Abstract
Accounts on the question of whether intellectual autonomy from colonial culture is desirable or even possible have tended to a pessimism, which we need not accept if we consider, as Remapping African Literature has demonstrated, the material agency of writers in exerting genuinely decolonizing counter-pressures to the forces of an apparatus that seeks to confine them. Because the discourse of African literary criticism has focused on colonial and structural determinism, it misses what I term auto-heteronomy and especially how that is more so defined by a universal regime of production.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking?, 1991.
- 2.
Immanuel Kant and Hans Siegbert Reiss, Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 237. Emphasis in original.
- 3.
It is not my objective to rescue Kant from the critics of the Enlightenment such as Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Enlightenment: A De-Colonial Reading of Kant’s Geography, and Paul Gilroy Gilroy, The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness. I wanted to highlight here the critical project of the essay “Orientation” that has for too long been ignored. Indeed, the idea of abstraction, of the concept purifying itself could be rightly construed as a class dominated concept of a white bourgeois class simply universalizing its own values; however, I hope that my reading of “Orientation” and Kant’s move toward the material and concrete world will serve as the basis for a new far-flung but credible alignment of Kant with Marx, in a way that Kant’s critics may have forgotten or missed.
- 4.
Immanuel Kant and Werner S. Pluhar, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987a).
- 5.
Kant and Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 146.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, p. 200.
- 8.
Kant and Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 146.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Another equivalent of this example is Kant’s notion of a purely rational belief as “signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker can orientate himself on his rational wandering in the field of supra-sensory objects, while the man of ordinary but (morally) healthy reason can use it to plan his course, for both theoretical and practical purposes, in complete conformity with the whole end of his destiny ….” Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking?, p. 245.
- 11.
Kant and Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 146.
- 12.
Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking?, p. 236.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 239.
- 14.
Kant and Pluhar, Critique of Judgment, p. 147.
- 15.
Kant, What Is Orientation in Thinking?, p. 237.
- 16.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, 1848).
- 17.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Globalectics Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ibironke, O. (2018). Conclusion: The Auto-Heteronomy of African Literature. In: Remapping African Literature. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69296-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69296-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69295-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69296-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)