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Achille Mbembe. Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique Décolonisée

Article  in  International Feminist Journal of Politics · December 2013

DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2013.841563

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Achille Mbembe. Sortir de la

Grande Nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique
Décolonisée
a
Sandeep Bakshi
a
University of Leicester, UK
Published online: 17 Dec 2013.

To cite this article: Sandeep Bakshi (2013) Achille Mbembe. Sortir de la Grande Nuit:
Essai sur l'Afrique Décolonisée, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15:4, 565-567,
DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2013.841563

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 b o o k r e v i e w s

The books reviewed in this section explore feminist politics in a global frame.
We aim not just to include writings in feminist international relations, but also
to feature multi-disciplinary scholarship pertaining to global gender relations.
The section is usually made up of a combination of several distinct elements:
Rethinking the Canon, Feminist Classics/Many Voices, review essays and book
reviews. ‘Rethinking the Canon’ gives space for an individual to reflect on
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one text that they feel ought to be essential reading for feminists working
on global issues, but which is likely to be marginalized by existing disciplinary
boundaries: they are invited to bring the text to our attention and to explain
why it is essential reading. ‘Feminist Classics/Many Voices’, by contrast,
includes several short appraisals of a book already widely considered a
classic for feminists working on global issues. Reviewers draw on their distinct
disciplinary, geographical and personal locations to offer diverse readings of
the classic text. Review essays survey several texts on a single theme,
aiming either to explore a recent debate that has generated a range of new
publications or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established
area of research. The book reviews provide brief introductions to, and
evaluations of, as broad a range of new publications as space allows. Anyone
with suggestions for texts to be reviewed, or requests to contribute to the
section, is encouraged to contact the Reviews Editor, Suzanne Bergeron, at
sbergero@umich.edu, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan
Dearborn, Dearborn, MI 48380, USA.

Reviews
Achille Mbembe. Sortir de la Grande Nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique Décolonisée [We
Must Get Out of the Great Night: Essay on Decolonized Africa]. Paris: Éditions
La Découverte, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7071-6670-8. Kindle edition.

Achille Mbembe’s insightful book carefully continues the endeavour of his

former works, that of the ‘constitution of the African self as a reflexive
subject’ (Mbembe 2001: 6). It offers an incisive critical assessment of decolo-
nization in Africa and interrogates the paradox of postcoloniality that bears

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013

Vol. 15, No. 4, 565– 578
 upon the ex-colonizer and the decolonized nations. Although decolonization
afforded the inevitable promise of a rupture with colonial pasts, the transition
from object to subject for many decolonized communities after fifty years of
independence remains incomplete owing to enduring forms of oppression.
In an attempt to suture postcolonial theory and necropolitics, Mbembe
frames the key themes of colonization, decolonization, migration and transna-
tional identity formation within the over-arching metaphors of violence, death
and (re-)birth. Beginning with a personal account of the ‘long night’ of
political history of African independence movements (ch. 1), the book inter-
connects death, colonization and memory in order to complicate the trajectory
of decolonization.
One of the most robust arguments of the book concerns the refusal of ‘auto-
decolonization’ of contemporary France (chs 3 and 4). Charting an alternative
colonial/postcolonial history of the self-centred French Republic, Mbembe
Downloaded by [University of Leicester] at 12:08 17 December 2013

emphasizes the absence of race as a useful category of analysis in France.

The idealized concept of the Republic and its appendage, universalism, circum-
vents a thorough discussion of racial discrimination and exclusion. Citing the
memory of the Algerian war of independence in particular, he avers that
diverse racial representation is crucial to France in that it would enable a deco-
lonization of colonial structures that adversely affect France’s cultural and
national imaginary. He argues for a strengthening of those critical spaces
that critique the relatively ‘implicit whiteness of Frenchness’ even though post-
colonial studies emerged only recently in French universities and encounters
firm resistance from established academics (ch. 4). In so doing, France can
address the issue of the invisibility of its ethnic minorities and alleviate the
national anxiety centring on its influence in Africa and the globalized world.
Significantly, his reading of specific contemporary race issues in France –
the riots of 2005, the headscarf debates and the discourse on radical Islam,
to name a few – shows how an astute postcolonial appraisal undermines the
pervasive ‘neorevisionalist/provincialist’ discourse (ch. 4).
In the final sections of the book, Mbembe traces the process through which
the decolonized African nations gradually eroded the institutions inherited
from colonial regimes. However, in direct contrast to France’s restraint
apropos of globalization, Africa’s ‘grand transformation’ incorporates a
remarkable reorganization of cultural, social and sexual identities despite
the reigning logic of violence, militarization and war, and privatization of
national economies (ch. 5). The vitality of conurbations such as Abidjan,
Dakar, Douala and Lagos attests to the emerging social transformation in
Africa that unhinges the episode of colonization as the ubiquitous signifier
and the ‘silent sexual revolution’ that contests received understandings of
patriarchy, gender and homosexuality (ch. 6). ‘Afropolitanism’ as Mbembe
calls it, holds to scrutiny the earlier movement of ‘Négritude’ through a rede-
finition of reality, origins and transnational movement. It subsumes a ‘cultural
métissage’ that arises from an imbrication of the self and the other, and the
familiar and the strange (ch. 6).

566 International Feminist Journal of Politics --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 As a notable contribution to the field of postcolonial studies, the book inau-
gurates a long-delayed discussion of Francophone decolonial political
thought. Mbembe’s conclusion identifies the possible decolonizing moment
in Africa as the current cultural reconfiguration of African identity that orig-
inates neither in post-independence nationalist rhetoric nor in the colonial
enterprise of extraction and predation. The constitution of multiple forms of
being ‘African’ is facilitated by the re-/circulation of ideas and the transna-
tional movement of pluricentric diasporas that decentre Africa as the unique
point of origin (ch. 6). Perhaps the most important point of this decolonizing
moment is for Africans to look beyond Europe and create new temporal
modernities.

Sandeep Bakshi
University of Leicester, UK
Downloaded by [University of Leicester] at 12:08 17 December 2013

Email: sb583@leicester.ac.uk
# Sandeep Bakshi 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.841563

Notes on contributor

Sandeep Bakshi is a postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of

Leicester. His research interests cover transnational queerness, postcolonial
theory and Punjabi folk representations. He is currently turning his PhD disser-
tation into a monograph.

Reference

Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califor-
nia Press.

Elizabeth Povinelli. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endur-

ance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-
8223-5084-2.

Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endur-

ance in Late Liberalism begins with ‘A Symphony of Liberalism’, a two-page
composition complete with staves in complementary registers and rhythmi-
cally broken chords correlating with significant political events across
various jurisdictions since 1950. These events include ‘Bretton Woods, `44’,
‘Algerian War, `54– `62’, and ‘Liberal Gov’t abolishes Aboriginal & Torres
Islanders Commission, `04’. This sampling and its musical arrangement are
indicative of the impressive creativeness, scope and ambition of this book,

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Book reviews 567

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