Articles & Book Chapters
- Beth A. Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson. "Introduction." Creativity Beyond Crisis? Perspectives on the Politics of Agency in Africa. Edited
by Beth A. Buggenhagen, Stephen Jackson, and Anne-Maria B. Makhulu. The University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection (also published in hardcopy) (2008.). (Under Review)
Abstract:
In the proposed volume we question one of the dominant tropes of the current global conjuncture, specifically, the decline of the state. We begin here not solely because this position reinscribes a longstanding pessimism about the post-colonial prospects for African nation-states. But more importantly, promulgating the retreat of African states as a particularly African problem conceals the very contradictions that characterize the present--an uncritical acknowledgement of the project of neoliberal globalization and the very idea of the nation-state form itself. What if, as John Comaroff has recently proposed, the production of knowledge in and about Africa projected the West as its opposite, revealing not only the epistemological structures of Eurocentrism, but the "West’s failures since Westphalia": The steady erosion of the nation as a primary unit of belonging, the growing crisis of liberalism, even, the mounting hysteria over the so-called war on terror in which Europe and the US currently play a significant role (Willis 2005). The point is not to demonstrate quid pro quo that those vulnerabilities generally associable with the Third World might be found just as easily in the metropole, but rather to suggest that present circumstances in the so-called First World—-where a sense of the cataclysmic seems all too pervasive—-share something with a much older set of assertions about Africa. Those assertions we have chosen, following many before us, to call by the name "Afropessimism."