In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir Diagne

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1 Universalism in questions

       Jean-Loup Amselle

      Universalism has been, and continues to be, rightly decried insofar as the conquest and colonization of Africa were carried out in the name of the eradication of ‘barbaric customs’ such as slavery, human sacrifice or female genital mutilation.¹ What is described as ‘overarching universalism’ – a phrase that acts as a sort of frozen syntagm – and the corresponding imposition of the rights of man, or, as we say today, human rights, continue to be propagated in the form of campaigns against female genital mutilation, against homophobia and against the treatment meted out to women in the South. These campaigns are led by major international organizations and NGOs, and are taken up in Africa by the ‘secular’ fractions of the elites in each country; they have the disadvantage of arousing the determined opposition of a significant number of the population, who are in favour of maintaining female genital mutilation or are hostile to the emancipation of women and averse to homosexuality. It is also well known that in many cases the legal prohibition of female genital mutilation does not stop this practice from being performed.

      Hostility towards any reform of what is supposed to be an immutable ‘tradition’ is also taken up and supported, in Mali, for example, by Muslim leaders of every tendency; they see it as a political marker for confronting the secular faction of the local bourgeoisie, which they describe as kowtowing to the West. So what is to some extent just a political issue between fractions of the ruling class is presented as a clash between Africa and the West, with the consequence of muddying the waters and fostering so-called ‘postcolonial’ positions.²

This phenomenon became clear during Barack Obama’s visit to Dakar, Senegal, in 2013: while the American president was favourable to ‘coming out’ about one’s sexual orientations, whatever they were, the Senegalese president Malick Sall said homosexuality was not one of the ‘African traditions’ and that there was no question of decriminalizing it.³ The imposition from outside of a universalism of human rights in its different forms – whether it be ‘the gay international’, as Joseph Massad put it with regard to homosexuality, or ‘femonationalism’, to use the term put forward by Black feminists⁴ – caused and continues to cause collateral damage within Southern countries, since the obligation to ‘come out’ as encouraged by the West has the effect, in both cases, of penalizing working-class homosexuals and trapping women within an apparent patriarchal dictatorship.

      The importance of this damage should be relativized and a proper emphasis placed on the ‘agency’⁵ (the capacity of social actors to respond) of homosexuals in the South, especially in Muslim countries; and the same applies to women’s resistance to the injunctions of ‘White’ feminists from the North. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the imposition of a universalism of human rights is part of the aftermath of the colonial period⁶ and must, as such, be condemned – despite the ambiguities that ran through the Durban conferences in 2001 and 2009.⁷

      Unfortunately, criticism of the unilateral imposition of human rights, of this overbearing Western universalism in all its aspects, often has the harmful effect – now as before, during the colonial period – of concealing the need to defend another type of universalism whose importance is obvious in the face of the excesses of cultural relativism associated with the denigration of reason, or what is now called decolonial ‘pluriversalism’.⁸ True, universalism must be rejected to the extent that it is only a Eurocentrism, and therefore a ‘particular’ opposing other ‘particulars’ seeking recognition. This does not, however, mean forgoing the quest for a unity of the different manifestations of capitalism on different continents or the search for potential communication and translation between different cultures.

To begin with, let us introduce the postcolonial thinkers Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose theories are often based on culturalist premises which emphasize the irreducible specificity of different countries or subcontinents such as China or India. As I endeavoured to show in my book L’Occident décroché, Indian historians of the ‘subalternist’ school who initially based their analyses of popular resistance on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci later resorted to other authors such as Michel Foucault and Louis Dumont, thereby giving an essentialist and culturalist flavour to their apprehension of Indian social realities.⁹ Those who oppose this culturalist vision and claim to have discovered a redefined universalism are more discrete: they come from the same Southern countries, but they also teach in the United States. Here I will mention the Indian Marxist thinker Vivek Chibber, professor at New York University. A defender of universalism, he insists that the manifestations of capitalism are basically the same in the East as in the West, in India, Europe and the United States.¹⁰ In a similar way, Nivedita Majumdar showed that the almost exclusive focus on gender at work in the writings of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha had the effect of masking the forms of acquiescence to the tradition that are in some cases demonstrated by so-called ‘subaltern’ women, or of obscuring their class consciousness.¹¹

      The American-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, meanwhile, uses other data – basically, cultural data – and has a different theoretical slant, but he too is just as committed, within the context of what he defines as a ‘cosmopolitanism’, to seeking values shared by many cultures. My own concept of universalism is close to his theoretical model.¹²

      Another American-Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, is also clearly hostile to cultural relativism: he defends a universalist position based on the biological unity of the human species. For him, there is nothing impossible in the idea of translating Western concepts into African cultures (in this case, Akan)¹³ or African concepts into European languages, even though this latter transference is less common than the former. In this respect, he rejects the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whose strong version, ‘linguistic determinism’, postulates that human actions are necessarily limited by the language in which they are expressed. He is also hostile to the idea of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ put forward by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom to understand a sentence is to understand a language. In both cases, Wiredu believes, the powerful influence of language on thought cannot legitimize any relativism.¹⁴

      Souleymane Bachir Diagne СКАЧАТЬ