In his book The Location of Culture, first published in 1994, Bhabha argues against understanding culture as a unified entity, and therefore cultural borders as something pre-existing or given. Instead, he sees in them fields for negotiating differences. In the act of interpretive appropriation, he claims, displacements and, thus, ambivalences are produced. Bhabha speaks of an ‘intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code’ (Bhabha, 1994: 37). Here, he sees the formation of a new type of ‘international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity’ (Bhabha, 1994: 38; italics in original). He understands hybridity as an unintended consequence of colonial power, which yields capacity for action and the potential for subversion. Thus, ‘the display of hybridity – its peculiar “replication” – terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery’ (Bhabha, 1994: 115; italics in original). Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity is not simply to be understood in terms of cultural intermixture. Rather, he explicitly refers to a hierarchical and asymmetrical power constellation. Nevertheless, how far Bhabha’s invoked practices of mimicry and hybridity can succeed in damaging or even overriding postcolonial power constellations? Bhabha is criticized, justifiably so, for a limited understanding of cultural artefacts in terms of human relationships, leaving out the material and structural aspects of postcolonial inequality and class-related power relations, like anticolonial resistance, which is articulated time and again through uprisings and liberation movements (see, for example, Parry, 2004).9
In the following sections of this chapter, I will look specifically at Africa and Latin America, and will appreciate some of the contributions to postcolonial theory that have arisen in these continents.
African contributions to postcolonial theory
As in other regions of the Global South, there have also been several strands of thought in Africa that deal with colonialism, its aftermath and today’s postcolonial constellation. They usually reflect the specific situation on this continent, but also have numerous links to the debates on the aftermath of slavery and its overcoming in the Caribbean and the United States. This connection has prompted the Cameroonian philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997a) to draw attention to the early interactions and to point out that postcolonial African philosophy is not confined to those authors who are at home in Africa.10
A striking example of the period between the Second World War and the beginning of decolonization in the 1950s is the intellectual exchange between the poets and philosophers Aimé Césaire, who came from the Caribbean, and Léopold Senghor, who led Senegal into independence and in 1960 became its first president. To both of them the anticolonial current of the Négritude, which was first understood as a cultural-political response to racism in the metropolis of Paris and the French colonies (Senghor, 1964; Césaire [1950]2000), has a long history. According to them, the blacks are distinguished by their integrative spiritual qualities, which were opposed to the rational features of Western populations, and were regarded as equal or superior. The representatives of the Négritude confronted the Eurocentric legitimations of white domination with the violent and destructive regime of their actual practice. Senghor, in particular, emphasized the practice of Africa’s own cultures with its firm social network and the communitarian way of life and production as sources of its own strength. This still happened in an idealizing and homogenizing manner. Instead of referring to Greek antiquity as in the case of Western philosophy, the representatives of the Négritude purposefully went back to African knowledge archives, especially the high civilization of Egypt, as well as the legends, myths and proverbs of African peoples.11 The movement of the Négritude, which had its place in the French colonies, corresponded to the so-called Pan-Africanism in the British colonies (see Geiss, 1974).
Another early example, drawn directly from African archives of knowledge, is the Ubuntu’s current of thought, which is prevalent mainly in southern Africa (see Ndaba, 1994; Gade, 2011; Kuwali, 2014). It was a spiritual source of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and was incorporated into the transitional constitution of South Africa after apartheid had been ended. Ubuntu can be interpreted similarly to the Négritude in response to the dehumanizing experiences during the colonial period. According to Ubuntu, humanity is a quality that manifests itself in virtues such as hospitality, care, respect and community orientation. In addition, according to Ubuntu, people are not only linked to each other, but also to non-human beings. It requires the help of the ancestors to restore a lost balance in the world of being, in order to achieve justice, understood as harmony and order. At the centre of the thought current of Ubuntu there is a social practice oriented towards community and harmony, as such it can also be understood as communitarian ethics (see Metz, 2007).
Négritude and Ubuntu are different parts of thought currents that the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka (1981; 1988; 1990) critically called ethnophilosophy. Though he saw in ethnophilosophy an attempt to oppose the racist stereotypes by the ethnographic reconstruction of traditional belief systems and forms of culture and to offer them a positive alternative, it seemed to him as a naïve escape into an idealized precolonial past. He regarded the idea of closed African thought systems, their communality and their radical demarcation from Western rational thought as the mirror image of a racist-colonial tradition. On Négritude, and ethnophilosophy in general, Odera Oruka criticizes the fact that the people living in Africa supposedly attribute homogeneous African personality characteristics on a racial and tribal basis.12 Cameroonian writer Achille Mbembe, in his work Critique de la Raison Nègre (Mbembe, 2013), also warns about giving the supposedly black skin the status of a biologically based fiction in the fight against the racism of whites, and takes it as the basis of a specific kind of African reason.
In an earlier piece, which is now seen as one of the classical writings of postcolonial theory, Mbembe (2001) had already intensively discussed racism as an enduring basis for postcolonial rule. Shortly afterwards, with critical reference to the French philosopher Michel Foucault ([1969]2002), he emphasized that the European project of modernity is to be seen in a constitutive context with slavery and colonization, civilization and barbarism. According to him, the counterpart to modernity is the lack of rights of the colonized, whose life in the eyes of the conquerors was nothing but a form of animal life. It was a kind of ‘necropolitics’ aimed at ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations’ (Mbembe, 2003: 14). In the postcolonial present, this constellation continues in a modified form. The postcolonial discourse in Africa – according to Mbembe in a later published