Author:

Abstract

In a move to uncover the colonial legacies in the order of discourse that constructs Africa as Other, Mudimbe encounters a deadlock: how to exteriorize oneself from an order of discourse that already constructs Africa as an exteriority? Using Foucault, he demonstrates the shortcomings of liberation discourses that remobilize colonial notions of African alterity. In trying to untangle these legacies with a Foucauldian methodology, Mudimbe ends up reproducing a gesture already foreseen by that order. Motivated by rejection of an imposed marginality and faced with the impossibility to create a margin from which to produce an emancipated speech, Mudimbe’s philosophy seems to yield only silence. When Sun Ra invests his marginalization, reclaiming his alterity as an African-American person, he goes beyond what Mudimbe criticizes as an idealization of a confabulated Africa. This jazz musician and performer claims to have been sent from space, to the earth, by ancient Egyptians. He remodels the course of history to inscribe Black people in a mythical filiation, that coincides with an outer-space and futuristic outlook. His work appears absurd at first hand but it is, in fact, reproducing the mythical alterity imposed on African-Americans – and by extension Africa, and Black people around the world. Using humor and derision, he pushes the discourses Othering Africa to their extreme and thereby reveals their senselessness. Marginality becomes no longer an imposed burden, but a tool for the dismantling of a disciplinary order of discourse.

Keywords: Mudimbe, Sun Ra, afrofuturism, Foucault, marginality.