ABSTRACT
What analytical perspective should we as scholars develop to think of African actors’ daily experiences, struggles, and engagements with the postcolonial state without falling into the trap of afro-pessimistic accounts, that is, without employing the terminology of African “crisis” and victimhood? In response to this question, Simon Gikandi has recently called for a new “language” that will allow us to account for the actual lived experiences of Africans, to take seriously their capacity for innovation and invention, and hence to consider them as “subject(s) already engaged in powerful and imaginative gestures of copying and survival” (2010: xvi). Although we very much agree with Gikandi’s critique of afro-pessimist accounts of Africa and Africans, we view a similar danger in overly stressing the opportunities for cultural innovation and creativity open to Africans in a historical era shaped by particular forms of globalization and neoliberalism.
