In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture by Kwame Anthony Appiah
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Kwame Anthony Appiah successfully describes the difficults involved in relating lived experience in Africa with the globalized agency of Africa as a group. Without hammering the post-colonial apparatus too heavily, Appiah navigates the difficult area of defining what makes Africa Africa from as many points of view simultaneously. For Appaih the post-colonial condition is characterized by a variety of competing identities, groupifications from tribal, regional, racial, national, ethnocentric, religious, eurocentric and otherwise. All of these necessitate that the individual successfully navigate as many areas as possible in order to figure out who they are. Identity is destablized because after we reject nationalism as a modernist aesthetic derived from european identity of the 18th+ centuries, what have we got to replace it with? In post-colonial countries, there is a harsh identity that the educated elites begin to have problems with creating — as their uneducated peers do not have access to the same historic basis to define themselves. Yet having a historic basis means losing the very centeredness of those “good ole days” when we were young, and life seemed very clear and stable.
We experience some of this daily, in non-colonized countries as well, but our sense of legitimacy is different. The problem of post-colonialism is that all groupings of identity are competing and yet equally legitimate, in some sense. One can’t deal with the world and completely ignore how the world sees one. The problem is complicated by the fact that many Africa groups do not identify with one another, coming from incompatible worlds, speaking a variety of incompatible languages with incompatible customs. The epilogue Appiah provides detailing his father’s identity and how his father’s death presented a complicated problem dealing with different competing sensibilities of how to honor the man and yet submit to the variety of powers that be.
All in all, a good read, one which suggests that the solution is of yet an unnamed composite identity that only time can seal. Appiah is aspecially adept at navigating the different areas of art, capitalistation, globalisation and identities that characterize a contemporary Africa, a final global limit of capitalist hegemony that is constructed from the top down, leaving the middle confused as to the desired orientation. It’s not a matter of having too many choices, it’s a matter of not even knowing what the proper choice can be, as the competing value systems require constant renegotiation, differentiation and redifferentiation depending on the the multivalience of the identities of the actors on the ground.
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