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The object of this book has been to see if, in answer to the question “Who are you in the world?” the African of this century could say without qualification, “I am an ex-slave.” … More prosaically, we sought to define the //quantitative// and //qualitative// difference, if any, between the colonial period and what followed: have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theater, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism? (237)
 * The Question **

Having set out to discover what remains, at this turn of the century, of the African quest for self-determination, we find ourselves thrown back on the figures of the shadow, into those spaces where one perceives something, but where //this thing// is impossible to make out—as in a phantasm, at the exact point of the split between the visible and graspable, the perceived and the tangible. In many respects, this conclusion is frightening. It suggests that Africa exists only as an absent object, an absence that those who try to decipher it only accentuate… Thus, we must speak of Africa only as a chimera on which we all work blindly, a nightmare we produce and from which we make a living—and which we sometimes enjoy, but which somewhere deeply repels us, to the point that we may evince toward it the kind of disgust we feel on seeing a cadaver. All this is one reason why, whether produced by outsiders or by indigenous people, end-of-the-century discourses on the continent are not necessarily applicable to their object. Their nature, their stakes, and their functions are situated elsewhere. They are deployed only by replacing this object, creating it, erasing it, decomposing and multiplying it. Thus there is no description of Africa that does not involve destructive and mendacious functions. […] It is this “song of shadows,” its metamorphoses, its sight, hearing, sense of smell, taste, touch—in short, its expressive power—to which we have given the ultimately meaningless name of //postcolony.// Beyond this word, we have been interested in the experience of a period that is far from being uniform and absolutely cannot be reduced to a succession of moments and events, but in which instants, moments, and events are, as it were, on top of one another, inside one another.In this sense, we must say that the postcolony is a period of embedding, a space of proliferation that is not solely disorder, chance, and madness, but emerges from a sort of violent gust, with its languages, its beauty and ugliness, its ways of summing up the world.(241-242)
 * The Answer? **

And Africa, because it was and remains that fissure between what the West is, what it thinks it represents, and what it thinks it signifies, is not simply //part of// its imaginary significations, it is //one of// those significations. By imaginary significations, we mean “that something invented” that, paradoxically, becomes necessary because “that something” plays a key role, both in the world the West constitutes for itself and in the West’s apologetic concerns and exclusionary and brutal practices towards others. (2)
 * Failures of Imaginations **

What these comments and their tautological character quite clearly show is that, by defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity—that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local— and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from idioms of a provincialism that no longer requires demonstration since it proves extremely difficult to understand non-Western objects within its dominant paradigms.There thus arises the purely methodological question of knowing whether it is possible to offer an intelligible reading of the forms of social and political imagination in contemporary Africa solely through conceptual structures and fictional representations used precisely to deny African societies any historical depth and to define them as radically //other,// as all that the West is not. (11)

Their imagination was working on the memory of an Africa, a vast petrified song, deemed past and misunderstood. 37 But, as a result of the tension inherent in the twin project of emancipation and assimilation, discussion of the possibility of an African modernity was reduced to an endless interrogation of the possibility, for the African subject, of achieving a balance between his/her total identification with “traditional” (in philosophies of authenticity) African life, and his/her merging with, and subsequent loss in, modernity (in the discourse of alienation). 38 […]  I do not mean that, in the chaotic nightmare that followed the abolition of slavery and ended in colonization, the reaffirmation of African humanity was a matter of no consequence. The uncompromising nature of the Western self and its active negation of anything not itself had the counter-effect of reducing African discourse to a simple polemical reaffirmation of black humanity. However, both the asserted denial and the //reaffirmation// of that humanity now look like the two sterile sides of the same coin. (12)

But—and herein lies one paradox—this form of sovereignty, made up of possessiveness, injustice, and cruelty, conceives itself as also carrying a //burden,// which yet is not a contract. In theory, the colonial potentate forms no bond with the object of //commandement//—that is, the native. In principle, there exists no mutual need between the parties. […] Yet the colonial potentate also portrays itself as a //free gift,// proposing to relieve its object of poverty and free it from debased condition by raising it to the level of a human being. That is what A. Sarraut called “the right of the stronger to aid the weaker.” […] The state that flows from this sovereignty defines itself as protective. The native is its protégé. The strength of this state lies as much in the feeling that arises from the right to protect the weak as from the hard-headed quest for metropolitan profit. Its strength is a strength for good and goodness. It is also a //family state,// and to that extent a “family and filial bond binds the colonies to the mother country.” 27 […] The figure of obedience and domination in the colony rests on the assertion that the state is under no social obligation to the colonized and this latter is owed nothing by the state but that which the state, in its infinite goodness, has deigned to grant and reserves the right to revoke at any moment. (34-35)
 * You shouldn’t have! **