I stand before you this evening utterly confused.^[1] But it is an auspicious confusion. You will have to forgive the following personal and autobiographical references. What is my home? Is home unambiguously Ghana, the land of my birth where I now live half of the year? Or is it right here, this gathering, this place, York University? I have known four post-primary educational institutions in my life. The first is Mfantsipim, my secondary school located at Cape Coast, the town where one of the infernal slave dungeons sits, one of the dungeons from which Africans, kidnapped and sold with the complicit agency of our villainous chiefs and merchants, embarked on an involuntary emigration, the originating place and time of coercive globalization; the school where I was comprehensively trained in elitist conservatism, Africa-aversion and Europhilia. I proudly completed my Cambridge Higher School Certificate (the ‘A Levels’) in the triad of subjects designed to foster extreme reverence for imperial culture, Greek, Latin and English; the school, incidentally, attended by Kofi Annan, imperialism’s future favourite African son who would in the end go mildly rogue, mildly, as befits an Mfantsipim old boy. The second institution is Harvard where I received my undergraduate education. There I was rudely awakened from my extra-terrestrial slumber, discovered my blackness and began my traumatic and irreversible turn to the left. The third is the University of Toronto where, after those traumatizing years of recognition, I came to pursue graduate studies with boring single-mindedness, although fortunate to have been taught by the great C.B. Macpherson, the liberal tradition’s faithful heretic. And finally, York University where I began teaching in 1971. Of these four institutions, York is incontestably the one for which I have the deepest and most enduring attachment, the place where I felt most at home, mind, heart and soul. So, is home in the profoundest sense this gathering, this community of shared questions and quests and shareable commitments?

Is home, more specifically, the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought (SPT) and its undergraduate relative in the Department of Social Science, the sibling programmes where my promiscuous intellectual passions found a permissive space, a space not colonized and corralled (to echo Lewis Gordon) into disciplinary protectorates? Where is home? I can’t quite go along with Edward Said’s endorsement of a view dear to Auerbach and cited in Orientalism: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land’ (1978, p. 259). I will settle for a sense of eccentric belonging that is less perfect, less heroic, and less deracinated, although by no means immovably tethered to roots: a way of belonging that comes with complications, ‘fertile complications’, as Aimé Césaire would put it (1983, p. 99). So thank you first and foremost, Programme Director Gamal Abdel-Shehid, for coming up with the idea of this conference. And thanks to co-conspirator Judith Hawley. Thanks to all the generous sponsors for honouring me and helping to enable my return to this community, this community which shares some responsibility for those ‘fertile complications’ of my intellectual life and ethical quests. Thank you, my York colleagues and friends, eminent scholars, presenters and participants. Special thanks to my former students who are here in person and in spirit. I vividly remember the question one former student Catherine Kellogg posed one day in the ‘Marxism and Political Discourse’ seminar, regarding my description of Hegel as the Gramsci of the bourgeoisie and of Gramsci as thinker of the ‘partisan universal’: ‘Partisan universal Is that not an oxymoron?’, Catherine asked. My answer was and is: yes, it is but not what common usage says an oxymoron is. I would like to think of this gathering as a continuation of that conversation.

 1.

My topic, ‘CON-TEXTS OF CRITIQUE, is a riff on the name of an SPT institution, STRATEGIES OF CRITIQUE, the annual colloquium organized by students in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University. Why have I placed a hyphen between ‘con’ and ‘texts’? A relative of the dash which, according to Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, ‘scatters and connects’ (2018, p. 55), this inter-syllabic hyphen is intended to stress the work of conjoining terms of critical discourse that would otherwise stay separated, signalling only their plurality and independence, ignorant of their shared grounds, presuppositions, and entailments. I want thereby to capture the idea of critique that at once honours the particulars of place and situation and the articulating principles that inform recognition of these very particulars, thereby inviting the plural terms of critical inquiry to state their case and yet avoid regress into radical pluralism. In the jargon of us old Marcuseans, let’s call it a non-repressive sublimation of the particular: a marriage that is neither arranged nor wholly fortuitous between what Susan Brophy calls ‘the necessity of a situated critique’ and what Neil Lazarus and collaborators call ‘the necessity of universalism’ (2016).^[2] Put differently, this is a kind of metacritical concession, but not an abject surrender, to David Miller’s Justice for Earthlings (2013). It is an anti-antiuniversalist understanding of contexts because it refrains from elevating that necessary attention to place into what Sonia Kruks (1995) calls the ‘epistemology of provenance’, or the you-know-where-I-am-coming-from understanding of the boundaries and justification of discursive commitments, even of truth itself.

What would such a strategy of critique do with SPT’s streams, specializations, and topics? Gamal Abdel Shahid and Judith Hawley have been kind enough to remind me of the old streams and inform me of the new ones. The old streams formalized, I believe, under the directorship of David McNally, were History of Social and Political Thought; Economy and Society; Consciousness and Society. The new ones are History of Social and Political Thought; Black Studies and Theories of Race and Racism; Economy, Consciousness, Aesthetics and Society. Walking from Steeles Avenue to Bethune College at York University on a bitterly cold February morning, in the days before the last recalcitrant oases of vacant and airy spaces became insufferably offensive to capital, I used to regularly curse living in this fair and icy land. And as I cursed the wicked elements, I had a dream. I had a dream that someday I would return to Ghana, teach at one of its universities and there be asked to design an SPT kind of programme. If in my delusional dotage I got the chance to undertake such a design, what would I do with SPT’s reconfigured offerings as template? While two of the new SPT streams, like all three of the old ones, are ethno-culturally and racially unindexed, the second of the new ones has a race-indexical topic, ‘Black Studies and Theories of Race and Racism’. Thus reconfigured, the relevant topics and texts in the second stream belong to the Black Studies shelf. DuBois and Fanon belong to the category of Black thinkers. If the arrangement of subjects in the York bookstore is the same as it was in my last years, you will find DuBois’s and Fanon’s texts and books on DuBois and Fanon not in the philosophy or politics or sociology section but in the Black Studies section. They are, first and foremost, Black texts, whatever their specific disciplinary family or genre may be. This is a genre classification that ironically erases genre, a specification that obliterates specificity.

In my imagined unpaid job as founding director of SPT at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, what would I do with this genre topography at the bookstore? More specifically, what would I do in that context with the second of the reconfigured York SPT streams and with the ‘geographical arrangement’ of the relevant texts in the bookstore? ‘Geographical arrangement’: that, you will no doubt recognize, is Fanon’s simile for the spatial ordering of the colonial world. I am insinuating that metaphor of coercive racialized divisions and enclosures into the seemingly innocuous placement of texts in a bookstore and the discursive compartmentalization which that placement signals. I said I discovered my blackness at Harvard and the USA. That’s because at Mfantsipim School I was not a Black student but a simply a student, a-racial. Back in Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, in a kind of return of the a-racial and re-acquaintance with the ordinary, I would not be Black professor but professor. Of course, there is no such a thing as ‘professor’ unmodified. There are, there will always be, other prefixes, be they of defining or ancillary significance. But it would not be Black professor. That’s because there I am not primarily a racialized subject, not Black. Well, neither as a significant socio-taxonomic category, nor as a matter of lived experience. In that particular place, in that specific context, neither ‘Existence-in-Black’ nor ‘The Blackness of Being’ – the subtitle of David Marriott’s book on Fanon – would be the defining frame or object of critical inquiry. Consequently, in that place Black Studies and by derivation an SPT specialty devoted to thinkers classified as Black thinkers would be out of place, as they are not in North America or perhaps in South Africa? DuBois’s and Fanon’s texts and commentaries on them would not be placed in a Black Studies section of the bookstore.

That situational salience of race in North America and South Africa, the very idea of blackness in life, social existence and even the academy in North America and South Africa, that contingent centrality of race, is telling. It tells us that ‘it ain’t necessarily so’ everywhere and all the time. In ‘West Indians and Africans’, Fanon contrasted the ‘contingent’ with the ‘important’, reducing the centrality of race in life and thought to the status of the contingent (Fanon 1967, p.18). Today, properly tutored by postmodernism, we will probably fault Fanon for a lingering adherence to essentialism and an essentialist definition of what is foundational. Guilty of the sin of essentialism as opposed to what? As opposed to, say, a critical historicism that would not see in race something extrinsic to the real thing, the foundational axis of social being. What kind of obdurate metaphysical thinking is it, we will ask, that insists on seeing race and its mandates, after eons of its material salience in real life the world over, as the accidental mistaken for the essential, the contingent usurping the place of the important? Really, Fanon should know better. We know better, don’t we? Neither immaterial accident nor timeless essence, ‘race’ belongs to the family of things marked by their specific essence (the phrase is that of the early Marx) and bringing a specific gravity to the drama of the human condition in history. Still, what do we do with contingent but sticky things? What place do we ultimately assign them in our discursive and critical-theoretic labours? How do the consequences of race and empire, the empire of race, shape the ways we rethink and reconfigure these labours? How should they shape them with respect to their forms and contents? If I got the chance to establish my dream SPT Programme at the University of Cape Coast, what decisions are my colleagues and I likely to make concerning form and substance, course titles, topics and subject matter, given the history of our present and our specific context?

We would, of course, start with the reality and the knowledge that the given forms and contents of the existing subjects have been and remain stubborn products of empire, steadfastly Eurocentric, grievously skewed in the things they include and the things they exclude or forget, wilfully or by unthinking habit, to remember. A hallowed SPT stream is indeed The History of Social and Political Thought, a topic that is emblematic of the specious synecdoche, political philosophy of the West impersonating the universal, white studies masquerading as monuments of human thinking about political things. How to expropriate the expropriators, unmask the impersonators, show the true and variegated face of humanity? Perhaps the task that confronted Ngugi wa Thiong’o and intellectual comrades at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s and the answer they gave can be a template. Faced with a school of literary studies that with guileless hubris called itself Department of English, Ngugi and his colleagues got it changed to the Department of Literatures. But it is instructive what they did not do. They did not call it the Department of African Literature, let alone the Department of Black Literature. They must have thought it absurd that a programme of literary studies located in an African university should call itself African. They took it for granted that such a programme will include, even give pride of place to, the examination of African literary texts, African imaginative explorations of the human condition in history. They saw no need to replace one exclusionary particular, one counterfeit universal, with another.

My imagined community of architects of a Ghanaian SPT Programme are likely to follow that example not in the interest of some saccharine cosmopolitanism, but rather in pursuit of necessary questions of social and political existence that are as intracultural as they are transcultural. Paradoxically, that native context of critical-theoretic labour compels anything but a reductive nativism, still less race-reductionism, in the topics and contents of critical inquiry. In that context, then, we would liberate the History of Social and Political Thought from its Eurocentric provincialism, prescribe, say Asian and African and Indigenous Peoples texts as integral and constitutive parts of that history. There will, of course, be the need for cultural-geographic specification and historical periodization of texts and topics. But in that context, it is unlikely that these spatial and temporal classifications will answer to racial or racialized identities; they will signify specification without segregation, embodying particulars as idioms of universals.

2.

I am sketching an imagined SPT community located in a context where, while we cannot say with Cecil Foster (2005) that ‘race does not matter’ we can say with some validity that the writ of race upon social substance and social subjectivity is not foundational, not determinative in the last instance, to invoke a famous Althusserian locution. Starkly put, there would be students whose skin is black but who are not Black students; likewise, professors whose skin is black but who are not Black professors. In a 1994 paper Charles Mills asked this question: ‘Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?’ A related question might be: ‘Do Black Professors Have Special Duties towards Black Students?’ My answer is yes, they do wherever there are Black students. But here in my imagined SPT community at the University of Cape Coast, there would no such special duties just as there would be no Black texts and topics. The non-existence of these classifications and obligations has to do with a signal reality: the relative freedom of this context, this space, from what I call the ordinance of race, the relative freedom, as result, from the tyrannizing determinations of what Frank Wilderson describes as the non-universalizable, radically different, unvarying, ahistorical ‘despotism of black positionality’, or what Jared Sexton (2017) calls the singular ‘sociopolitical status’ of blackness.^[3] That conception of a shared, irreducibly distinct, unvarying condition central to the vocabulary of US Afropessimism here cannot stand unmodified. Indeed, even in South Africa where the ordinance of race matters more than in Ghana, even in South Africa, perhaps especially in South Africa, that conception needs nuance. In the hands of Zumaites, race-first-class-later-if-ever-Garveyites, in the hands of self-serving votaries of black capitalism, that conception as the organizing vocabulary of social critique and insurgent demand is ideological in the strict sense – call it vulgar Marxism if you want – ideological in the strict sense of masking class interests in the garb of shared disadvantages, disabilities, discontents and dreams, in the name of a common ontological condition of ‘the blackness of being’. If Adorno thought (wrongly to my mind) that ‘the question of man (sic) is ideological because its pure form dictates the invariant of the possible answer’ (1973, p. 51). we can say with greater cogency that the rhetoric of the ‘despotism of black positionality’ is ideological. Why? Because it places in the same boat the martyrs of Marikana, Cyril Ramaphosa, the state-sponsored murderers of the mine workers, fake nationalist I-want-my-black-piece-of-the-pie hustlers pissed off not with monopoly capitalism, still less with capitalism as such, but with ‘white monopoly capitalism;’ that rhetoric places all of them in the same invariant race-reductionist, class-unindexed ‘black positionality’.

In Ghana, at the University of Cape Coast, unless I applied some serious bleaching agents, the fact of my black skin will remain unchanged. But the specific gravity of the lived experience of blackness will be registered otherwise. True, from the lovely landscape of that university, the metaphysics, politics, economics and culture of white supremacy as a world system will not disappear. Neither will the struggle against the persistence of its forms and the necessity of weapons of criticism aimed at these forms end. However, that struggle and those instruments of criticism will be part of, even subordinated to, other struggles in an enlarged compass of concerns. And this is where the left universalist understanding of con-texts and the kind of critique it favours is at odds with American (dare I say, the very American) school of Afropessimism, the kind of Black Studies that school encourages, the compass of social and political and contestation and vision it promotes. Afropessimism is ‘situated critique’ gone irredeemably narcissistic. That narcissism has metacritical and substantive consequences for value commitments.

First, consequences at the level of metacritique. Afropessimism takes up Césaire’s assertion of the ‘singularity of ‘our situation in the world’’(2010, p. 147), virtually de-historicizes that assertion and the existential condition it invokes, asks us to ‘radically differentiate between Blacks and all others’, between the Black experience of subjugation, violence and suffering from all other experiences of subjugation, violence and suffering (Wilderson 2016, p. 5).In the name of that radical incommensurability and Black exceptionalism, Afropessimism is suspicious of claims of solidarity with the condition and struggles of First Nations Peoples and the Palestinians, with the working class qua working class, with women qua women. The compact of compassion is here severely shrunk. More profoundly, Afropessimism turns the perverse ontology of the antiblack world into a Black ontology. In effect Afropessimism consents to signing the death certificate prepared by administrators of the peculiar institution. Afropessimism gives the last word to the ontology of the antiblack world. ‘Orphaned by this world that had set on [the Black]’, in the language of Yambo Ouloguem’s Bound to Violence, ‘a stamp incompatible with the usual conception of [the human being]’ (1971, p. 163), Afropessimism in effect says yes. By contrast C.L.R James, portraying the slaves on the eve of their insurrection, said of them that ‘they remained… quite invincibly human beings’ (1963, p.11) as though that affirmation was the condition of possibility of their insurrection. Not so Afropessimism. It is thanks to a strange sadomasochistic complicity with the ontology of anti-black racism that Wilderson refuses, as Hayden White might put it, to ‘narrativize’ the Black condition as a story announcing – not vouchsafed – the possibility of redemptory action. It is why Wilderson goes so far as to call ‘redemption’, to the extent that it is the generic topos of narrative – more precisely, the narrative of the human or humanist narrative – not simply an a-Black topos but ‘anti-Black’ (2020, p. 226). It is anti-Black insofar as the topos of redemption seeks to foist narrative structure and meaning upon a drama of being which is radically refractory to narrative as such.

Thanks to this absolute refusal of narrative and its penchant for denying things their inexchangeable properties, Wilderson mounts a related attack on analogy, more precisely ‘the ruse of analogy’ in the name of the specific gravity and absolute uniqueness of the Black ‘grammar of suffering’ (2020, pp. 11-12).^[4] It is an interdiction that is far more unyielding than Marx’s seemingly analogous critique of ‘allegory’ in Hegel: that ‘manner of speaking’ which, according to Marx, does not respect ‘the specific essence’ of a particular object, subsuming, say, the particular properties of socio-political realities, bristling as they are with endemic tensions that resist sublimation, under the rubrics of his logic and metaphysics (1970, p.40). Afropessimism’s refusal of analogy is far more radical than anything Marx’s critique of allegory intended. And that refusal is ultimately utterly disabling and self-defeating. For starters, how is the irreducible uniqueness of Black being or the Blackness of being knowable, identifiable? Is it not the work of analogy itself that discloses the distinct properties of comparable things, even as it reveals the shared properties of distinct phenomena, the class of things to which they ultimately belong? Come to think of it: Isn’t the apprehension of Black being as a transindividual condition dependent on analogy, on seeing myself in other existences as Black beings, an apprehension that is ruled out were we to follow Afropessimism to the reductio ad absurdum of radical epistemological individualism, one that sabotages the very possibility of political action. But perhaps Lewis Gordon (2018) is right, namely, that ‘the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism’. Its aim is not political action but the solitary defiance of the isolate rebel. No wonder David Marriott offers the following understanding of Fanon’s prescription for what is to be done in response to oppression, an understanding taken straight out of the medicine box of Afropessimism in its characteristic minimalism and anti-political solipsism: ‘…I became completely convinced that Fanon wishes the colonized to be absolutely free, but this is a freedom that has nothing to do with political sovereignty; instead, for Fanon, each citizen should stand on their own feet and be able to look at the enemy in the eye without trembling’ (Marriott 2018, p.xv) A dualism, then, of freedom as ‘political sovereignty’ or freedom as the ressentiment-driven, puffed-chest reactive bluster, all too often misdirected and internecine in its consequences. Not exactly a challenging prefigurative idea of post-racist and postcolonial ethical life. For if Afropessimism had political intentions, say, forging a community of those who have something in common, be it but the shared knowledge of their abjection in common, then only the wager of analogy can make intelligible what would otherwise be the private and senseless groans of isolate creatures. Only the wager of analogy can enable escape from what Cahier calls ‘the solitary confinement of despair’, conquer the nihilism of solipsism.

Analogy is the crucible of connectedness, the necessary condition of universalizing ethical reasoning, the spark of seditious solidarity. If it is true, as the early Marx revolting against Hegel’s all-too-reductive mode of ‘allegory’ claimed, namely, that ‘an explanation that does not give the differentia specifica is no explanation’ (1970, p. 12), is it not also the case that it is analogy that produces that very knowledge of differentia specifica? Contrary to Wilderson, analogy is not always mystifying; sometimes it is revelatory. It is thanks to analogical reasoning that the same Marx can say of the alienation of the human being’s creations that ‘it is the same in religion’ (1978, p. 72). It is thanks to analogical judgment that Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa is able to apprehend, in virtue of the reciprocal illumination of oppression’s varied forms and knowable secrets, a kinship between her condition as subjugated woman and wife and that of the enslaved men and women in her husband’s dominion (1970, pp. 37-39). If analogy is anti-black, if analogy is wrong, Anowa might say: ‘I don’t want to be right. .And Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa is not alone.

Fanon, Afropessimism’s favoured precursor, will have to plead guilty to this illicit trope. Consider how in ‘The Algerian Family’, he analogizes the narrow space in which woman’s body and movement, her expression and action, is confined with racialized-colonial space, saying of that repressive gendered spatiality that it is ‘just as Algeria as a whole’ is confined (Fanon 2011b, p.340). It is an analogy repeated today in critical accounts of social existence in the ‘post-apartheid’ and postcolonial world, coercive and unjust spatiality reconfigured as class apartheid. We are outraged by the imprisoning spatial conditions of existence in the shacks, in women’s life and in the so-called post-colonial city because they mirror and repeat ‘the geographical arrangement’ of life in the colonial-racial form. The sting of these conditions is, of course, particularly offensive to citizens of post-apartheid South Africa with living memory of formal apartheid and the struggle against it, citizens who now demand living space as a corollary of that struggle and insist on defining democracy as entailing the right to space. But these specific scenes of exclusion, of segregated and confined life, owe their power to outrage to the fact that they are so many forms of captive and constrictive modalities of the ‘human condition of being-in-space’. (Weinstein 1972, pp. 65-66). They speak, that is to say, to an essential human requirement that is denied, distorted, debased; they are instantiations of what Saidiya Hartman in a distinctly Fanonian vocabulary calls ‘human nature caged in a narrow space’ (2018, p. 469 emphasis added),^[5] whether the context is that of Black women’s lives in early twentieth century Harlem as is the case in Hartman’s account, or ‘postapartheid’ South Africa, or post-independence Ghana.

The fact that this critical humanist vocabulary holds across contexts, the fact that it may be enlisted – no doubt with differing idiomatic inflections – in protesting social orders where race is the central organizing principle and those where the rule of race, for all its global ubiquity, is, so to speak, an indirect rule, that fact tells us something. I am speaking, with respect to the latter context, of a polity where the president, to invoke that office as metonym, has a black skin but who is not a Black president, a polity where there is an oligarchy holding in their hands stupendous power and privilege but who are not wielders of racial power and privilege. I am speaking then of a context where the principal contradiction is not ‘black rights/white wrongs’ (Mills 2017) but what Ama Ata Aidoo’s play Anowa calls ‘the common pain and the general wrong’ in a language uncannily reminiscent of Marx’s 1843-84 name for what the proletariat represents – ‘not a particular wrong but wrong in general’ (1978, p.64). What does this trans-contextual continuity of the tropes of criticism tell us? It suggests to us what inferences we need not draw from ‘the necessity of situated critique’ with respect to its procedures and objects. That necessity need not foster the reification and absolutizing of the particular, the dogma of incommensurability. Can it be that Afropessimism and the version of Black Studies it promotes draws the wrong inferences from this necessity?

What the practice of situated critique might accomplish is to remind us of how things can be and can be done otherwise, act as prodding interlocutors of suspended universals, perhaps do something different from what a certain version of ‘decolonial’ critique does: an exploration and vindication not of alternative epistemologies and counter-ontologies but of universals, disinterring these universals as instruments of critique. Practising that imperative might make you wonder: What happens to critique that is not overdetermined by the mandates of antiracism, anti-anti-black-racism, adversary epistemology and ethics, epistemology and ethics in the service of race work, epistemology and ethics as race work: corrective, reparative, vindicationist work, answering back work?

And what might be the texts and topics for an academic class operating in such a context of critique? Even more intriguingly: can the very same texts read in the delimited space of SPT-Black Studies at York University be read otherwise in my imagined course called Studies in Contemporary Social Thought at the University of Cape Coast? How will Fanon be read in that other context?^[6] In a discussion of the psychoexistential question of power in my imagined seminar at UCC, how would Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart fame fare? What would be the verdict on him? A valiant anti-imperialist and noble warrior against white supremacy? Or an insufferable male supremacist, the authoritarian personality incarnate, abominable prefiguration of our post-independence despots? What, in particular, would be the verdict not of the guys, self-accredited custodians of our marvellous cultural treasures, but the verdict of bad-ass, our-culture-be-damned disloyal women in the class? And what does the possibility of these other rival readings tell us about the contingent legitimacy and limits of (particularistic versions of) ‘situated critique’, the legitimacy of its procedures and substance? Perhaps that these procedures and substantive concerns are answerable to universalizable norms and ethical ends for their justification. Perhaps that a self-critical contextualism discloses the necessity of universalism. In that case, the topics, texts and phenomena that are occluded, forbidden, degraded to the status of the inessential or even totally excluded from situated critique of the race-centred kind as heterogeneous to its universe of discourse, perhaps those things, as Fanon might have put it, would be ‘restored to their proper place’ as integral objects of insurgent thought and practice. Question the radical exceptionalism of Black suffering, question the idea of an undifferentiated ‘singular sociopolitical status’ which is the accursed fate of all Black people without exception, and the repressed topics of social critique return, say, the existential condition of the dispossessed and the destitute of the land, the residents of the shacks, class exploitation and immiseration, the subjugation of women, as emblematic instances of transracial wrongs. Then I am called to class and personal accountability for these wrongs, wrongs without borders, wrongs across contexts, wrongs made disconcertingly more manifest in the African postcolonial context than what is enabled by moral and political horizons available to me in the context of living life as Black life in Canada.

One plane flight from Toronto, and I am confronted with the necessity of a critical practice condemned to do full justice to con-texts: a critical practice that, while keeping alive memories of Black life, must attend to native questions of the human and the sociogenic maladies inherent to it. But that means that, unless a kind of (metacritical) transmigration of the soul is at work, the critique of Black life, for all its specific gravity, always already harboured the question of the human as its premise and prolepsis. I am transported then to a con-textual condition – social and discursive –where an insurgent protest will affirm that lives and rights matter but not as Black lives and not as Black rights violated by white wrongs under the aegis of white supremacy, but as human lives and human rights violated by class predators and regular male supremacists. That does not mean, given the history of our present, that to be radical, critique in such a context must completely subtract race, indeed all identitarian references, from its political argument and emancipatory vision as Badiou insists. It simply means acknowledging that (to hijack a Sartrean phrase) the ‘coefficient of adversity’ exercised by race is here somewhat mitigated and that this has important consequences for the nature of social antagonism and discontent, as well as the vocabulary of moral and political argument. Here then, a con-textual critique must exercise a double vigilance. On the one hand, it must watch out for the nefarious uses to which the putative a-racialism of ‘human lives matter’ can be put by rightwing ideologues in, say, the US and Canada: not unlike how they turn Martin Luther King’s injunctive dream and prophetic demand – ‘not by the color of their skin …’ – into a history-amnesiac dogma of radical solipsism. On the other hand, it must watch out for the ‘race first’, Black-nationalist depreciation, even outright denial, of internal class divisions, and suppression of the partisan universalism promoted by the politics of class.

3.

Now a brief consideration of how working from such a context, we might address some characteristic metaethical positions and substantive value commitments and aversions associated with certain forms of situated critique. Working from the social and moral cauldron of postcolonial world, Fanon’s repudiation of a race-foundational value relativism in the Conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks speaks to us with renewed force: ‘My black skin is not the depository of specific values’ (1967, p. 227). Of my blackness as that amalgam of epidermis and historical artefact which is race no determinate mode of evaluation, still less a substantive system of values, may be predicated and derived. What, then, becomes of some substantive value aversions and commitments in a context where the central issue is not white supremacy and white ethics, a context where we are constrained by our material and moral circumstances to consider and take up a constellation of values, precepts and forms of ideopraxis which, when all is said and done, belong to humanity? Shouldn’t a fearless Africacentrism, an Africacentrism freed of ressentiment and reactive phobias, be willing and able to raid all available arsenals of the human commons and shamelessly conscript them for native necessities? I for one confess to being willing to enlist in such a raiding operation, decrepit bones and all, ready to recruit my imagined community of SPT students at UCC to that end. And I am emboldened to do so by agile pathfinders such as the intrepid Olúfémi Táíwò. Let me take up two such arsenals, arsenals all too often disparaged, anathematized, refused as white prejudices, parochial precepts manufactured by the West in the West and for the West, precepts allegedly antithetical to epistemologies and ontologies from the Global South, more specifically and closer to home, precepts declared to be utterly un-African, inimical to ancestral virtues and practices.

To begin with, enlightenment. Not the Enlightenment – emblematic hydra-headed monster and the cause of all our woes – but, yes, enlightenment, a culture of rational thinking and rational agency, a human necessity and capability, and an exigency in the African postcolony. Here is why. If you heard a friend – a man of science, no less – relate with a straight face, that is to say with complicit credulity, a gravely ill acquaintance’s claim that had this friend visited her in the hospital but a few minutes earlier, he would have seen the face of Jesus by her bedside; if you heard the President of the nation – a civic republic, mind you – say that he is all for the erection of a national cathedral because it is the fulfillment of a pledge he made to God (not to mere voting citizens) that he would do so if he won the last election – erect a majestic cathedral in praise of the heavens when our people have no toilets in which to relieve themselves of their worldly burdens; if you heard the same leader exhort the people at the outbreak of Covid-19 to fast for one day to beseech God’s favour; if you listened to an archbishop who found it necessary to explain that ‘God is not responsible’ for the pandemic; if you listened to another official declare that God’s protective love – playing divine favouritism – must be the only explanation for the fact that this Neolithic Africa of ours has escaped the holocaust Covid-19 was expected to wreak upon us; if you heard another (self-anointed) archbishop whose everyday life is mired knee-deep in mammon proclaim that the answer to the fall of Ghana’s currency, the cedi, is prayer; if you heard a young man report a medical doctor’s serious diagnosis of his bleeding nose that the cause was not physical but ‘spiritual’, a demonic curse; if you encountered these specimens of arrant criminal actionable imbecility emanating from the half-educated no less than the intelligentsia – la trahison des clercs of a form Julien Benda knew not of – you will nod in agreement with ‘the cry of Epicurus’ celebrated by the young Marx: ‘Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes of them is truly impious’ (1975, p. 30). And you will assent to Yambo Ouloguem’s stinging calumny uttered in 1968: ‘Prehistory in a tail coat: there stands the African’ (1971, p.167). Ouologuem must have meant to say: ‘There stands your typical member of the African elite’. For to pin the crime of willful retardation on ‘the African’ is as wrongheaded as blaming all Africans, as opposed to our villainous chieftains and merchants, for the capture and sale of our people and the unspeakable horror of THE DOOR OF NO RETURN. Listen again to Ouloguem’s irate mockery of dandy darkness, and you will have to shout: What do we need? Light. Real light. When do we need it? Now. More light. Better light, light radiating from every face of the sun and every corner of the earth, peering into all the hidden abodes of our existence, dissipating in so doing the oppressive fog. More and better light, whether it is borrowed from other lands or generated anew from our own disused energies and faculties of body and mind, it does not matter. We desperately need to excrete from our mind demonological causation together with indolent faith in the blessings of a despotic divinity. We must subject all our beliefs and conventions to the searchlights made available by forms of thought and practice that are, when all is said and done, humanity’s commons.

One more anathema that must fall, an anathema which we are urgently summoned in this context to revisit, and that is individualism, ‘the sticky problem of individualism’ as the audacious Olúfémi Táíwò calls it in his work of liberating impiety, Africa Must Be Modern, sequel to his iconoclastic How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (2014, pp. 33-37). I am speaking of the knee-jerk uncritical criticism of individualism, the regular conflation of that protean ethic with one of its unsavoury modes, possessive individualism, understood as the quintessential white ethic, ‘the white possessive’ (Moreton-Robinson); in its place the exaltation of collectivity. There are variations on the genealogy of this collectivity orthodoxy, inverse of the ‘autonomy orthodoxy’ that, according to Simon Critchley, afflicts the Western account of ‘ethical experience’ (2012, p. 32). The discursive context of a strand of African American social thought and its account of moral conditions and practices in the aftermath of slavery presents one prototype of the genealogy of counter-individualism and vindication of collectivity. In a luminous essay, Saidiya Hartman’s evokes the ‘art of survival, social poesis’ of young black women in early twentieth century Harlem as paradigm of moral life in the aftermath of slavery:

Collaboration, reciprocity, and shared creation defined the practice of mutual aid. It was and remains a collective practice of survival for those bereft of the notion that life and land, human and earth could be owned, traded and made the private property of anyone, those who would never be self-possessed, or envision themselves as acquisitive self-interested proprietors, or measure their life and worth by the ledger or the rent book, or long to be the settler or the master. Mutual aid did not traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from others or revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty, as much as it did singularity and freedom. (2018, p. 461)

Powerful portrait of the ethos of community fashioned from historical pragmatics. Fred Moten elicits from the fate of the damned in the aftermath of slavery a more dramatic version of that counter-individualism. In his hands, the abolition of individuation foundational to the racial order – that lethal collectivist ontology and its permutations under racial capitalism – becomes a choiceworthy form of ethical practice and a cause for celebration. In effect, Moten (2016) radicalizes Glisssant’s ‘consenting not to be a single being’ into the sacrificial suicide of the self in the service of the ‘preservation of the ontological totality’. But is this not tantamount to acquiescing, totally, to the onto-logic of the world the enslavers made? No Black magic, I fear, can transform the product of such a repetition into a thing of unblemished beauty. Or succeed in burnishing its underside: the social pathology Fanon diagnosed as ‘le démerdage, la forme athée du salut’ (2011 a, p.461), survivalist solipsism in the peculiarly virulent strain that afflicts the destitute and the desperate in the afterlife of slavery and the wretched of the postcolonial earth. In Moten’s transfiguration romance, that pathology, it would seem, does not exist. But neither, alas, is there in it any alternative idea of liberty, any vision of the self and practices of individuality beyond property and possessive individualism. In a conversation with Robin Kelley, Moten (2016) says with laconic and bitter accuracy regarding Daren Wilson, the cop who murdered Michael Brown: ‘I don’t think he meant to violate the individual personhood of Michael Brown. He was shooting at mobile black sociality, walking down the street’. Nothing personal, so to speak. Ditto George Zimmerman when he saw the non-individual who happened to be Trayvon Martin. But here is the question: What is to be done with this lethal contempt for the person, this brutal act of radical de-individuation? Transfigure it from a product of white terrorism into a chosen ethical principle, from a community of death into a life force, from racism’s major premise into our first and last word? Or revivify, by dint of concerted action, our individualities, individualities assaulted and buried, alive? To James’s affirmation concerning the slaves, as the condition of possibility of their liberation, namely, that they were ‘quite invincibly human beings’, should we not add ‘irrepressibly individual persons’?

But here is another approving picture of the ethos of counter-individualism drawn, this time, on a larger binary map. In ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’, Boaventura de Sousa Santos contraposes the West and the rest in matters of working ontologies. Of the principles that inform socio-political struggles in the Global South, particularly those of Indigenous peoples, he says, summarily: ‘their ontological conceptions of being and living are quite distinct from Western individualism. Human beings are communities of beings rather than individuals …’ (de Sousa Santos 2012, p. 50) Are the vernacular metaphysics of the human being in the whole of the Global South that simple, uncomplicated, univocal, unmodified by changing historical conditions of existence, the absolute and radical contrary of the Western species? Just asking.

In the African discursive context the dominant argument appeals less to historical pragmatics and veers towards an essentialist version of what Amartya Sen calls ‘cultural ethicism’ (1999, p. 89), namely, the thesis that individualism is fundamentally un-African. That thesis is radically ahistorical. It is also baldly dishonest: an ode to community sung not as a prophetic call but in constative key, that is to say, sung as existing fact in the midst of a ferocious jungle of survivalist solipsism, the obverse side of which is all too often the habit of docile conformism. That thesis obfuscates a ghastly reality: how the wretched of the postcolonial earth under neoliberal occupation desperately fight for scraps as Pankaj Mishra puts it, fiercely compete for possession of what is left of material and psychic space, all too keen to savour trickle-down doses of the will to power. That creed of the African Ideology disingenuously forgets the alchemy thanks to which, in Ayi Kwei Armah’s stinging words, ‘the coping practices of hustling slaves can become the cultural substance of our freedom’ (2018, p. 287).

Unburdened of the need for critique as racial vindication and defence of received cultural goods, the tenor of our voice changes from exultation to exhortation, from celebration of what is or held to already exist to a call to what is to be done, work that is infinitely more onerous. We are able as a consequence to dismantle all manner of value apartheids, among them, the value apartheid of ‘white picket-fence individualism’ versus the enchanted communitarian circle of the African world, societies of Indigenous peoples and the Global South in general. At stake, ultimately, is the challenge of an ethics that solicits individual freedom and responsibility and a countervailing imperative of acting in concert and sharing the commons. Working from the maelstrom of the African postcolony, attending to native necessities, we cannot afford to partition the precepts that actuate our practices and place them in walled enclosures. Still less can we afford to be neutrals, that species of miscreants for whom Dante reserves the most uncomfortable premises in hell. We will be partisans and citizens. We will enlist in the party of humanity, sign on to the compact of compassion of the dispossessed and the destitute in our own land and all the lands of this human world. We will do so in the knowledge that there are consequences to narrowing the compass of that contract, consequences for ourselves and for others. No one evoked these consequences more poignantly than Wilfred Owen, chastising in these memorable words those given to the practice of indifference or, what amounts to the same thing, those who would dismember their particular predicament from the common pain of suffering humanity:

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears. (1962, p. 292)

It is an invitation to re-member severed but shareable things – the tears but also the hopes and the dreams.

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