Black diplomacies: colonialism, race and the poetics of mediating estrangement

Abstract

Drawing upon genealogical studies that conceptualize diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement, this dissertation engages various sites of African estrangement, multiple conceptions of the political and the mediation practices that accompany them. Beginning with an examination of missionary proselytism, proto-colonial humanitarianism and anti-colonial modes of sociality, the dissertation proceeds to engage the specters of colonial governance in the postcolony and uses these insights to problematize the monological conception of diplomacy as a professional practice. Accordingly, the dissertation maintains a critical stance with regard to the regimes of diplomatic/colonial recognition that privilege secularism, statecraft, propriety and racialized bodies and encourages an engagement with diplomatic bodies, sites and aesthetic practices that are often considered undiplomatic as a result of racial and colonial discourses. Through an exploration of the mediatory capacities of objects (and objectified persons), the dead and everyday encounters that illustrate that the 'personal is diplomatic,' the dissertation explores, and in some instances suggests the pursuit of 'amateur diplomacies of everyday life'. It encourages as well, the experimentation with an ethics of encounter and forms of cultural translation or modalities of co-habitation and return that disturb or negotiate the inventions and negations of colonial pasts (and their specters in the present). The insights derived from the problematization and pluralization of the diplomatic in this dissertation are also used to engage in a critique of the new forms of violence and the diplomatic entanglements and sites of estrangement that emerge in the postcolony.