Comments on

"Of Mimicry and Membership"

Johannes Fabian
University of Amsterdam

The topic that James Ferguson takes up in his article is an important one. Moreover, it takes courage to address African expressions of what looks like nostalgia for colonial times because they tend to be politically embarrassing. Such
expressions are by no means new; in fact there were colonial versions, for instance, when West or East Africans under French or British rule expressed nostalgia for German times. African colonial nostalgia had its counterpart to attitudes analyzed by Renato Rosaldo (1989) in his essay on "imperialist
nostalgia." I wrote "what looks like nostalgia" because Ferguson correctly emphasizes that his documents express not regret for a past but claims on a present. It is a present that Africans want to share with the modern world. However, contemporaneity is not a fact; it demands mutual recognition and, more
fundamentally, 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 contemporaneity is too selective. I think he may not sufficiently appreciate that the
study of phenomena such as performative mimicry, if seen in a critical perspective (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 context without which they would not occurpopular 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 relapse into the functionalist or aestheticizing reifications of African "tradition"
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 documentsmembership and global citizenshipmay
need some rethinking because it gives a political, almost constitutional meaning to modernity (as something conditional on admission to a club). The deeper
issue is that contemporaneity 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 premise. Anthropology's contribution toward others achieving contemporaneity is not primarily a moral
one; it is a matter of providing information and knowledge 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 modernity. 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
"modern" societies (as evidenced by high life expectancy, conspicuous consumption, etc.) is another.
Put differently, and maybe utopically, 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 Culture. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
Rosaldo, Renato
1989 Imperialist Nostalgia. In Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis.
Boston: Beacon Press.