Abstract:
Achille Mbembe’s article “African Modes of Self-Writing” (2001), which is a
precursor to his book On the Postcolony (2001), challenges essentialist conceptions of
African identity and their theoretical and political poverty, and in turn offers a fluid
conception of African subjectivities. Reviewing anti-colonial and postcolonial
theories of African identity, Mbembe contends that dominant notions of African
identity are tropes of Nativism and Afro-radicalism premised on historicist thinking,
which lead to a dead-end. He utilises Michel Foucault’s notion of self-styling and
argues that, contrary to Nativist and Afro-radicalist notions of African identity—
which deny African subjects spaces or sites of autonomous actions that constantly
constitute their identities—African subjects in Mbembe’s view are existential works
of art forged through the practices of the self. Critique on Mbembe’s “African Modes
of Self-Writing” and On the Postcolony has been dominated by the polarities of
essentialist and anti-essentialist views of African identity and their socio-political and
material consequence. Except for Jewsiewicki (2002), none has interrogated
Mbembe’s appropriation of Foucault’s notion of the practice of liberty or self-styling
and its theoretical and political consequence on Mbembe’s conception of the sociopolitical
and cultural freedom of the African subjects. It is the aim of this essay to
interrogate Mbembe’s narrow appropriation of Foucault’s conception of self-styling
and its consequent problematic theorisation of African identity as enacted by practices of the self. By way of introduction, I will contextualise Mbembe’s critique of African
modes of imagining African identity, before I analyse his bounded appropriation of
Foucault’s notion of self-styling, and conclude by exposing his consequent
problematic conception of African practices of freedom.
