2 Logic of identity 5 3 Reformulating African identity: Overcoming status subordination and achieving inclusive equality 9 4 Scope and structure of the book: A broad triangulation of race, culture and sexualities 12 4.1 Part 1: Background to the hermeneutics of heterogeneous Africanness 13 4.2 Part 2: Africanness, race and culture 13 4.3 Part 3: Heterogeneous sexualities 14 HERMENEUTICS OF AFRICANNESS: 2 BUILDING ON STUART HALL’S CULTURAL THEORY OF IDENTIFICATIONS18 1 Introduction 18 2 Connecting inclusive equality with a deconstructive hermeneutics of Africanness 19 3 Who/what is African?: A central discursive question 23 4 Hall’s cultural theory of identity as enunciation 25 4.1 Identity as becoming and being 26 4.2 Implications of a Hallian approach for conceptualising Africanness 31 4.2.1 Transposing Hall’s theory to Africanness as broad cultural and racial identifications 31 4.2.2 Transposing Hall’s theory onto African sexuality identifications 36 5 Positionality 38

PART 2: AFRICANNESS, RACE AND CULTURE WHAT’S IN A NAME? THE NAMING OF 3 AFRICA AND AFRICANS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RADICAL CULTURAL ALTERITY41 1 Introduction: Representation, truth, knowledge and power 41

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Naming of Africa 46 2.1 Provenance of the naming 47 Naming of Africans: Epochal re-description 50 3.1 Africa at the edge of time: The founding of alterity in anachronistic space 51 3.2 Africa as land of cultural otherness: A leaf from Mudimbe’sThe invention of Africa 61 3.2.1 Christianity and the production of African spiritual alterity 63 3.2.2 Anthropology and the production of African cultural alterity 66 Mudimbe’s contribution to dialogic Africanness 69

AFRICA AS LAND OF RACIAL OTHERNESS76 1 Introduction 76 2 The contribution of philosophy and science to the construction of African racial alterity 78 2.1 Philosophy 78 2.2 Science 80 3 Re-membering Saartjie Baartman: Black embodiment, ascribed identity and fetishisation 84 3.1 Logic of identity 89 3.2 Fetishisation 91 4 Apartheid and the banality of race 94 4.1 Creating ‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Whites’ 99 4.1.1 ‘Africans’ and ‘Whites’ as extreme polarities 99 4.1.2 ‘Coloureds’ 100 4.1.3 ‘Indians’ 103 4.2 Racial positioning among inferiorised ‘races’ 104 4.3 Apartheid as not so much about apartness but baasskapism 108 5 Ode to an open Africanness 112

DECENTRING THE RACE OF AFRICANNESS116 1 Introduction: putting race under erasure 116 2 Recalling Hall’s deconstructive identification template 119 3 Decentring the race of Africanness 121 3.1 Appiah’sIn my father’s house 121 3.2 Blyden’s black personality 126 4 Retaining the political salience of race 137 4.1 Afropolitanism 140 5 Africa as space for diverse identifications and recognition of ever-evolving ethnicities 145

PART 3: HETEROGENEOUS SEXUALITIES REPRESENTING AFRICAN SEXUALITIES: 6 CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHOUT 1 Introduction 2 Said’s discourse of orientalism 2.1Orientalismand Said’s aporias

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151 151 152 156

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2.1.1 Hybridity: Breaking with coloniser/ colonised binary 160 Nativising African peoples 163 Mamdani’s discourse of nativism 166 Nativism and the construction of colonial whiteness 173 5.1 Compulsory whiteness and regulation of sexualities 178 Nativising black men’s sexuality 184 6.1 Southern Rhodesia and the phantom of the ‘black peril’ 185 Black women’s sexual degeneracy and colonial continuities in Caldwell et al: A performative study of African women 192

‘TRANSGRESSIVE’ SEXUALITIES: CONTESTING NATIVISM FROM WITHIN AND OVERCOMING STATUS SUBORDINATION197 1 Introduction 197 1.1 Proclaiming heterosexuality and castigating homosexuality 199 1.2 Democratising sexuality 203 2 Discursive clarifications 205 2.1 Transgressive sexualities: the terminological rationale 205 2.2 Overcoming status subordination 206 2.3 Avoiding LGBTI essentialism 209 2.4 Avoiding unproductive LGBTI anti-essentialism 215 2.5 Remaining conscious of colonising sexuality knowledge 216 3 Deconstructing sexualities 222 3.1 Essentialist social construction 224 3.2 Transformative social construction 226 3.3 Deconstructing the relationship between sexuality and gender: Drawing on Richardson’s analytic template 230 3.3.1 Naturalist approach 231 3.3.2 Prioritising gender over sexuality 231 3.3.3 Gender as an effect of sexuality 231 3.3.4 Sex and gender as separate, non-deterministic, historically and culturally situated systems 232 3.3.5 Sexuality and gender elision 241 4 Way forward 241

MEDIATING CONFLICTING SEXUALITY IDENTIFICATIONS THROUGH POLITICS AND AN ETHICS OF PLURALISM245 1 Introduction 245 2 Rawls’ overlapping consensus 248 3 Rescher’s dissensus management approach 250 4 Young’s critique of the ideal of impartiality and the civic public 256 5 Arendt’s concept of citizenship in a plural political community 261

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Finding an overlapping consensus and asymmetrical reciprocity in African political and constitutional frameworks

EPILOGUE: THEORISING AFRICANNESS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

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265

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the course of planning, writing and publishing this book, I benefitted from support in various forms which I wish to acknowledge with sincere gratitude.

The book was funded by the Ford Foundation. Lourdes Rivera was a programme officer at Ford at the time I secured funding. I am grateful not just to the Ford Foundation for its generosity but also to Lourdes Rivera for her abiding patience in awaiting the completion of the book.

The Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, was generous in providing me with sufficient time and space to complete the book. I wish to thank Frans Viljoen, the Director of the Centre, for enabling the book project.

A number of colleagues and friends read the draft manuscript or encouraged me to pursue the manuscript to its completion. I am grateful to Cathi Albertyn, Ebenezer Durojaye, Daniel Mekonnen, Godfrey Kangaude, Reginald Odour, Rudo Chigudu, Serges Kamga, Sylvia Tamale, and Tshepo Mosikatsana for reading the draft manuscript or parts of it and sharing their insights. I extend the same gratitude to reviewers who anonymously reviewed the manuscript. And thank you to Bernard Dickens, Evance Kalula, Rebecca Cook and Siile Matela for warmly encouraging me to see the book to its completion.

The Masters Class of 2015 in the Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Africa programme at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, played a part in the making of the book. In seminars, I tried out on the Class some of my thinking in conceptualising Africanness. I thank the Class of 2015 for their responsiveness.

My wife Patricia, children Khosi, Gideon and Claudia-Rose, and niece, Michelle, were a constant source of support. I am profoundly grateful for their love and inspiration.

Last but not least, my gratitude goes to Pretoria University Law Press (PULP) – the publishers of the book. I wish to thank Lizette Hermann, the manager at PULP, for the technical production of the book and Yolanda Booyzen for designing the cover page.

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PREFACE

What is Africannessis a dialogue on the subject of who is African and what is African. My aim is mainly twofold:first to implicate a reductive sameness, which I call ‘nativism’, in the naming of Africans and show its teleology and effects and second, to offer an alternative understanding of how Africans can be named or can name themselves. Above all,I develop an epistemology for constructing the hermeneutics of Africannness today, long after the primal colonial moment and its debasing racialising ideology. I build my thesis on discursively interrogating the making of Africa in colonial discourses and, more particularly, the making of an African race and African culture(s) and sexuality(ies) in ways that are not just historically conscious but also have a heuristic capacity to contest nativism from the outside as well as from within.

In developing an alternative epistemology of how Africans can be named or can name themselves I engage in discursivere-presentation in order to map new terrains and articulate new possibilities in the naming. Ultimately, I explore more liberating and affirmative ways for Africans to name themselves. As a counter-discourse,What is Africannessa develops hermeneutics of Africanness as its theoretical contribution to discursive representation and to debates on how normatively to address the question: Who/what is African?

I draw from the work of anti-foundational theorists in framing my central arguments, to argue that when thinking about Africanness, Cartesian and dichotomous foundational categories are not particularly useful. We are better served by a hermeneutic template for the cognition of heterogeneous Africanness; an Africanness situated in a multiplicity of histories, cultures and subjectivities, which speaks less to African identity in the way it has been espoused in colonial discourses and by ideologues of identity, and more to African ‘identifications’ in the sense intended by Stuart Hall, the sociologist and cultural theorist.

My arguments in this book go beyond problematising African identity. More significantly, I address an existential gap in theory for explicating African social identity. I do so not through offering a dogma of Africanness or commending a grid of characteristics or typologies that should be met before one is eligible to claim Africanness, but through developing an interpretive method – a hermeneutics – for locating and deciphering African identifications in ways that are historically conscious and conjunctural.

The hermeneutics I develop are intended as a conceptual tool for deconstructing as well as constructing African identities in ways that dismantle hierarchical systems of thought and unmask aporias and contradictions, without erasing complexities, fluidities and difference. The hermeneutics look to the present and the future in addition to the past, so

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that African identifications are not nailed to a mast but remain invested with mobility and the capacity to mutate radically and make new and unexpected beginnings.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to re-membering Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815)

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PART 1: BACKGROUND TO THE HERMENEUTICS OF HETEROGENOUS AFRICANNESS