highlighting of these variable geometries of identity – plotted against the two axes of verticality and horizontality, and their potential historical reversals – also plays a part in another model, one that is equally important in Amselle’s epistemology: this is the geographical model and its often worldwide scale. Amselle, in fact, has never stopped practising a globe-trotting anthropology on multi-located sites, from Europe to the Africas and the Americas, and from India to Peru via Mali. The anthropologist thus links disparate worlds, and he pursues ‘channels’ and ‘networks’ at various points of the planet; his studies can therefore be read as extensive geopolitical coordinate systems.
A third model structures these works, based on a socio-linguistics, and more specifically a pragmatics, which constantly insists on the shifting nature of referents and on the fundamentally performative character of ethnonyms. This socio-linguistic framework moved centre stage after Branchements (2001), which focused on ‘particularist derivations of signifieds in relation to a network of planetary signifiers’,34 while, following on from this, other studies (of contemporary African art, postcolonialism and new forms of primitivism) have tracked the various processes of ‘relexification’ of artefacts and concepts, and all the phenomena of ‘creolization’ or ‘code-switching’ which characterize contemporary artistic, literary and intellectual practices.
These three models – historical and dynamic, geometric and geographical, socio-linguistic and pragmatic – ultimately lie within the same problematic: it is a matter of thinking first and foremost about the relations of force within societies, as well as between different societies, languages and cultures. The latter, in fact, as Amselle tells us,
are not situated next to each other like Leibnizian monads without doors or windows: they take up their place in a moving whole that is itself a structured field of relations. […] The definition of a given culture is actually the result of an intercultural relation of force: the spatially dominant culture has the power to assign to other cultures their own place in the system, turning the latter into their subjected or determined identities. […] The system is not static, however: certain cultures that were once subjected become dominant while others, like stars, are born and then vanish.35
This issue of ‘relations of force’ is certainly Amselle’s major concern, and the keystone of his whole oeuvre. It is a theme he also explores in cultural and linguistic relations as well as in artistic, literary and intellectual productions.
From one dialogue to another
So it is on the basis of their respective paths, but also of a certain number of shared concerns, that Diagne and Amselle have here followed a dialogue already initiated in several studies and public encounters.36 They tackle many themes: the question of universalism; the concepts of race, culture and identity; the role of languages in philosophical practice and philosophy in different cultural areas; the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa; and finally the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his recent ideas on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor.
However, it is important to warn the reader that it is not just two styles of thought, but also two opposite modes of address, that are coming into play here. Faithful to a certain polemical temperament and to a taste for straight talking that sometimes dispenses with oratorical precautions, Amselle opens the various debates by trying each time to drive his opponent into a corner and, in particular, to expose the essentialist, culturalist and differentialist logics that might underlie certain critical propositions in postcolonial and decolonial thinking on the relations between Africa and the West, language and thought, Islam and philosophy, culture and politics. The anthropologist thus adopts a resolutely chivalrous posture – in the sense that he enjoys crossing swords with an opponent.
Conversely, without practising the cowardly art of ducking and diving, but striking back whenever he deems it necessary, Diagne refuses to don what he calls ‘the livery’ of the ‘Afrocentrist, particularist and essentialist’ thinker (p. 138). He then fuels the discussion in a less agonistic way, but one that is just as radical as Amselle, proposing a total ‘decentring’, one which ‘reject[s] all centrisms’ (p. 142), but rather highlights branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time.
So let us wager that the publication of these conversations, which are often uncompromising but always stimulating, will spur other conversations.
Anthony Mangeon is Professor of Francophone Literature at the University of Strasbourg. He is the author or editor of several books on the literatures of Africa, the West Indies and the Black Americas in their relation to knowledge, including: La Pensée noire et l’Occident: de la bibliothèque coloniale à Barack Obama (Cabris: Sulliver, 2010), Postures postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala, Lettres du Sud, 2012), Anthropolitiques: Jean-Loup Amselle, une pensée sans concessions (Paris: Karthala, 2015), Crimes d’auteur: de l’influence, du plagiat et de l’assassinat en littérature (Paris: Hermann, Fictions pensantes, 2016) and L’Empire de la littérature: penser l’indiscipline francophone avec Laurent Dubreuil (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, Plurial, 2016).
Notes
1 1. Jean-Marc Moura, Littératures francophones et théorie postcoloniale (Paris: PUF, 1999).
2 2. Jean-Marc Moura and Jean Bessière (eds), Littératures postcoloniales et représentations de l’ailleurs: Afrique, Caraïbes, Canada. Conférence de littérature comparée de l’Université de la Sorbonne (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000).
3 3. See Neil Lazarus (ed.), Penser le postcolonial: une introduction critique (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006), Marie-Claude Smouth (ed.), La Situation postcoloniale: les postcolonial studies dans le débat français (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des Sciences politiques, 2007) and Collectif Write Back (ed.), Postcolonial studies: modes d’emploi (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2013).
4 4. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003).
5 5. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, New Accents, 2002).
6 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds (London: Routledge, 2006; first published in 1987).
7 7. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004; first published in 1990).
8 8. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire (eds), La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005).
9 9. Jean-Loup Amselle, L’Occident décroché: enquête sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock, 2008).
10 10. Jean-François Bayart, Les Études postcoloniales: un carnaval académique (Paris: Karthala, 2010).
11 11. Nicolas Bancel et al. (eds), Ruptures postcoloniales: les nouveaux visages de la société française (Paris: La Découverte, 2010).
12 12. See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (London: Seagull Books, 2011), p. 15.
13 13. ‘It is but natural that, in the study of the history of culture, our own civilization should become the standard, that the achievements of other times and other races should be measured by our own achievements. In no case is it more difficult to lay aside the
