Smashing the Imperial Frame: Race,Culture,(De)Coloniality

Abstract

Extending the philosopher Achille Mbembe’s notion of the ‘seeing power of race’ in Critique of Black Reason, this paper explores the imperial frame – a racialized and racializing vision of singularity/alterity – that was foundational to European modernity and the formation of the modern world. I intend to show how the racialized have always articulated an otherwise for cultivating a humane relationship with difference, an unconditional relationship with humanity, through (knowingly or unknowingly) putting the rhetoric of modernity/coloniality on trial. Interweaving a discussion of the 2014 Jordanian film Theeb (trans: Wolf) – our decolonial text – I propose a framework, a series of commitments for a culture decolonized: to time as (re)enchanted and emerging; space as pluriversal and planetary; and self as the guarantor for the Other’s share.

Keywords

culture decoloniality Eurocentrism Achille Mbembe modernity race

Modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of a World History that it inaugurates; the ‘periphery’ that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. (Dussel, 1993: 65)

He who swims in the Red Sea cannot know its true deep, and not just any man, Theeb, can reach the seabed, my son. In questions of brotherhood, never refuse a guest. Be the right hand of the right when men make their stand. And if the wolves offer friendship, do not count no success; they will not stand beside you when you are facing death. (Father in Theeb)

Introduction

On the opening page of philosopher Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (2017), he writes:

Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. This is the significant event, the fundamental experience, of our era. And we are only just now beginning the work of measuring its implications and weighing its consequences.

This decentring is the foundational context of the present study.¹ There were and are of course many Europes, real and imagined, though perhaps the contours separating them have always been blurred. Europe here, however, recalling Lévi-Strauss’s (1955, 1963) usage of the word, is a founding ‘myth’, ‘the original home of the modern’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: xiv), built on a paradigmatic ‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ historicism. Following Frantz Fanon, Europe is literally the creation of the ‘Third World’, a forgotten but persistent fact which shapes our world today.

In this context, I approach the question of our past failures and future hopes for a humane relationship with difference, with elsewheres, for an unconditional relationship with humanity. This is, I argue, a decolonial horizon towards which the voyage in has been taken and the difficult work already begun. It is through putting racism, sexism and colonialism on trial within a more specific discussion of ‘culture’ that I will intervene in and contribute an offer of several principles for a (cultural) commitment to multiplicity and to humanity.

Racism and colonialism were ‘those modern forms of violence and erasure, two figures of the bestiality within man, of that union between the human and the beast’, that we are far from leaving behind (Mbembe, 2017: 156). In a time of the continued degradation and devaluation of the natural world, unprecedented violence, insurgent nativism and xenophobia, and institutionalized racisms in myriad forms, one of the most urgent priorities for Europe is not to understand its alter better, but itself and its own history. The (whitened) Eurocentric view through which one sees and judges the Other, however she is marked, classified, or defined, persists. But this attitude toward alterity can also be pathologized. As Roger Ballard (1996: 25) reminds us:

it is within Europe’s own longstanding structures of self-definition that pluralism in general, and the Islamic presence in particular, have been rendered into nightmares. If so, it is Europe itself which stands in urgent need of therapy. But as yet the patient is still in denial, and as any psychotherapist would confirm, those who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of their self-generated plight find it far easier to engage in a process of transference. Rather than confronting the illusory character of their own mental constructions, they prefer to ascribe the very behaviour which they refuse to acknowledge in themselves to those whom they believe are harassing them.

It is my contention that if we are to think through difference outside of the pathology Ballard describes, in an era of European decentring, we must think carefully and disobediently about the basic parameters of life – time, space and self – all of which have been ‘colonized’ insofar as their hegemonic understanding continues to be encumbered by the knowledge-power of modernity and its darker side, coloniality. Hence the theoretical compound, modernity/coloniality – especially important since the ‘end of history’, the Soviet Union’s collapse and, with it, the ideology that divided the world into First, Second, and Third.

Coloniality is itself a decolonial concept. Naming the (un)intended consequences of the narratives of modernity, coloniality is a reminder, as Aníbal Quijano has told us, of the central axes or patterns of power that were foundational to modernity.² Crucially, it was ‘the codification of the difference between conquerors and conquered in the idea of “race” … the constitutive, founding element of the relations of domination that the conquest imposed’; and ‘the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and products’ that articulated ‘slavery, serfdom, small independent commodity production and reciprocity, together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market’ (Quijano, 2000: 533–4). Coloniality is, third, shorthand for an arrangement of power. As Walter Mignolo explains, coloniality of power is:

the logic that underlines the differences, manifestations, and enactments of modern imperial/colonial formations (Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, United States) and all its dimensions: knowledge (epistemic), economic, political (military), aesthetic, ethical, subjective (race, sex), spiritual (religious). (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 140–1)

Part of the present task, however, is to analyse this rhetoric of modernity, these logics and processes which produce(d) colonial cultures, but rooting ourselves in the experiences and knowledges of the Third World; the pluriverse³ of the colonized.

Coloniality and decoloniality are inextricably linked. But unlike Eurocentric notions of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis, surplus value in Marxist political economy, biopolitics in Foucauldian archaeology, or Giddens’s story of modernity,⁴ coloniality concerns the outward history of Europe and originated in the Third World. An attempt to pursue (de)coloniality analytically is to follow Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) statement on border culture:

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture.

The notion of borders has great bearing on the decolonial and the argument within, for they are not only geographic/territorial. They are also racial, gendered and sexual. They construct and isolate epistemic and ontological, linguistic, national and cultural forms. These same borders point to the hegemonic architectures of modernity/coloniality from the Renaissance and beyond (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 112). After all, Europe’s centrality was not merely geopolitical. It was and, in many ways, continues to be cosmological insofar as modernity names a set of narratives which cohere around certain principles: the Western Christian version of humanity, complemented by secular disenchanted narratives of science, economic progress, political democracy, and lately globalization: it is Reason that has displaced God.⁵ Europe’s decline, that is, our awareness of Other more capacious principles in light of the myriad crises we are facing, presents an opportunity to disrupt the force of these borders, especially epistemic, racial and sexual, with a transformative potential not simply in abstract disciplinary terms of international relations or political economy, but in the materiality of these discourses. It is – recalling Sylvia Wynter’s argument for correlation and Emma Pérez’s decolonial imaginary – to capitalize on the deep cracks in the imperial frame towards a new construction of the world.⁶

The imperial frame, as I am using it, relies on these borders. It refers to a particular mode of seeing the world, self and other that reproduces the not-so-old constructions of infrahumanity – that carceral spectrum of human value which arrived with the European Renaissance through to the Enlightenment and liberal modernity/coloniality – and its deep structural divisions, inequalities, and violence. It refers also to a way of substituting what is with another reality in the service of powerful (imperial) interests through the coming together of epistemic and coercive means. An exemplary critic of the workings of the imperial frame is Achille Mbembe. As a keen analyst of European modernity, he engages deeply with how race and racism have played a major role in how the modern world is organized. Indeed, the central focus of Critique of Black Reason is to provide an account of how we are to navigate through a landscape ‘constituted largely out of deeply consequential fantasising’, that is, the form, content and purposes of ‘race’. And he does it here ‘by both analyzing and puncturing the genealogy [of Blackness in particular], by mapping it out but also by seeking to look at the map it has constituted for itself’ (Mbembe, 2017: x). Structurally the present is shot through with the past but ‘Mbembe’s chronology is never a stable one’. And his varied philosophical engagement with the history of the Atlantic slave trade, the creation of the plantation complex of the Americas and the constitution of modern Europe with our contemporary structures and power relations of labour, migration, surveillance and capital is essential for understanding the predicaments of our world.

My engagement with his work, however, is much more specific. I aim to extend Mbembe’s critical thought in an effort to cultivate a culture founded on series of decolonial commitments concerning difference. In Mbembe’s notion of the pou(voir), or seeing power, of race, we have been shown how ‘race’ imposes a double condition of silence. The persons we choose not to see or hear cannot exist or speak for themselves and, secondly, must be spoken for so that what they say makes sense in ‘our’ language(s). The imperial frame captures this ‘seeing power’ of race from the European Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and in which colonial desires for newer ends are always present. Achille Mbembe’s words on ‘seeing power’ are helpful and I quote him at length for the lucidity of his thought:

To see is not the same as to look. You can look without seeing. And it is not clear that what one sees is in fact what is. But looking and seeing have in common the fact that they solicit judgment, enclosing what is seen or the person who is not seen in inextricable networks of meaning – the beams of history. … The colonial gaze also serves as the very veil that hides this truth. Power in the colony therefore consists fundamentally in the power to see or not to see, to remain indifferent, to render invisible what one wishes not to see. And if it is true that ‘the world is that which we see,’ then we can say that in the colony those who decide what is visible and what must remain invisible are sovereign. (Mbembe, 2017: 111)⁷

Interestingly, the true power of this seeing (and hearing) is derived from what is not seen or heard. As Mbembe continues:

Beyond ‘what we do not see,’ there is no race. The pou(voir), or seeing power, of race is expressed first in the fact that the persons we choose not to see or hear cannot exist or speak for themselves. When necessary, they must be silenced. But their speech is always indecipherable, or at least inarticulate. Someone else must speak in their name and in their place so that what they say makes complete sense in our language. As Fanon, and before him W. E. B. Du Bois, has shown, the person dispossessed of the faculty to speak is constrained always to think of himself, if not as an ‘intruder,’ then at least as someone who can only ever appear in the social world as a ‘problem’. (Mbembe, 2017: 111)

The Du Boisian/Fanonian ‘problem’ of the intruder subject to systematic dispossession is a concise analogy for what continually forecloses a humane relationship with difference. But these are our beginnings and the pressing task is to depart from Mbembe and advance the life-worlds of racialized Others. I want to expand this notion of ‘seeing power’ to explore the assumed muteness of the Other in discussions of difference (from both the racist/sexist subject and their critics); and the fictive-made-real concept and (silencing) effects of ‘race’ itself to show how the Other has never been silent.

The imperial frame actively resists thorough decolonization. Words have weights and destinies, and the critical task today as it was yesterday continues to be to investigate this restrictive, provincial vocabulary which makes a fetish of radical purity and authenticity, forms of belonging rooted in narratives of blood and soil (evidenced in race-as-culture discourses), in order to think beyond it to an elsewhere. We require, first and foremost, a higher tolerance for ‘chaos’,⁸ a commitment to multiplicity and to plurality in the world. It is in the decolonial project, or decoloniality, that I think there is some promise for these commitments. And the necessary vocabulary to cultivate them has long existed. The task is to follow Adolfo Albán Achinte’s (2008: 85–6) embodied re-existence – ‘the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity’ – on our critical journey to further the incomplete processes of decolonization witnessed and celebrated (by most) in the mid-20th century.

In sum, Europe is no longer the centre of gravity of the world and it has not yet figured out what it wants to know about, or do, with the Other. I adopt a decolonial approach here to propose a series of commitments, the principle coordinates, to produce a culture – conceptualized as a form of storytelling, a living and changing aspect of human interaction – necessary for a humane relationship with difference. As anxieties of Europe’s decentring have intensified, producing racism, violence, and other forms of extraction, exclusion and marginalization, the journey towards an unconditional relationship with humanity (expansively defined) is arduous but sorely demanded. Via several rewarding vignettes from the 2014 ‘decolonial-historical’ Jordanian film Theeb (trans: Wolf), I propose a framework, a series of commitments for a culture decolonized: to time as (re)enchanted and emerging; space as pluriversal and planetary; and self as the guarantor for the Other’s share. I conclude that while Europe goes astray, deeply conflicted about where it is within and with the world, a foundation must be laid towards a decolonial horizon, where we can more equitably and capaciously accommodate and articulate the plurality of life-worlds which exist – both natural and human.

Coordinating Culture: Theeb, Time, Space and Self

Firstly, it is worth providing some brief details and context for Naji Abu Nowar’s 2014 film, Theeb. Directed and co-written by Nowar, a British-born Jordanian filmmaker and the son of a former Jordanian ambassador and historian, Ma’an Abu Nowar, Theeb tells the story of the eponymous Bedouin boy and the journey he takes when a British Army officer asks Theeb’s elder brother, Hussein, to act as his guide through the desert to a water well on the old pilgrimage route to Mecca. Set in the Hejaz in 1916 on the eve of the great Arab revolt, coincidentally taking place at the same time as David Lean’s 1962 classic, Lawrence of Arabia, the First World War is heating up, the British are inciting the Arab tribes to revolt against the Ottoman imperialists, and we are on the brink of a massive change. Lauded by critics as an antidote to the latent romanticism-cum-Orientalism of David Lean’s Lawrence – described in the Boston Globe as a ‘Lawrence of Arabia from the other side of the ethnic fence’⁹ – Naji Abu Nowar rejects this ostensibly critical acclaim. In a recent interview Nowar says passionately:

this is our history. Lawrence of Arabia is many people’s only reference. But for us this is our history. We didn’t make the film to be an antidote to anything, we weren’t even thinking about Lawrence of Arabia. This is our story and we were just making our stories. We didn’t need, nor did we think of that [Lawrence of Arabia] as a reference.¹⁰

He has asserted on a number of occasions that Theeb was an exercise in telling the story and writing the history of the First World War, of the fall of the Ottoman Empire – The Dark Times as the Bedouin of the Hejaz called the period of Ottoman aggression and decline – from the eyes and hearts of the Bedouin inhabitants of Wadi Rum.

Nowar challenges the ‘burden of representation’ that often comes with advancing marginalized perspectives – the problem that many artists in the Middle East and the Global South generally face is that they only get their work funded if it is about a political subject matter, one that has something to do with the geopolitics of the region. For Naji Abu Nowar,

it’s very important that artists have the right just to tell a story or express themselves for the sake of doing it, and that they’re not suddenly dismissed because they haven’t given their political stance about a particular conflict.¹¹

Though potentially subversive, texts from the non-West which deal directly with geopolitical issues as a means to secure funding keep in place a longstanding metonymy between the non-West and disorder – elemental to racist notions of la mission civilatrice and the white man’s burden. Attempting a decolonial historical narration is at one and the same time political and other. Theeb both fulfils and rejects our ascription of political messages to it. But it insists that there are overlapping perspectives of the same historical moments which are necessary to account for if we are to apprehend their different meanings unconditionally.

In beginning from the specificities of human experience, as Theeb captures through the perspective of its main character, the story illuminates the pluriversal and emphasizes the plurivocal nature of being in the world against hard and fast identitiarian, racial or cultural distinctions. In Theeb we are put in Bedouin shoes in all the peculiarity and disquiet of the time. The Bedouin of the Western Province care little about politics as we have come to know it. Their primary concern is survival, which encourages us to reflect on the base conditions and needs of dignified life. Naji Abu Nowar says,

if I could put the audience in their [Bedouin] shoes whereby you don’t know what year it is, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re just living your normal life; and then suddenly this stranger appears from nowhere and this story begins and you don’t know what an Englishman is, you don’t know there’s a First World War going on. So what would that feel like? And that was really the directorial emphasis on the film. … Let’s put the audience in this boy’s shoes and have him really experience what it must have been like – how strange and surreal it must have been.¹²

Setting the terms, as opposed to changing the content, of our conversations of history, of identity, of self and Other, requires playing around with, if not altogether corrupting, our working notions of time, of space and of self – my three co-ordinates for cultivating a culture, decolonized. Like countless other works, Theeb elucidates these ‘corruptions’, not as exceptional outliers but as necessary constituents of everyday life in the life-worlds of the Bedouin of the Hejaz. The status of the film in this essay is precisely to offer a creative articulation of the decolonial work which I present. It serves as an analogy, an imaged supplement to the transformations that I am pursuing. Ultimately, the imperial frame reproduces a racial order which intervenes in our everyday comprehension and relationships with difference. Smashing the imperial frame, as I have it, is to advance the cracks – those spaces for decolonization – that have long formed in it by reconceiving time, space and self. Let us now turn to the coordinates.

Time

A character whose name we never learn, The Stranger, the leader of a bandit gang who kills the main character Theeb’s older brother, is keenly aware of the spectre of time. Theeb’s father, Sheikh Abu Hmoud, was a famous Bedouin leader. In a conversation between The Stranger and Theeb that takes place shortly after they have quite literally broken bread to eat and Theeb helps to remove a bullet from The Stranger’s wound, The Stranger, upon learning the Sheikh’s relation to Theeb exhales and says with an undertone of resignation ostensibly unnoticed by Theeb: ‘The Wolf begets a Wolf.’ Later in song form, he says up to some cosmic beast in the sky, ‘Wolf, I beseech you don’t eat the Wolf. How many nights did he feed you when you were starving?’ Thus unfolds the paradox of time. The Stranger appears aware that in his murder of the Sheikh’s older son, he has sealed his fate at the hands of the wolf begotten, Theeb. The teleology of time is understood to be inaccessible, its consequences unavoidable, and its flow non-linear.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945: 469) tells us that time is the ‘most general characteristic of psychic events’, which is to say that it is fundamental to the interior structure of subjectivity. However, to analyse time is not only to gain a sense of subjectivity’s constitutive encounter with it, but takes us also to the heart of an epistemic architecture which both undergirded and housed modernity/coloniality. Modernity, modernization, progress, etc., are each based on working notions of before and after, to and from, by which all of us are being driven.¹³ The power of the rhetoric of modernity and its attendant Eurocentrism is derived from the ability to make believe that modernity is something beyond the narratives that invented the word: the war and military means; the geographic, territorial, national lines drawn on the earth; and the racial, sexual and cultural lines inscribed and re-inscribed on its subjects. Since modernity has been conceived in a single line of universal time and history, divergences from this trajectory are marked with varying forms of – often conflated – alterity. In the present, this crucial temporal pillar of modern/colonial rationality is made plain in discussions as wide-ranging as climate action (‘development’ discourse) to calls for ‘moderate’, ‘reformed’ religious praxis (bespeaking Luther’s Reformation). The pluri- and interversal is negated ab initio, because ‘present time’ is understood to be the only present, the present of Europe. Elided is the possibility the Other presents of the Americas of the South, India, Japan, or Senegal, etc. – the pluriversal. For people there have Other exigencies which do not fit straightforwardly onto the temporal atlas drawn by and for modern/colonial/Enlightened Europe. This feeling was consolidated in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where Germany was the centre of gravity and the ultimate present of history and time to which a universal chronology was ascending.¹⁴

A major decolonial challenge is to think without modernity, delinking from its fictions such as the universal temporal-historical grid which remains crucial to its continued operation. The premodern and the postmodern as the historical moments before and after modernity within universal, homogeneous time are unhelpful. Decolonially speaking, the idea of the nonmodern – that superfluous subject who is absent from the recognized temporal realm of universal history, thus depriving them of full humanity – served as a flexible concept necessary for the invention of underdeveloped, uncivilized peoples: the wretched of the earth. That is, all those who are yet to catch up to becoming modern or postmodern.

However, modernity as the unfolding of universal history, of homogeneous time, is itself the illusion created by the narratives and concept of modernity. ‘Time’ here is not universal but is instead shown to be the provincial European way of naming movement along an invented assembly line of historical transformations and repetitions. Allied with colonial force and violence, Western modernity sacrifices Other times and their consequential needs/demands absolutely and indefinitely, according to a common-sense logic in the name of universal history, homogeneous time, and of Civilization’s unfolding.¹⁵ It is, therefore, unable to account for the coexistence of temporalities, of time as simultaneous and non-linear, of time that is neither nonmodern, premodern nor postmodern.

The scene described at the outset of this section prompts us to ask questions about the role of time and history as reliable anchors (in modernity/coloniality). Modern/colonial history’s own time is ‘godless, continuous and, to follow Benjamin, empty and homogenous’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 73). For example, the European Re-naissance (itself a concept that denotes a change in time) was premised upon the invention of Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the two previous periods upon which this rebirth was founded. History as a modern/colonial discipline of study emerges as a secular subject fundamentally rooted in Eurocentric time. Moreover, time is given a naturalistic quality. It is not treated as part of a system of conventions, a cultural code of representation, but as something more objective, something belonging to ‘nature’ itself. Thus, everything can be historicized irrespective of a society’s own understanding of temporality.¹⁶

Interestingly, the rich literary traditions, the worlds of fiction among Blacks, have always been much more sceptical. In fact, they have often depended to a large degree on a critique of time. In a concise discussion of ‘Black time’, Mbembe tells us:

Everything in the Black novel seems to indicate that time is not a process that one can simply register as what we might call a ‘succession of the present.’ In other words, there is no time in itself. Time is born out of the contingent, ambiguous, and contradictory relationship that we maintain with things, with the world, or with the body and its doubles. Returning to Merleau-Ponty, time emerges in ‘the gaze directed toward oneself and toward the Other, the gaze that one casts on the world and the invisible. It emerges out of a certain presence of all these realities taken together. (Mbembe, 2017: 121)

But race intervenes in this gaze – modernity’s imperial frame – locking the Other in her supposed primordial nonmodern origins waiting to be brought up to the present despite her absolute Otherness.

This European modern ‘time’ is a code that stands for a particular formation of modern/colonial consciousness into which Other notions of time had to be translated/supplanted. It is here that the many (secular) narratives recorded of tribal primitive humans and savage Others which arose in the 16th century is rooted. It is worth remembering that the noun primitive was derived from the Latin adjective primitivus and became a noun to refer to aboriginal people in a land visited by Europeans. Interestingly, the transformation of the word coincides with the advent of the word civilization to measure and determine uncivilized Anthropos.¹⁷ We do not have the space for too detailed a hearing of these narratives but it suffices to say that the code of Eurocentric time becomes not only a measure of progress through history, but also of humanness. The first element in the imperial frame calling for decolonization is this working notion of time (assumed in earnest by the 19th century though unthinkable without the European Renaissance) which insists that all happens homogeneously, in one timeline and in an abstract and undifferentiated space.

The avowed secularism of modernity/coloniality come the Enlightenment relied upon the trope of moving forward, of progress, which was a Christian teleology. It re-formed and emerged out of the secular orientation of the European Renaissance to mature three centuries later in the Enlightenment, and entered Western vocabulary as we have come to know the word.¹⁸ Ultimately, this historical trajectory, this forward movement of time universalized the narcissistic celebration of the inward history of Europe as History per se.

Yet the continuous flow of universal historical time within the rhetoric of modernity does not belong to nature any more than the notions of progress or development are the same everywhere. Interestingly, in her pioneering work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt notes that after the Second World War ‘Western’ historical time came to a halt. That ‘Western culture’s innermost structure, with all its beliefs, had collapsed about our ears’. There was an experience of a disoriented time. However, a loss of faith in time was now more ardently expressed as capitalist progress (another category connoting a unidirectional movement through time). Europe became ‘an agent moving to overturn the present’ (Hartog, 2015: 5). Despite the overwhelming experience of disorientation, there was still an assumed universal ‘present’, instituted in Europe, that constituted the self-assurance of European agency to overturn it.

Unlike the cosmology in Theeb, there are no hungry wolves here. Wounded in the desert, it is The Stranger who asks for mercy and patience on the vulnerable Theeb’s behalf.¹⁹ He says in one scene, ostensibly the night after the murder of Theeb’s brother, ‘God has sent me so that the beasts do not get you.’ Above, Theeb has nourished the beast to whom The Stranger pleads and who resides in an elsewhere on more than one occasion: when and how? The revered Sheikh Abou Hmoud begat two sons. Hussein, the eldest, who is killed by the Stranger. And Theeb – the wolf begotten – who must ultimately kill The Stranger. What regulating principle can we discern in this actualization of The Stranger’s quip, ‘the wolf begets a wolf’, to which we, as viewers, bear witness? Universal and homogeneous time is cosmologically inadequate for ordering or sustaining the enchanted, pluriversality within which Theeb exists. The presence and flow of non-linear time must be spoken of in the plural.

Disrupting ‘time’ in order to document subaltern pasts must also be tied to a larger effort to make the world more socially just. Edward Said (1993: 1) has said:

Appeals to the past are among the most common of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps. This problem animates all sorts of discussions – about influence, about blame and judgement, about present actualities and future priorities.

It is culture – the story of ‘we’ – that organizes and sustains communal memory. But culture as a malleable fabric of social life, as a result of human interaction and exchange between difference, is fertile ground for challenging notions of ‘then’ and ‘now’. Disrupting the Eurocentric narratives of the Orient, the Third World, of Africa, of the self and other, replacing them with either a more playful or a more powerful new narrative style is a major component in the process of dismantling the imperial frame. This kind of work has been carried out by dozens of scholars, critics, and intellectuals in the ‘peripheral’ world. This effort has been called the voyage in and insists on an integrative view of human community and liberation.²⁰ Theeb continues in this tradition.

The point is that the history of all cultures is the history of borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable; just as with the Enlightenment’s early massive indebtedness to the Islamic sciences, Muslims had borrowed from India and Greece. Culture, like history, is ‘never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures’ (Said, 1993: 260). This is the universal norm. And not the distanced enclosures of ‘races’, nations, states, civilizations and cultures enunciated and instituted by modernity/coloniality. However, once put in prose (or on 16 mm film), a universal concept such as history carries within it traces of what Hans Georg Gadamer would call ‘prejudice’.²¹ Prejudice in this sense is not a conscious bias but ‘is a sign that we think out of particular accretions of histories that are not always transparent to us’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: xiv). But at the heart of European culture during the many decades of imperial expansion lay an undeterred and unrelenting Eurocentrism. This accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories; it studied them, it classified them, it verified them, and it allowed ‘European men of business’ the power ‘to scheme grandly’ (Calder, 1981: 14). But it also subordinated them ‘by banishing their identities, except as a lower order of being, from the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe’.

This cultural process has to be seen as a vital, informing, and invigorating counterpoint to the economic and political machinery at the material centre of imperialism. This Eurocentric culture relentlessly codified and observed everything about the non-European or peripheral world, and so thoroughly and in so detailed a manner as to leave few items untouched, few cultures unstudied, few peoples and spots of land unclaimed’ (Said, 1993: 267–8). All that was dominated, classified, and violently claimed, however, had to be placed within the dated grid of Eurocentric time which took European historical progression as universal. The allegedly universal thought that was/is central to pretensions of a supreme European culture and a legitimate Eurocentrism was always already modified by particular histories, but nonetheless attempted to conceal the violent mechanisms required to universalize Eurocentred epistemology. The project of concealment is still quite pervasive today.

Conceiving of time as it exists in Theeb – recognizing the rupture in the temporal rhythms of life caused by the ‘iron donkey’; the Bedouin unawareness of the catastrophic war being waged nearby; and The Stranger’s intuitive comprehension of circular time where the Wolf begets a wolf who would be responsible for his death – opens up the possibility of coexisting temporalities, of an orientation towards pluri- and interversality. And within this temporal system, time here is enchanted insofar as its regulating principle is recognized as residing in an elsewhere, not necessarily divine but certainly not empty or homogeneous. Time is unpredictable and somewhat inaccessible, and therefore ‘always represents a heterogeneous, irregular, and fragmented region of human experience’ (Mbembe, 2017: 122). This does not mean that there is no distinction between before and after or that the attempt to construct them is meaningless. It is instead to argue for the predominance of a paradoxical time, one that is never fully or with empirical certainty rooted in the present, nor is it ever completely isolated from the past or the future. Free of the hostage situation that the Western idea of time, and the belief that there is one single temporality (Western-imagined fictional temporality) has imposed on the world, we are presented with the opportunity to advance the project of pluriversal and interversal decoloniality. We can connect and bring together in relation ‘local histories, subjectivities, knowledges, narratives, and struggles against the modern/colonial order and for an otherwise’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 3). There is the possibility of time(s) of differential duration, of disjuncture and simultaneity.

Taking the option of Quijano’s desprenderse,²² of ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2009, 2011a, 2011b), means to think Other than this progressivist and self-serving understanding of ‘universal’ disenchanted time, which the blurred distinctions between past, present and future in Theeb point to. The ‘present’ as an experience of time is worth thinking closely about in the context of Euro-America’s passing supremacy. Human, that is, social formations are not necessarily converging towards a single point. Our notion of ‘time’ must ‘harbor the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent but interlocked, paradoxical’ (Mbembe, 2000: 16). We are in a context today in which that once-supreme future horizon of Europe’s global replication is still foreclosed to Other places, races, and peoples, while the grip of the past – the colonial era – is receding. The possibility of replicating Western modernity as the ultimate goal in formerly colonized lands and among formerly colonized subjects, whether in the postcolony or postmetropole, is becoming increasingly absurd. The cracks in the imperial frame which sustain such pretensions are, on the other hand, expanding. This is an emerging time (Mbembe and Roitman, 1995). The option that decoloniality offers is one of delinking from the options articulated by modernity/coloniality and successfully established as the only available choices.

Space

In Theeb, the vastness of the desert is met with the violent intrusion of the iron donkey – the train – causing a reappraisal of ‘our’ space, home, etc., for the people of the Hejaz. However, in a scene when Theeb and The Stranger are crossing the desert at night, Theeb asks The Stranger how he tracks with the stars. The Stranger replies, ‘put the North star between your eyes and the South star between your shoulders’. With the stars as celestial bearings, there is an instinctive sense of cosmological unity between earth and sky; an exchange of extra-terrestrial resources for the journey. With The Stranger’s recognition of the desert’s inherent relation to the stars, space and direction are conceived on a planetary scale.

The invention, description and explanation of the North Atlantic Anthropos around the 16th century dislocated and projected onto the rest of the planet a spatial separation between ourselves and the cosmos. In the rhetoric of modernity, homogeneous, linear calendrical time was met with the concept of worldly²³ ‘space’ working to mediate and obliterate ‘the changing energies of the seasons, the circulation of the Sun and the Moon, and their impact in our daily living’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 212). Time became empty, nature became ‘brute’ and ‘stupid’; both were disenchanted and, ultimately, under the sovereign will of a small province of the planet, if not a select community within that province.²⁴ Both time and space become ‘ours’, so to speak, to be mastered and possessed. Consistent with the policy of ignorance in the material and epistemic perfidies of empire, indigenous notions of time and space were systematically dismantled. Those spatial and temporal systems which rooted the conquered’s narrative of events that preceded the very (colonized) ‘present’ in which they were telling their stories were also sacrificed for the salvific project of imperialism. The non-Europeans invaded, classified and divided were confronted with a praxis of living and understanding that was not theirs for centuries, but which according to modernity/coloniality became the measure of humanity.

Yet these imperial encounters, however ignorant and self-referential, did not simply ‘mark’ the invaded. Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved with and, more importantly, in one another; ‘none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ (Said, 1993: xxix). This, I think, is as true of contemporary Europe as it is of India or Brazil, despite so much being made of the threat of un-patriotism, and perpetual calls to venerate rigidly contoured national cultures, often at the expense of others. Our notion of ‘space’, place and home, therefore, must introduce a sense of scale allowing for a commitment to pluriversality; to the idea of co-existing temporalities and overlapping geographies in the relation and exchange between myriad local histories, subjectivities, territories.

Ultimately, everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which means that we must think, first and foremost, about habitation. But we must also be cognizant of the fact that some people have always planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents, and the forms of sovereignty which have for generations tied them to the land of later, modern, imperial desire. The (de)colonization of space is, after all, not meant as a metaphor but refers in its clearest form to the unsettling project of the repatriation of indigenous land and life (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 28–35). In 1840, for example, a treaty proposed by the British in Aotearoa New Zealand and ‘signed’ by Maori chiefs confirmed their ‘ownership’ of the land in return for acknowledging British ‘sovereignty’. However, as the Colonial Office well knew, these concepts did not have universal meanings and did not exist as such in Maori. ‘The meaning of the treaty remained open-ended. A first interpretation concluded, ‘The shadow of the land goes to Queen Victoria, but the substance remains to us [Maori].’ But later the reverse seemed more accurate: ‘The substance of the land goes to the Europeans, the shadow only will be our portion’ (Hartog, 2015: 35). There were irreconcilable logics of space and sovereignty at work here: one constituted of imperial power seizing ‘undeveloped’ territory, and the other given meaning by concepts such as mana (prestige) and kaitiakitanga (stewardship).²⁵ In the calculus of modernity-coloniality, it was only ever the former that could win.

Theeb brings these twinned logics of space – habitation and expulsion – together. The film is set in the home of the Bedouin which is simultaneously under colonial ‘possession’ of the British, and the disorganization of imperial rule represented by a lost and dependent Englishman. We are also, however, in full knowledge that the beginning of the end of nomadic life is close on the horizon with the imposition of national boundaries by Western powers arriving in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it is clear that Nowar wishes to engage with the deserts of Wadi Rum in more ways than the aesthetic, beyond the desert-as-signifier. Instead we are witness, however fleetingly, to the Bedouins’ relationship with their surroundings – the exacting space of the desert – as absolutely essential to their way of life but alien to the colonial officer, Edward.

In the not-so-distant history of the Atlantic period – especially of the 18th century onwards – the small province of the planet that is Europe gradually gained control over the rest of the world. This ‘gregarious phase of Western thinking’ arrived in parallel to emerging ‘discourses of truth relating to nature, the specificity and forms of the living, and the qualities, traits, and characteristics of human beings. Entire populations were categorized as species, kinds, or races, classified along vertical lines’ (Mbembe, 2017: 16). It was also during this period that people, nations and cultures were conceptualized as individualities enclosed according to a hegemonic raciology, where the collective was perpetually involved in a struggle that could result only in liberty or servitude – the driving dialectic of time. The gregarious phase witnessed a remarkable expansion of the European spatial horizon (the Empire) and an entrenchment of its time, which went hand-in-hand with a shrinking and atomizing of the cultural imagination to which ‘race’ was paradigmatic. In sum, ‘once genders, species, and races were identified and classified, nothing remained but to enumerate the differences between them’ (Mbembe, 2017: 17). The very processes of identification and classification and its vast bodies of knowledge, its epistemic power, were inextricably propelled by the imperialist impulse.

The colonization of space (and time) were of course military, corporate, and state-political activities accompanied by unspeakable forms of violence, pillage, rape, and death. But they were also conceptual, that is, epistemic endeavours in dialogic motion with the stark materiality of modern/colonial discourses. Hegel, for example, could not have philosophized space (notions of interiority and the margins of universal humanity) and time (unilinear, Eurocentric) as he did without the actual colonization of time and space in Germany’s African possessions. In what was perhaps the starkest example of this colonization of space, the triangular trade in humans and other merchandise after 1492 ‘transformed the Atlantic into an entangled economy connecting Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. Relatively autonomous regions became interconnected, part of a vast Oceanic-Continental formation’ (Mbembe, 2017: 14). To be sure, this new structure of circulation required colossal capital, transfer of metals, agricultural products, and manufactures. Equally crucial, however, was the dissemination of knowledge of the human sciences/philosophy which disavowed the humanity of the being-things, the human-merchandise, transferred on ships, instantly excluding them from access to the universal and to history, fixing their superfluous humanity in a timeless space.

Secondly, thinking other than the space of modernity/coloniality requires us to confront the snare that the formal and informal relations of empire made of human sisterhood and brotherhood (Du Bois, 2007: 179).²⁶ Foregrounding the planetary, with the stars as our bearings so to speak, introduces a sense of movement and scale which alerts us to the contingency of the racialized divisions and structure of the world to which institutions, states and societies are heavily invested. It prompts us to speak of connections within space as opposed to monopolistic claims to it.²⁷ And it bespeaks the difficulties and dangers of isolating races, nations and cultures from one another in the name of self-constitution and/or judgement of the Other. As Fanon (2001: 54) would say, humanity can only be recovered by would-be postcolonial subjects through a new relation to the land that ‘will bring … bread and, above all, dignity’. But also through, I argue, an expanded notion of space which makes those attempts to construct impenetrable boundaries of culture and difference seem absurd.

We still have much to learn from those forms of being and (historical) consciousness which were systematically dismantled, marginalized, silenced in the formation of early capitalism and the modern/colonial world. The forms of movement and circulation in space represented by the (sign of the) iron donkey in Theeb exist alongside the variegated forms of allegiance – to gang, to tribe, to father, brother, and Stranger – and a planetary consciousness shown in The Stranger’s knowledge of celestial cartography. In a very different context, the notion of ‘Black consciousness’ during early capitalism equally emerged within new dynamics of movement and circulation – represented by the slave ship, the bureaucratic apparatus and the colonial potentate. While seemingly totalizing and in many cases deadly,

Black consciousness was the product of a tradition of travel and displacement, one rooted in a logic that denationalized the imagination. Such processes of denationalization continued through the middle of the twentieth century and marked most of the great movements of Black emancipation. (Mbembe, 2017: 14)

So strongly felt and perceived, however, is the ontological distinction between West and non-West due to race/culture/religion, that these boundaries are considered absolute. With the supremacy of the distinction²⁸ there goes what Johannes Fabian (2014) calls a denial of ‘coevalness’ in time, and a radical discontinuity in human space. Edward Said was, as he rightly said, always slightly out of place, ‘but that only brought out what was wrong with that place that could not completely accommodate him in the entirety of his character and culture’ (Dabashi, 2015: 53). The harsh reception and treatment of the migrant, a political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, between languages, and between space and time, is our own moral test and pedagogy. In such conditions, Mbembe tells us,

we create borders, build walls and fences, divide, classify, and make hierarchies. We try to exclude – from humanity itself – those who have been degraded, those whom we look down on or who do not look like us, those with whom we imagine never being able to get along. (Mbembe, 2017: 182)

The stateless, alienated and superfluous migrant may well be out of place, excluded as they often are from claims to home and solidarity within ‘host’ communities, but this makes plain the deficiencies and cruelties of our own hostile environments and further reveals the cracks in Western (Christian) civilizational claims.

It is worth remembering, however, the words of the Insurgent Subcomandante Galeano (2015) when he said: ‘basta con hacerle una grieta’ ([it is] enough to make a crack in it). Earlier than him, Aimé Césaire and later Frantz Fanon referred to ‘the cracks in Western Christian civilization as spaces, places, and possibilities of and for decolonization’.²⁹ The stories, cultures and histories of Others which are told and exist in alternative temporal and spatial registers are important for advancing these cracks in (the rhetoric of) modernity/coloniality.³⁰ Merely to insist on one’s own identity, history, tradition, uniqueness, as is fashionable today, may initially get to name some basic requirements for the right to an assured, decently humane existence. But it is a planetary consciousness of human(e) differences that is part of the decolonial horizon as I am attempting to articulate it. This – the planetary – ‘is consciousness of the tragedy, fragility, and brevity of indivisible human existence that is all the more valuable as a result of its openness to the damage done by racisms’ (Gilroy, 2004: 75) which constitute our racialized discourses of (cultural and religious) difference.

To speak of connections within enchanted time and pluriversal space is to conjure fragile images of self and other which historical time has no right to destroy. We are nowhere near ‘the end of history’, Francis Fukuyama’s public concessions notwithstanding, but we are still far from being free of monopolizing attitudes toward it. There is only one world and ‘it belongs to all of us, equally, and we are all its coinheritors, even if our ways of living in it are not the same, hence the real pluralism of cultures and ways of being’ (Mbembe, 2017: 182). Coinheritance being attached, in my reading, to the essential twinned concepts of privilege and burden. We are coinheritors of a planet that was/is not of our making and whose regulating principle lies elsewhere. We are privileged with sentient life and burdened by a constrained stewardship, ethically and morally, in our relationship to the earth and to others.³¹ A decolonial culture, or cultural ethics and politics, could be premised upon an agonistic, planetary idea of space, capable of comprehending the universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other, the ultimate indivisibility of the in-common, the fundamental ephemerality of human divisions – whether state, national, cultural – and, in the final analysis, of the human her/himself.

Self

In a scene towards the end of the film, Theeb and The Stranger are on their way to an Ottoman encampment but are stopped by a group of revolutionaries asking where they are headed and why. When the leader of this band of revolutionaries asks Theeb whether he has seen an Englishman, he replies, ‘what’s an Englishman?’ In Theeb’s question, what is foreign is not that a man might come from a place called England and therefore be an Englishman. But that in the context of this encounter, Englishness is somehow definitive of who/what the colonial officer is. That ‘Englishman’ does not have an inherent signification. Theeb’s confusion derives from how the Other, Edward, has been defined, and not necessarily from the foreignness of the Other himself. Because after all, in the Bedouin space of the desert, as the epigraph to this paper reads, a guest is never to be refused entry or hospitality; whether foreigner, Englishman [colonist?], or otherwise.

Like time and space, it is worth remembering that the human Self did not ‘represent’ a given entity in modernity/coloniality; it was an idea of particularity, constituted by the (epistemic) invention of imperial and colonial differences.³² There are too many instances which elucidate how the human was a product of particular modern/colonial knowledge forms so several brief examples will suffice. Lu Xun, a leading figure of 20th-century Chinese literature, has shown us that the Chinese conception of the body changed with the coming of Western medicine and biology.³³ Ontologically – on the genomic level – of course, the body continues to be similar (with superficial changes) across human distinctions, from time immemorial to today. What changes here is the knowledge that produces the human.

Fanon in a different context has written on the paradox of differences inscribed in/on the body in the colony, and in the narcissism of colonial power which became evident in the relation between medicine (to heal) and colonialism (to harm). The body that at times is locked up, ‘stripped down, chained, forced to labor, beat, deported, and killed’ is the same one that, elsewhere, is ‘cared for, educated, dressed, nourished, and compensated’ (Bayart, 2005: 208). In the colony the subject that receives care is the same one that, elsewhere, is the object of mutilation. But all was undergirded by working knowledge of what constituted the human, when, where and how, in the face of overwhelming imperial interests. Similarly, the colonial encounter with the indigenous of the Americas, racialized as Indians, or the sub-Saharan Africans, racialized as Black, were made of the same matter, the neurons, the nervous system, the same cells of the human organism. All required the same resources of life. But it was the Indians and Blacks who were first understood as lesser beings in relation to the prototype of the (white, male, propertied) human.

In our attempt to cultivate a culture that has worked through coloniality to an elsewhere, the question is not ‘what is human and humanity’ but rather recognizing who invented and defined themselves as human in their praxis of living, sensing, thinking, doing and believing, and applied their self-definition universally to distinguish and classify and rank lesser humans. In short, white Western imperial subjects bequeathed to themselves and their descendants the status of full humanity, the superior subspecies across time and space, fundamentally distinct from: (i) a notion of nature – the life-energies of the biosphere – as ‘brute,’ ‘inert,’ and ‘stupid’³⁴; and (ii) those defined as lesser or nonhuman, as Other absolutely, through the mechanisms of racism and sexism. The local and self-promoted emergence of the model human – white, Christian, male – from the European Renaissance and later the Enlightenment exploited the two spheres of meaning available to demarcate difference: the racial/religious and the sexual.³⁵

What concerns us here is the re-constructive project of thinking about the self and identity, of the human, beyond modern/colonial epistemology and ontology, and the racism and sexism constitutive of its conceptual universe vis-à-vis human differences. That is, how are we to tell stories of self and Other – our working notion of (decolonial) culture – that no longer hide and silence coloniality whilst also pointing to some other horizon? A notion of ‘time’ that is enchanted and emerging, and mapping pluriversal connections across ‘space’ is important, I have argued, for this critical effort. But also, to think about the self, ‘grounded on cosmologies of complementary dualities (and/and) rather than on dichotomies or contradictory dualities (either/or)’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 155). It is to heed Audre Lorde’s (2007: 112) timeless insight that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’. It is, in essence, a call to go back to basics and to recognize what some Andean indigenous thinkers call vincularidad – an integral relation and interdependence among all living organisms.³⁶ To be cognizant of concepts such as ‘race’, ‘nature’, ‘human’, ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘culture’, as conceptual consequences of creative and, as we have seen, destructive human effort. In European (Western) vocabulary, the word human emerges as a negative identity, based on an absence of the Other, an insistence on a fundamental nonsimilarity with those people without the correct god, or a soul, or with dark skin of the night.

But we must remember that each language and civilization has their own ways of naming the human self, standing on two legs, using their hands (to create worlds) and engaging in communicative action with those around them in the long and perpetual process of forming cultures and multiple, simultaneous identities. To insist instead on the priority or radical purity of one’s own voice in our wish to make ourselves heard is to risk either mirroring the imperial hubris of Eurocentrism and its configuration of the world, or remaining rooted in a world constructed out of warring essences. In both these scenarios imperialism courses on, as it were, belatedly in different forms. So, we are left with a question of how a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism, coloniality and its borders is to imagine its own past. Getting beyond the self-indulgence and fearful fragility of narrowly defined identities is key. And I think there is a great deal of promise in getting beyond them. There is the possibility of a universalism that is not limited or coercive, against the insistence that all people or cultures have only a single identity. That an Englishwoman or Englishman can only be so according to a list of opaque qualities and attributes, physical or otherwise.

There is the recognition of the universal as a site of a multiplicity of singularities. For those who have made the voyage in such as Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor, the universal is defined through the register of singularity. For both, there is no absolute universal. The only universal is ‘the community of singularities and differences, a sharing that is at once the creation of something common and a form of separation’ (Mbembe, 2017: 158). In this recognition, there is the possibility of that which Adolfo Albán Achinte (2008: 85–6) presents as re-existence, understood as

the mechanisms that human groups implement as a strategy of questioning and making visible the practices of racialization, exclusion and marginalization, procuring the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity and self-determination, while at the same time confronting the bio-politic that controls, dominates, and commodifies subjects and nature.

There is, in short, the possibility of a new construction of the world rooted in a revised relationship with alterity, in full knowledge of what has been inherited from modern/colonial raciology in our relationship with singularity and difference, self and Other.

‘Differences’, as Salman Sayyid (2014: 28) tells us,

are not mere obstacles to be overcome but are rather constitutive of identity itself. Difference is the condition of the possibility of identity. Thus, to resort to dialogue as a means of transcending differences would imply the erosion of the identities constituted by the articulation of those differences. The erosion of identity cannot escape being a violating act; the more deeply etched and fundamentally drawn the identity, the more likely its loss would be felt as a violation.

The racist, self-congratulatory narcissism embedded in the charges of so-called ‘identity politics’ levelled at racial/cultural Others are premised on this violation. That it is an alleged erosion of racial/cultural identity by an overabundance of insoluble differences that justifies their racism, culturalism, xenophobia and violence.³⁷

Fanon’s thoughts on the two contradictory logics of the colonial potentate are instructive here. The first logic consisted in not accepting difference, and the second in refusing similarities. In hoping that the colonized would imitate it, while also prohibiting such imitation, the colony was transformed into ‘the very figure of the “anticommunity,” a place where, paradoxically, division and separation (what Fanon calls the “principle of reciprocal exclusivity”) constituted the very forms of being together’ (Mbembe, 2017: 107).³⁸ The colonial potentate was a narcissistic power which annulled the possibility for the emergence – or at least the recognition – of an autonomous subject within the colonial context. And ‘anticommunities’ are not necessarily a thing of some less civilized, less modern, past.

Srinivas Aravamudan (2012) reminds us that throughout its history, European thought has tended to conceive of identity less in terms of mutual belonging to a common world than in terms of a relation between similar beings – of being itself emerging and manifesting itself in its own state, or its own mirror. This is a fundamentally racist logic which goes to the heart of the idea of the human and supports a high degree of stupidity and cowardice. It is the logic of a person who, as George Bataille puts it,

attributes to some external sign a value that has no meaning other than his own fears, his guilty conscience and his need to burden others, through hatred, with the deadweight of horror inherent in our condition. … Men hate, it would seem, to the same extent that they are themselves to be hated. (2008: 73)

The thought of Du Bois, Césaire, Fanon, Dussel, Wynter, Lugones, Mignolo and Mbembe, amongst many others, and their concern for those inferiorized, racialized as Other, does not argue for or lead to secession from the world. Rather, it affirms its plurality and militates for the necessity of making it thrive. It was/is a crucial counterweight to modernity/coloniality’s monopoly on the universal, insisting instead that Euro-America is not the world but only a part of it.

On the level of the body, those archaic gestures in the colonial world (to kill, rape, pillage, brainwash, etc.) constituted the accursed share of the colony. Césaire – and later Fanon – have explained that the beneficiaries of imperial raciology amputated their own humanity in the process of excluding the Other; that the colonizer who insists on ‘seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, tends objectively to transform himself into an animal’ (Césaire, 2000: 33, 41). By contrast, thinking of the self decolonially is to take seriously the notion that each person is a repository of a portion of intrinsic humanity. That there is an irreducible and indomitable share (of humanness and of the world) which belongs to self and Other – to all. Aimé Césaire for one struggled his entire life to place racism and colonialism, with all its false names, on trial in order to cultivate a place of permanence where the indestructible core of the human-being would be made manifest. A place in which a new ‘we’ could reside and which could bear witness to the rise of humanity and to the deeply held conviction that ‘humans, no matter where they are, have rights as human beings’ (Césaire, 2005: 69). But

there is no relation to oneself that does not also implicate the Other. The Other is at once difference and similarity, united. What we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share from the beginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share. (Mbembe, 2017: 178)

Thinking this way means to make absurd notions of self, alterity, and identity obstinately rooted in debates about mind/body, masculine/feminine, and –above all – nature/culture dichotomies, conveniently bracketing uncomfortable difference on the losing side in the hope of maintaining some level of coherence in self-definition. Instead, it is to exploit structural closure to insist that we are each of us guarantors for the Other’s share. Perhaps most importantly, being in the world, with all its natural and human multiplicity, does not even begin with the self necessarily. Time, space and self all fundamentally implicate the Other and nature: in Other presents, connected geographies and cosmologies, with a share of the world mutually guaranteed. We are making a demand for re-existence, recognizing the principle of vincularidad in our unconditional relationship to humanity and to an increasingly precarious planet.

Concluding Remarks

As if to condense the theoretical triad I have presented together in a single experience, Naji Abu Nowar’s account of filming with the Bedouin of the desert region of Southern Jordan is useful. He has spoken of the difficulties of entering and adapting to the Bedouin ‘rhythms of life’ in the harsh conditions of the desert.³⁹ On the level of the body, life must take place at a slower pace because there is a need to conserve energy, to keep from sweating. Nowar’s expectations of what could be accomplished in the time of day had to be revaluated, accustomed as he was to the rapidity of movement and access in ‘modern’ society. Things simply took longer. The limits on movement and progress in the making of the film due to the conditions meant that space – the vast territory of the desert – was made to seem insurmountably massive, and came with an appreciation of the secondariness of the body to the commands of nature. Exhaustion, dehydration, stroke, hunger, thirst could not be invented or philosophized away. No epistemic operation can remove us from the fragility of our embodiment.⁴⁰ In sum, time was simultaneously ‘long’ (insofar as the pace of work-life had to be slowed) and ‘short’ (insofar as less could be accomplished in comparison to ‘normal’ time because of the heat). Space was at once overwhelmingly big because it could not be traversed with ease and came with the unavoidable costs of caution and fatigue, but also intimate given that human physiological limits required a close proximity to other travellers for safety, navigation, and survival.⁴¹ Finally, the individual self was caught in the midst of these temporal and spatial conditions, facing the twin equalizers of desert conditions and physical limits of the human.

I have attempted here to offer some tentative co-ordinates for cultivating a culture decolonized – for smashing the imperial frame – towards an unconditional relationship with humanity. It has been to offer a counterweight to what Césaire (1987) calls European reductionism:

that system of thought, or rather instinctive tendency, on the part of an eminent and prestigious civilization to take advantage of its prestige by creating a vacuum around it that abusively reduces the notion of the universal to its own dimensions, that is to think the universal only on the basis of its own postulations and through its own categories.

A transformation of a Fanonian social consciousness beyond national consciousness with all its latent, imperial, racist logic is a pressing task. The goal enunciated by Fanon – the coming of a new human being – requires us to free ourselves from the non-human conditions in which racial and sexual lines have been drawn within Eurocentric epistemic universality. The results of which have all too often been to ‘amputate man [and woman] from the human and isolate him [and her], permanently, in a suicidal pride if not in a rational and scientific form of barbarism’ (ibid. Césaire, 1987) Modernity/coloniality is no longer, if it ever was, heuristically supreme. It is long overdue that Europe, Euro-America, Euro-Israel exit the certainty of philosophizing a mythical self and Other for themselves and re-enter history. For the world at large, there is no model, no template, and no blueprint. We are in search of a political ideal. And Europe’s decentring serves only to further confirm what many have long known.

What are the potential possibilities and dangers of the shifting centre of gravity of the world? Where do notions of ‘culture’ and ‘race’ fit on decolonial horizons? There is no Archimedean point beyond these questions from which to answer; there is no perspective outside the actuality of relationships among cultures, among unequal powers, among us and others. ‘We are, so to speak, of the connections, not outside and beyond them’ (Said, 1993: 65).

To conclude, Achille Mbembe says that:

To practice racism today even as it is rendered conceptually unthinkable, ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ have replaced ‘biology.’ Republican universalism is presented as blind to race, even as non-Whites are locked in their supposed origins. Racialized categories abound, most of them feeding into everyday practices of Islamophobia. But who among us can doubt that the moment has finally arrived for us to begin-from-ourselves? While Europe goes astray, overtaken by the malaise of not knowing where it is within and with the world, is it not time to lay the foundation for something absolutely new? (Mbembe, 2017: 7)

But the foundation has already been laid of course. With the arrival of Europe’s twilight and its attendant anxieties about where it is within and with the world, the many alternative ways of seeing, being, telling, and writing which have always existed must be made to re-exist. This struggle begins, I have argued, from the ethical and moral venture to remember, and to reconceive time, space and self along the foregoing lines.

Footnotes

Notes

Muneeb Hafiz is an Associate Lecturer and PhD Candidate in International Relations/Decolonial Studies at the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University.

References

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