African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

African Futures

African Futures

Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Edited by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40224-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40238-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40241-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226402413.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldstone, Brian, editor. | Obarrio, Juan, editor. | American Anthropological Association. Annual Meeting (109th : 2010 : New Orleans, La.)

Title: African futures : essays on crisis, emergence, and possibility / edited by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.| Most contributions derive from an invited session on African Futures in Crisis, held at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans in 2010. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016023752 | ISBN 9780226402246 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226402383 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226402413 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Africa—Social conditions—21st century—Congresses. | Africa—Forecasting—Congresses.

Classification: LCC HN773.5 .A3254 2016 | DDC 306.096—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023752

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

ONE  /  Introduction: Untimely Africa?

BRIAN GOLDSTONE AND JUAN OBARRIO

PART I: RETHINKING CRISIS

TWO  /  Africa Otherwise

JANET ROITMAN

THREE  /  The Form of Crisis and the Affect of Modernization

BRIAN LARKIN

FOUR  /  The Productivity of Crisis: Aid, Time, and Medicine in Mozambique

RAMAH MCKAY

PART II: EMERGENT ECONOMIES

FIVE  /  Money in the Future of Africans

JANE I. GUYER

SIX  /  Forensics of Capital

MICHAEL RALPH

SEVEN  /  Brokering Revolution: Imagining Future War on the West African Borderlands

DANNY HOFFMAN

EIGHT  /  Hedging the Future

CHARLES PIOT

NINE  /  Entangled Postcolonial Futures: Malagasy Marriage Migrants and Provincial Frenchmen

JENNIFER COLE

PART III: URBAN SPACES AND LOCAL FUTURES

TEN  /  Rough Towns: Mobilizing Uncertainty in Kinshasa

ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE

ELEVEN  /  Local Futures, the Future of the Local: Urban Living in a Central African Metropolis

FILIP DE BOECK

TWELVE  /  Changing Mobilities, Shifting Futures

PETER GESCHIERE AND ANTOINE SOCPA

THIRTEEN  /  Time and Again: Locality as Future Anterior in Mozambique

JUAN OBARRIO

PART IV: POSSIBILITIES

FOURTEEN  /  Getting Ahead When We’re Behind: Time, Potential, and Value in Urban Tanzania

BRAD WEISS

FIFTEEN  /  Africa in Theory

ACHILLE MBEMBE

Acknowledgments

References

List of Contributors

Index

Footnotes

One

Introduction: Untimely Africa?

Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio

This book of essays approaches the subject of futurity in Africa as an irreducibly open question, one whose potential answers are contingent not only on who is posing the question but also on the myriad specificities—of scale, location, sensibility—that orient it. Emphatically of the moment, the contributions to this volume bear the imprint of the context in which they were conceived: stemming from an invited session on African Futures in Crisis held at the American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans in 2010, with additional essays later commissioned along those thematic lines, these texts address a conjuncture whereby Africa is posited, paradoxically, not only as a more insular and desperate place than previously had been imagined—think Save Darfur, for example—but also as an ambivalent and even auspicious site of Africa rising (as The Economist famously put it in its December 2011 cover story) through investment and speculation—or more promising still, an African renaissance (Thiong’o 2009)—in the domains of politics and social and cultural life.

How contemporary Africanist scholarship might effectively traverse (or indeed circumvent) these coincident, seemingly contradictory forecasts—their implicit codes and underlying presuppositions and the new images that might dislodge them—is at the heart of the debate that this book engages. What stance might scholars assume in the face of such a motley ensemble of verdicts and diagnoses, which so frequently are rendered as indisputable, even inescapable? Are those who proffer these claims to be responded to on their own terms, within their own coordinates of success and failure, confidence and despondency, and within their own genres of verification? Or might the intervention rather lie in discerning other concepts, other intimations of what it means to hope and anticipate, struggle and despair in Africa today? Could the tempo and timeliness of such interventions provide a counterpoint to the instantaneity of those pronouncements that dominate the global public sphere?

Alternating between the modes of conceptual history and analysis, on the one hand, and close-to-the-ground ethnography, on the other, between sustained phenomenologies of a given place or people and equally sustained critique (and indeed, at times, disclosure of the limits of critique as such), the chapters in this collection speak in a range of voices. What unites them, in a manner somewhat different from other valuable collections that have appeared over the past decade, is not so much a single topical or subdisciplinary preoccupation (e.g., aesthetics [Nuttall 2007], religion and media [Hackett and Soares 2015], love [Cole and Thomas 2009], law and illegality [Comaroff and Comaroff 2006], mental illness [Akyeampong, Hill, and Kleinman 2014], health and healing [Dilger, Kane, and Langwick 2012; Geissler 2015; Luedke and West 2006], cities and urban life [Diouf and Fredericks 2014]), nor a common methodological or theoretical orientation (e.g., Marxism, psychoanalysis, social history, actor-network theory), but instead a broad concern with how particular senses and experiences of time, of potentiality and emergence, along with feelings of incapacity or impossibility, come together to make certain futures actualizable, inhabitable—and others not at all. In the wake of the various neoliberal experiments with democracy and putatively freer markets; in the wake of decolonization and the well-documented postcolonial disenchantments with previous models of the state apparatus or with popular collective movements; in the wake of Ebola, conflagrations of xenophobia, and the surfacing of new fronts in an ongoing war on terror; in the wake of any expectation, in some places, that there could ever be a reliable source of electricity, water, or work—in the wake of all this, what becomes of one’s relationship to one’s nation, to one’s ethnic group, to one’s church or religion, to one’s family, to one’s locality or region, let alone to Africa and its diasporic elsewheres? In engaging these developments and their attendant problem-spaces (Scott 2004), this collection turns on a distinctive axis of investigation: one in which the global is refracted and recast from an array of localized vantage points, revealing anew the world and Africa (to evoke the title of Du Bois’s 1946 study by that name; see also Cooper 2014) by attending to its peripheries, its internal frontiers, its interstices and corridors, its shadows (De Boeck, chapter 11; Engelke 2015; Ferguson 2006;) and underneaths (Ferme 2001; Nuttall 2009), and its constitutive blind spots, as well as those enduring social projects and emerging cultural forms that, for many observers of the continent, continue to hide in plain sight.

Far from presenting a case for African exceptionalism, then, or positing a single totalizing image of futurity and emergence taking place on the continent, the chapters that follow engage a wide, interdisciplinary conversation about imaginations and practices of the future¹ while at the same time addressing, from the perspective of specific (if shifting) regional and historical loci, global debates taking place across a spectrum of regions and fields of inquiry. These chapters can thus be read not only as an attempt to move beyond the notorious essentialist and exoticizing tropes—incisively skewered by Binyavanga Wainaina (2008) in his How to Write about Africa—that have long seduced scholars of the continent but also as an alternative to a more recent reluctance among some scholars to make any statements at all about Africa for fear of falling prey to such essentialism. Hence the recent suggestion that, averse as anthropologists—as opposed to, say, journalists and politicians—have been to speak of Africa in general, the discipline that contributed more than any other to what Mudimbe has termed ‘the invention of Africa’ has had almost nothing to say about ‘Africa’ in its time of crisis (Ferguson 2006: 1–7). Notwithstanding a dose of skepticism as to the facticity and pervasiveness of this time of crisis through which the continent and its populations are ostensibly living, the criticism is apt. Moreover, the chapters that follow serve to demonstrate that to speak of Africa is not, inexorably, to advance some new (or not so new) reductionist argument but that speaking thus can in fact be intellectually and politically warranted—even if this requires an analytic sensibility imaginative enough to be oriented toward what often becomes a dizzying, overlapping multiplicity of sites, histories, and events. The objective here is neither an Archimedean comprehensiveness nor the discovery of some master category or theoretical schema that would dispel the sundry mysteries in which the term Africa seems perpetually to find itself enclosed. The point is to contribute to an ongoing collective discussion on how to write the world from Africa, or to write Africa into the world or as a fragment thereof (Mbembe, chapter 15).

In short, African Futures navigates a landscape of confronting perspectives, aiming not so much to iron out the contradictions nor to disprove the verdicts (though such disproving will at times be necessary) as to think within the paradoxes, perplexities, and apparent certitudes Africa is taken to insinuate. Taken together, the chapters gathered here attest to the fact that the study of Africa can no longer be confined to its geographic borders, that the matter of where Africa begins and ends is always, necessarily, in a state of flux and cannot be settled conclusively in advance. They attest, too, to the conviction that the categories and phenomena that for so long animated scholarly work on the continent might find themselves exhausted and evacuated of significance. Put differently, these chapters show how such phenomena (local political authority, humanitarianism, militarism and conflict, migration, urbanization, and economies formal and informal, to cite only some of the issues that will be addressed in this collection) might be reconceived by expanding the scope of inquiry, situating our research topoi within broader networks of relationality and wider webs of signification.

The chapters in this book, finally, resist the urge to simply flip the script on Africa’s persistent status in the planetary order of things, remaining agnostic on the question of whether the continent is lagging behind the West or whether it is, in fact, the West that is lagging behind Africa. Such dichotomies, after all, seem to leave intact the dubious fiction of a single, universal telos.² The task, so prosaic and yet so quickly swept aside in the rush to either praise or pathologize the continent, is to expose the inadequacies of telling a single story (Adichie 2009) about Africa and its prospects, defying the hegemonic and uniform terms by which we are asked to decide on the fate of Africa (Meredith 2006) and acknowledging their currency while locating in their place a veritable montage of simultaneous trajectories. As such, these chapters explore the ways in which the moral, temporal, and epistemological frames that continue to facilitate interventions in Africa might be turned inside out or subjected to arrangements that redefine their meanings and nature, as well as the extent to which dominant conceptualizations of futurity—be they rooted in evolutionary, end-of-history (Fukuyama 1992), empty and homogenous (Benjamin 1968), or developmental models of time—have come to be rejected, adopted, or transformed by Africans themselves in a manner unforeseen by what the prevailing formulations in the social sciences have taught us to expect.

Once denied its claim to historicity, even infamously exiled from history entirely, the term Africa now conjures up a different set of possibilities. The time is ripe, this book contends, to throw light on the plurality of routes through which African futures are being engendered and apprehended.

Crisis

Current debates in the academy and public sphere alike center on the uncertain destiny of the planet, engulfed in a range of crises related to everything from finance, climate, and ecology to security and terrorism. Africa, more often than not, is presented as the exemplary site of this critical conjuncture. This comes as little surprise, for the continent’s contemporary condition has long been held captive to an assortment of demonizing and often cynical diagnoses of its present state and a grim assessment of its impending future.

The signs of alleged, multiple, concurrent crises within the continent, reported by academic and policy centers and amplified by the media—regional wars, disease, mismanagement of resources, failed development, widespread anomie, dissolution of social structures, displacement, the demise of genealogy and generation—appear to be nothing if not self-evident.³ Yet the chapters in this volume gesture toward an altogether different line of inquiry, one that demands a thoroughgoing interrogation of the spectacularization of catastrophe typically associated with Africa as well as the attendant stigmatization of African states and political cultures that is rampant in broad sectors of the public sphere. Indeed, this book goes a step further: what would it entail, we ask, not merely to fine-tune or to redirect the category of crisis with regard to contemporary Africa but to subject the notion to a more sweeping critical analysis? How might we provincialize, cut down to size, the very concept of crisis as such? What functions does the term perform, not only in the hands of foreign pundits and policy makers, but for African citizens themselves? Can we begin to imagine Africa beyond the pervasive sign of crisis?

Such questions arise from the realization that today, as Janet Roitman (chapter 2) notes, it seems impossible to discuss Africa without making recourse in some shape or form to the figure of crisis. Spanning domains as diverse as state governance, law, security, finance, health, humanitarianism, citizenship, and the natural environment, crisis appears as an omnipresent feature of contemporary existence, arguably losing in the process whatever conceptual purchase it may previously have possessed.⁴ Moreover, as Roitman goes on to assert, crisis must not be construed as a mere descriptor. Rather, it has become a metaconcept of sorts, a linguistic placeholder, a structuring device that, far from simply appraising the quality of this or that phenomenon vis-à-vis a particular calculus or within a specific narrative, literally constructs the narrative itself. On Roitman’s view, then, crisis is not just an object of historical knowledge but—here she draws on the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1988 [1959]; 2006)—an enabling blind spot, a precondition for historical knowledge, the place from which one claims access to and knowledge of history (chapter 2). Likewise—perhaps nowhere as much as Africa—it has come to serve as the chief criterion for determining the significance of events, of what counts as news amid the flow of circumstances that compose the everyday in Africa. Rupture, malfunction, disorder, and disaster, a deviation from a presumptive norm or standard: this is what we tend to hear about. It is in this sense, then, that crisis can be said to constitute not only an epistemological blind spot but also a political one, for its prodigious glare diverts attention away from a whole range of other phenomena such that the urgent, emergency-charged Event gets foregrounded to the neglect of, well, everything else (see Roitman 2014).

Indeed, in terms of a politics of knowledge, one of the most troubling consequences of the incessant talk of crisis is the simplistic explanatory frameworks it tends to nourish. Jane Guyer (chapter 5) assesses one celebrated work (van de Walle 2001) whose basic premise is the temporal transformation, with regard to African economies, of crisis from the turning point or passing condition its etymology implies into an enduring, even permanent, state of affairs. Here crisis, as Guyer puts it, comes to stand as a large, persistent, and singular condition, a point of suspension rather than turning, one result of which is that within its logic, every process (social, economic, political, or otherwise), every experience or sensibility, is scrutinized as a mere reflection and aftereffect or, at best, as a form of resistance to an intractable dilemma of one kind or another. And the same holds true for the complex historicities of the continent, as the longevity of crisis—itself presented as an effect of a single factor originating in the near or distant past, be it colonial expropriation, the economy, war, or ethnic identity—engulfs all of sociality within the whirlwind of the various maladies of the present. From the vantage of such a scheme, whereby explanations of a given predicament work finally to buttress precisely those double binds (modernity/tradition, customary/state, global/local, urban/rural) they purport to investigate, the future, it seems, can be imagined only in accordance with an expanding repertoire of technocratic formulas or salvaging interventions. Africa as a whole, according to Mbembe (chapter 15), becomes little more than an event that calls for a technical decision.

This book therefore subjects the very idea of crisis to critique, disentangling the concept and revealing how it functions within the study of contemporary Africa (and beyond) by shrouding itself in an aura of enlightened common sense and privileged insight into a supposedly irrefutable, however unverifiable, empirical terrain. Implicit, too, is a suspicion that the term—more a symptom than a signifier, indeed a diagnostic—is often an alibi for the political-economic management of putative conditions of existential duress (Redfield 2012), thus serving as a key discursive figure in the enormous feedback loop that continues to make and remake Africa’s fraught place-in-the-world (Ferguson 2006).

And yet, critical though they are, the contributors to this collection are neither univocal in their disavowal of the term as such nor wholly in agreement as to its semantic properties in the specific milieus they address. Two broad currents can be discerned. On the one hand, there are those (Roitman, Ralph, Mbembe, and to a certain extent Larkin and Guyer) who treat crisis less as a description than as an intervention in Africa—even, we might say, as one of the primary bases upon which Africa gets produced as such within a global arena. For them, crisis is a conceptual technology, as Larkin (chapter 3) puts it, one that fundamentally serves as a means of categorizing, periodizing, and standardizing the world—specifically, as a commonplace of social and political discourse about Africa, as a means of narrating an entire continent (and then, in some cases, reaping the fruits that come from it, such as research funding, military and humanitarian involvement, and so forth). Other authors, however, are more ambivalent about the category, not because they find the notion of a continent in crisis to be more palatable or accurate, but because they are operating, on the whole, on a rather different scale of inquiry. Thus crisis, in these chapters, is presented less as a product of hysteria and abjectifying prognoses than as an opportunity, a term, for Nigerians, of emergence and disjuncture (Larkin), of new modes of work and war making in Sierra Leone (Hoffman), or in urban centers like Kinshasa (Simone) or Arusha (Weiss), at once a catalyst and site for the everyday mobilization of livelihoods. Or, for Malagasy women in Madagascar (Cole) or the so-called bush-fallers in Cameroon’s Grassfields (Geschiere and Socpa), it becomes the affective and existential impetus to find such livelihoods elsewhere.

The inclusion of the word crisis in the subtitle of this volume, therefore, is highly qualified, seeking neither to legitimize received images of the continent nor to reproduce them unproblematically. Yet we also remain attuned to the term’s ever-changing capacities. Whether directly, through a critical reappraisal of the category itself, or indirectly, by providing empirical illustrations of its repercussions on the terrain of the ordinary, the following chapters consider the ubiquity and alleged permanence of crisis, approaching it with more than a little suspicion—aware of its prejudicial, self-fulfilling mode of judgment—but, at the same time, taking seriously the rapidly unfolding transformations, fractures, opportunities, and dead ends indexed by the term.

Accordingly, we recognize the pitfalls in simply expunging the word from our conceptual dictionaries, for what crisis names, in the end, is not only a verdict imposed by others on Africa and its populations—that is, it is not merely a descriptor that replaces the slower, more exacting work of coming to terms with the play of forces that comprise contemporary conditions on the continent—but it is also, crucially, a condition that is claimed, diagnosed, and inhabited by an untold number of African citizens themselves.⁵ Be it a Pentecostal pastor, a local doctor, an NGO worker, or a high-ranking political functionary, it is clear that, in some instances, crisis can be mobilized as a site of enormous productivity (McKay, chapter 4) and is often deployed as such.

Present

Notwithstanding the pervasiveness of the concept of crisis in popular and academic discourse about the continent, recent times have brought about a shift in the general consideration of Africa, from its presentation as a space of seemingly interminable catastrophe and emergency to—alongside, if not in place of, this image—one of Africa on the rise. Thus, increasingly, Africa is being read optimistically in media and policy reports, with the familiar figures pertaining to purported maladies of various kinds gradually giving way to numbers suggestive of rapid economic growth, widening availability and circulation of commodities, the development of new markets and infrastructures, and intensified foreign investment.⁶ Here Africa slowly but steadily emerges as a more vibrant cultural and economic space, which is beginning to change the contours of social structures and class formations, as well as the texture and rhythm of everyday life on the continent. Is the tenacious picture of an undifferentiated Africa . . . marked by depravity, affliction, and beauty, one awaiting the salvation of an equally unmarked ‘West’ (Livingston 2012), finally behind us? If so, the disconcerting reality for Africanist scholars accustomed to deconstructing the assertions of failure that have so long been attached to the continent is that such critical strategies may themselves, in this moment of Afro-optimism, have outlived their pertinence.

Even so, as the motif of doublings or shadows in contemporary Africanist literature powerfully underscores (De Boeck, chapter 11; Ferguson 2006: 15–17; Mbembe 2001; Nuttall and Mbembe 2008), this economic and sociocultural progress is, as ever in capitalist societies, simultaneously producing a startling array of underneaths characterized by phenomena such as enhanced violence, social fragmentation, and territorial delinking (Ferme 2001; Nuttall 2009). Capitalist expansion on the continent, after all, is today, after structural adjustment, dominated by the volatile temporality of speculative financial capital, land grabbing, and extractive projects. These accelerated temporalities and their short-term logic impact current forms of government and development programs, as well as the disrupted fast pace of popular economies also subsumed by financiarization. The political economy of the future, on this account, is overdetermined by the fragmented temporality of the market and the media, the long-term cycles of production and reproduction having been overtaken by the instantaneity of consumption.⁷

The chapters in this volume examine contexts permeated by the sudden changes generated by these socioeconomic shifts. They partake in a paradoxical, fragmentary sense of unity given to the continent by an evident condition of macroeconomic progress that, at the same time, is deepening inequalities and rendering—for large segments of the population—the chances of securing even the most basic livelihood ever more improbable. Hence a basic premise of this book—namely, that the contemporary conjuncture defies both the bland confidence of lenders, policy makers, and humanitarian organizations as well as the vicious circles of so-called Afro-pessimist projections. Across the continent, life eludes its demarcation by the usual alternatives to damnation, on the one hand, and donation or salvation, on the other. This volume brings to light a range of emergent social forms and imaginations of different times to come, ones that remain irreducible to—or at least creatively recast—the programmatic visions of development, humanitarianism, and religion.

As Africa appears as a global site of experimentation on scales both world-historical and subjective (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011), received categories become increasingly inadequate to conceptualize developments such as the ones examined in this volume and the registers of anticipation, hope, revelation, and anxiety that animate them. Many of the macrosociohistorical and theoretical frameworks of the immediate postcolonial period seem to have outlived their usefulness (Piot 2010)—or, in any case, have seen their assumptions and typologies diminished by historical events that outstrip their applicability. Reductionist explanations that work through absolute reference to the historical past or the hermeneutics of suspicion of some essential underlying substratum appear exhausted. In response to such an impasse, this collection suggests, Africanist scholarship after postcoloniality would do well to abandon a falsified search for lost origins while concurrently refusing to content itself with postmodern evocations of mere surfaces and disseminations of epiphenomena. The aim of this book is to generate an archive in the present of in-depth, textured analyses of still emergent processes and identities: theoretical ethnographies of futurity. In short, empirical research on the continent demands new vocabularies and methods that will allow us to make sense of the fast flow of transformations and reversals that have taken place there in recent years.

It is in response to this challenge, recombining previous concepts and modes of inquiry or searching for new ones, that the following chapters have been assembled. Together, they form a collection of maps and snapshots of key contemporary formations through which the contours of the future in Africa (and its Euro-American elsewheres; see Ralph [chapter 6], Piot [chapter 8], and Cole [chapter 9]) are actively being imagined: the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational; the struggle for duration in the face of provisionality, precariousness, and emergency; the production and collapse of assorted techniques of juridification and illegality; regimes of invisibility that seduce desire and subvert everyday linearity; lotteries and Ponzi schemes that hedge the present against tomorrow; new militarized modes of production and governance; apocalyptic revelations of the end of time; visions of impending and unknown worlds; a pervasive yearning for exile. What the contributors to this collection have in common is their antireductionist commitment to plural and open-ended perspectives over the usual predetermined pathologizing and redemptive visions of Africa.

In the aftermath of the master tropes and grand narratives that oriented the study of Africa over the past few decades, the following thought pieces opt to work within the countless cracks and fissures that have opened up in their wake. The chapters theorize these incipient forms and modalities against the backdrop of a fragmented, post–Cold War, postdevelopment, post-9/11 political-economic landscape. Without a doubt, this is a sociological terrain decidedly unlike that studied by an earlier cohort of Africanist scholars. Increasingly freed from the bloated authoritarian complex that held sway in many countries since the independence period, today’s political apparatus is diffuse, decentralized, and (at least nominally) democratic. The ties that urban state elites maintain with rural spaces and politics are often attenuated and strategic. Amid state pullback, a privatized commons, land grabbing, and the flourishing of political and economic enclaves, novel sovereignties and biopolitical configurations are materializing in cities and villages alike. The savage logics of extractive capital and a new scramble for African land, oil, and minerals have brought a gallery of transnational players to the continent’s doorstep: corporations and venture capitalists that resemble the concession companies of yesteryear, a strategically charitable China, US oil and antiterrorism interests, a burgeoning development-humanitarian-spectacle complex. This volume addresses a social context in which, jostling for influence, these agents blur old boundaries—between public and private, development and entertainment, legal and illicit, military and humanitarian, local and global—and set in motion a new range of possibilities for organizing and unsettling everyday life on the continent.

The volume does not presume a paralysis of being defined by the governance of crisis, on the one hand, or by the seemingly eternal return of the customary and tradition, on the other. Rather, it gives expression to a poetics of becoming, of novel and regenerated capacities and potentials. The following chapters illustrate how present horizons of meaning and conditions of possibility are inflected by various political and economic histories of subjection, misuse, and extraction, but show that these are not absolutely constitutive or determining. Against the ubiquitous public rhetoric of atrophy, these chapters anticipate African futures that by no means will be merely reactive to contemporary neoliberal schemes of accumulation or the purportedly entrenched logics of territorialism and ethnicity.

Thus, alert to the profound intricacies of contemporary social, political, religious, and economic formations, these chapters survey sites of the crystallization of the new, the potential, and—in some cases—the hitherto unimaginable: emergent trends, practices, and subjectivities that may provide a window onto possibilities of an Africa otherwise (Roitman, chapter 2; see also Povinelli 2011) presently in the works.

Futures

In recent years, a number of thinkers in the social sciences and humanities have come to be dubious of the conceptual primacy of the future in its various moral and political, even theological, guises (Berardi 2011; Berlant 2011; Edelman 2004; Love 2009). While attuned to such misgivings, the contributors to this volume nevertheless foreground this thematic as a crucial point of entry into the folds of social life on the continent, even as they too, in a similarly critical spirit, perceive in the term many of the conceptual cognates—progress, (re)production, development, and so forth—that for so long imposed on African societies a rigidly normative trajectory on their material, political, social, and intellectual capacities. Speaking of futures in the plural, as this collection proposes, is one modest but perhaps meaningful way of mitigating the teleological significations of the category or the adornment of global History with a capital H.

Recent theorizations of futurity within African studies and beyond have paved the way for a project such as this. In his study of genocide and the political roots of violence, Mahmood Mamdani (2009) distinguishes between cultural communities, which presuppose a shared past, or common historical inheritance, and political communities, organized around a common project toward the future. The contexts surveyed in this volume show that today, common political futures are not at all secured or preordained, as they were believed to be in the not-too-distant past. The senses of shared ethical and political projects are constantly being reconverted and recombined following the sudden disarray of previously secure structures and the equally contingent emergence of new possible directions.

Local political imaginations of the future played a key role in the period leading toward independence in Africa. This was a historical situation determined by the need for elites and popular movements alike to imagine times to come that would be radically different from the immediate past. After the demise of many models and concepts created at that time, today questions of freedom and emancipation engage futurity in an arguably compromised fashion, creatively attempting to deal with the constant return of myriad—and, in many cases, disavowed—life-forms and social signs from an earlier epoch (custom, ritual, autochthony, indigeneity). After experiencing the pitfalls of neoliberal democracy, the vicissitudes of the rule of law and civil society (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Ferguson 2006; Monga 1996), and the deepening of inequalities through deregulation and structural adjustment (Mkandawire and Soludo 1999), long-term political imaginations of the future seem to be engulfed by a continuous present, composing a mélange of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial fragments.

Without denying the manifest singularity of this historical matrix, we might also recognize its indebtedness to and multiple resonances with the near pasts that preceded it, which suggests, perhaps, that the materialization of the new in Africa entails less of a complete break with the past per se (Meyer 1998) than it does the