of his wonderful achievements, civilized man looks down upon the humbler members of mankind. He has conquered the forces of nature and compelled them to serve him. […] What wonder if civilized man considers himself a being of higher order as compared to primitive man; if it is claimed that the white race represents a higher type than all others. When we analyse this assumption, it will soon be found that […] the achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded’ (‘Human Faculty as Determined by Race’, in The Shaping of American Anthropology, pp. 221–2).14 14. Santiago Castro-Gómez, ‘Le chapitre manquant d’Empire: la réorganisation postmoderne de la colonisation dans le capitalisme postfordiste’, Multitudes, no. 26, Autumn 2006, http://www.multitudes.net/Le-Chapitre-manquant-d-Empire-La/.
15 15. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 149.
16 16. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Boole, 1815–1864: l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989).
17 17. George Boole, Les Lois de la pensée, translated by Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Paris: Vrin, 1992).
18 18. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Islam et société ouverte: la fidélité et le mouvement dans la philosophie de Mohammed Iqbal (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001).
19 19. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
20 20. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011).
21 21. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, translated by Jonathan Adjemian (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2016).
22 22. Daniel Arasse, Histoires de peinture (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2006).
23 23. Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, pp. 11, 13 and 54.
24 24. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Bergson postcolonial: l’élan vital dans la pensée de Léopold Sédar Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011). (An English edition, Postcolonial Bergson, translated by Lindsay Turner [New York: Fordham University Press, 2019], was in production as the current volume was going to press. [Translator’s note.])
25 25. Diagne, African Art as Philosophy, pp. 194–5.
26 26. Jean-Loup Amselle (ed.), Les Migrations africaines: réseaux et processus migratoires (Paris: Maspero, 1976).
27 27. Jean-Loup Amselle, Les Négociants de la savane: histoire et organisation sociale des Kooroko, Mali (Paris: Anthropos, 1977).
28 28. Jean-Loup Amselle, Psychotropiques: la fièvre de l’ayahuasca en forêt amazonienne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013).
29 29. Jean-Loup Amselle, Islams africains: la préférence soufie (Lormont: Le bord de l’eau, 2017).
30 30. Jean-Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures, 3rd edn (Paris: Flammarion, 2015).
31 31. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
32 32. Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Ethnicisation de la France (Paris: Lignes, 2011).
33 33. Jean-Loup Amselle, Les Nouveaux Rouges–Bruns: le racisme qui vient (Paris: Lignes, 2014).
34 34. Jean-Loup Amselle, Branchements: anthropologie de l’universalité des cultures (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).
35 35. Jean-Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere, translated by Claudia Royal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
36 36. In addition to L’Occident décroché (2008), see also the third part of Jean-Loup Amselle’s last book, Islams africains (2017), devoted to Diagne, or listen to the podcast of the debate in Lille in November 2014 and broadcast on France Culture in ‘Les Chemins de la connaissance’ (‘The Paths of Knowledge’), as part of a series of broadcasts and conferences on ‘African Thinkers’ (‘Penseurs d’Afrique (2/5): L’Afrique a-t-elle inventé les droits de l’homme’, https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-nouveaux-chemins-de-la-connaissance/penseurs-d-afrique-25-l-afrique-t-elle-invente-les.
Introduction
Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle
This book of epistolary exchanges, or rather of e-mail exchanges, between the two of us, an anthropologist and a philosopher who, in some of our work, express a search for Africa(s), focuses on what might be called the question of the postcolonial.
It is difficult, for many reasons, to date precisely the appearance of a postcolonial paradigm and to ascribe it to definite writers. First of all, this term has two distinct meanings: it refers to a phenomenon that occurred ‘after’ colonization and to a phenomenon that was to ‘counteract’ colonization and its aftermath in the contemporary world, both in the South and in the North. Secondly, postcolonialism must be plural: there are as many authors as there are postcolonialisms and, within this paradigm, literary people rub shoulders with political scientists and other specialists in the humanities and social sciences, and have often played the role of precursors.
Be that as it may, the emergence of a postcolonial paradigm is doubtless to be situated in the aftermath of the Second World War. This paradigm was already gestating in a historical configuration where, even before the war, revolts and riots in countries under foreign rule indicated that this rule could no longer be maintained. The Brazzaville Conference called by de Gaulle in 1944 recognized that, if only thanks to the part played by the colonies in the liberation of Europe from Nazism, the colonial system would not survive unless it were re-established on new foundations. This system was in fact doomed, as the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 would demonstrate.
This was also the era when the two main victorious countries in the war, the United States and the Soviet Union, confronted each other as the dominant powers. For different reasons and in different forms, they had both opposed old-style colonialism as established by Europe. This was the time, in particular, when the United States assumed the hegemony over the rest of the planet previously held by Europe, and where as a corollary the notion of ‘cultural area’ replaced the old ‘savage/civilized’ binary on which the domination of European colonial powers over Africa, Asia and Oceania had been based. The notion that there is a plurality of human cultures all equivalent to one another, a notion which lies at the heart of the American cultural anthropology of Franz Boas and his followers, also lay behind many postcolonial texts.
Perhaps the most significant event for postcolonialism was the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, in 1955. It brought together twenty-nine African and Asian countries and marked the entry onto the international scene of the decolonized countries of the so-called ‘Third World’. In the final resolution of this conference, colonialism and imperialism in general were condemned, especially in France (then one of the two main colonial powers in Africa) and in the apartheid regime in South Africa. The participants also sought to define themselves as ‘non-aligned’ with the two big blocs of the time,
