African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility

Abstract

The “wrongheaded yet amazingly persistent” (117) image of Africa as dark, violent, and desperate has generated a proliferation of other, more hopeful images to disrupt this incessantly pessimistic story. One trope has been to reframe “grin and bear it” as “suffering and smiling” to celebrate the extraordinary resilience of Africans in the face of myriad difficulties. Another turns away from social problems entirely to highlight the cosmopolitan achievements of the continent's elite in art, architecture, and business. Radical social inequality has led to radically bifurcated accounts of the social world. A stark divide stands between a default pessimism and a mandatory optimism that has made hope into one of Africa's greatest resources, complete with its own extractive industry. The challenge for anthropologists is to hold these multiple extremes in view while describing the nonextreme, everyday, mundane ways they are implicated in the reproduction of social life, economic practice, spatial form, and cultural creativity. African Futures takes up this challenge by attending to the multiplicity and intermingling of modes of time reckoning in post–Cold War Africa. In their introductory essay, Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio observe the failure of teleologies like development, modernization, and good governance as both analytic categories and social projects. they note the continuing importance that modernist keywords and their binary pairings (crisis, backwardness, corruption) have as emic concepts in diverse African contexts. The book aims to cultivate a new vocabulary to observe, describe, apprehend, and theorize futurity as plural, open ‐ ended, and nonlinear. Its snapshots of emergent futures that the paradox of permanent crisis, the of futurity, of permanence in the context of forced temporariness, the