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Comments on

  Of Mimicry and Membership

Johannes Fabian

University of msterdam

The topic that James Ferguson takes up in his article is an important one. More-

over, it takes courage to address African expressions of what looks like nostal-

gia for colonial times because they tend to be politically embarrassing. Such

expressions are by no means new; in fact there were colonial versions, for in-

stance , when W est or East Africans under French or British rule expressed nos-

talgia for German times. African colonial nostalgia had its counterpart to atti-

tudes analyzed by Renato Rosaldo (1989) in his essay on imperialist

nostalgia . I wrote what looks like nostalg ia because Ferguson correctly em-

phasizes that his documents express not regret for a past but claims on a pre-

sent. It is a present that Africans want to share with the modern world. How-

ever, contemporaneity is not a fact; it demands mutual recognition and, more

fundam entally , it must be created. It is with regard to the latter that I have some

disagreement with, and see some weakness in, the author's argument. I find

that the attention paid in this article to African cultural production of contem-

porane ity is too selec tive. I think he may not sufficiently apprec iate that the

study of phenom ena such as performative mimicry, if seen in a critical perspec-

tive (that I, for instance, found in the concept of popular culture [Fabian

1998]),

  does not doom us to condescending toward some of the expressions

discussed in the first part of the article. These should be seen in the wider con-

text without which they would not occur—popular song, theater, painting, and

historiography. That some of these attempts at cultural appropriation come out

as pathetic failures should not be excluded a priori and can therefore be stated,

if supported by what we know about them; after all, we would not want to re-

lapse into the functionalist or aestheticizing reifications of African trad ition

that excluded failure by definition (or explained failure away as either deviant

or due to outside intervention).

The terms Ferguson uses for the ultimate aim of the demands and claims

expressed in the quoted docum ents—

membership

  and

  global citizenship

—may

need some rethinking because it gives a political, almost constitutional mean-

ing to m odernity (as som ething conditional on adm ission to a club). The deeper

issue is that contem poran eity is not a right (as suggested when the author

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speaks of the right to be connected, noticed, and attended to ). Rights can be

granted; contemporaneity must be a condition, a prem ise. A nthro polo gy 's con-

tribution toward others achieving contemporaneity is not primarily a moral

one;  it is a matter of providing information and know ledge that is capable of at

least undermining the distancing conceptual apparatus on which ideological

conceptions of modernity are based.

Which brings me to another problematic point in the author's argument.

Ferguson seems to posit that there are certain unequivocal (i.e., nonideological)

blessings of

 m odernity.

 It is one thing to assert that having enough to eat, access to

education, efficient health care, and, perhaps, democratic political institutions

is a blessing; but to posit that the blessings listed are actually achieved in

  m ode rn societies (as evidenced by high life expectancy, consp icuous con-

sumption, etc.) is another.

Put differently, and maybe utop ically, the point in thinking about Africans

and modernity ultimately is not how to assure that Africans get their piece of

the pie but rather when, where, and how the pie is baked so that Africans do not

have to beg for nor demand pieces.

References Cited

Fabian, Johannes

1998 Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Cu lture. Charlottes ville:

University of Virginia Press.

Rosaldo, Renato

1989 Imperialist Nostalgia.

 In

 Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social A naly sis.

Boston: Beacon Press.