On the Dazzlement of Postcolonial Imperialism
While the term “postcolonial imperialism” has been in circulation for some time, it has largely been undefined – but assumed to carry an obvious meaning with specific reference to Karl Marx’s theories of primitive accumulation. Joseph Tonda’s book Postcolonial Imperialism addresses this lacuna by giving substance to the concept and bringing it to light.
I choose the terms “bringing to light” and “lacuna” quite intentionally as they relate to Tonda’s key concern with postcolonial imperialism: the notion of dazzlement. In particular, as Tonda notes, “the central idea here is that the truly dazzling and invisible power that lives, circulates, and acts in the darkness or the invisible – including in the darkness or the invisible of the imaginary or the unconscious, in spectral form in the uninterrupted flow of screen-images – is value” (3).
Through dazzlement (confusion, deception, fascination, seduction, and wonder), one’s head spins and vision is disturbed, which leads to hallucinations. These hallucinations affect everyone for different reasons, but they all are tied to the pursuit of value. Specifically, postcolonial imperialism’s hallucinations are narratives “of a world colonized by its material, symbolic, noological, and ontological creations, and which ultimately resembles the primitive world caught in the hell of its own ideas” (51).
As someone who engages with questions at the intersection of race, religion, black subjectivity, and gender through the notion of ambivalence, I found Tonda’s book to be a great revelation (in the illumination sense) and a clear challenge (in its brilliant exhortation). Simply put, we, as academics, shouldn’t kid ourselves in thinking that we can just stand outside the spectacle of dazzlement that is our society, because the fear of disappearance is at the heart of postcolonial societies. And, as postcolonial subjects, we participate in our society’s “concern for staging, the concern for brilliance, the concern for the spectacle of dazzlement” (189).
Tonda’s target of critique is postcolonial thought broadly conceived, including postcolonial critique. In particular, Tonda accuses this tradition of being incomplete because, like Narcissus who died through being consumed by self-obsession, postcolonial thought/critique is dazzled by the perverse logic of colonial value despite wanting to separate itself from it. For this reason, even seemingly liberatory concepts of postcolonial thought, such as hybridity and ambiguity, which seek to challenge “the ‘binary thought’ that is the thought of the Same,” do not cross “the theoretical threshold that would have enabled those in the field to see the invasive imperialist and colonizing presence of the Black spectral power introduced into white psychic intimacy by value from the time of the slave trade” (4). That is, postcolonial thought is colonized from within, dazzled, as it were, by its own critique that keeps it from seeing its own continued valuing of value that is constituted through what Tonda calls the colonialism of value.
Dazzled and Bamboozled
Here I am reminded of another context where dazzlement is critiqued, one that also draws on the intersection of race, black subjectivity, spirituality, and social criticism. I am referring to Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), a satirical black comedy-drama.
The film follows Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated, frustrated television writer who creates an intentionally racist modern minstrel show featuring Black performers in blackface, hoping it will fail and get him fired. Instead, the show becomes a ratings success, exposing the American entertainment industry’s willingness to profit from racial stereotypes.
As the show’s popularity grows, Delacroix becomes consumed by its success while those around him grapple with its harmful impact. The situation spirals into violence and tragedy, forcing him to confront the consequences of his actions. Through its biting satire, Bamboozled examines racism, media exploitation, and the enduring legacy of racist imagery in American entertainment. Although it received mixed reviews and underperformed commercially upon release, the film has since been recognized as a cult classic and was added to the American National Film Registry in 2023.
Lee critiques Black Americans for their complicity in their own demise, as represented by not only Delacroix, but also Manray, who is one part of the show’s starring duo. Manray is dazzled by the success that puts him and his skills in the spotlight. That is, Manray and Delacroix find value in being recognized for their talents that otherwise get passed over in a racist world.
Tonda draws similar conclusions with respect to postcolonial imperialism’s indifference to any form of morality, except that of value itself, which is a violence from which it is impossible to break. In Lee’s film, both Manray and Delacroix die brutal deaths, and that is the narcissistic price that they pay for their spotlight moment. For Tonda, the impossibility of escaping the violence of value (its dazzlement) is “due to the fetishism of diplomas and university titles,” all of which continuously advance “the specter of whiteness” (157). After all, even in Bamboozled, it is the one White member of the Mau Maus (the militant rap group who decry the minstrel show) who is not killed by the police. In other words, for both Tonda and Lee, the problem is recognition, and particularly the kind that values the specter of whiteness.
In Bamboozled, even when Manray removes his blackface and performs as himself, he still wants recognition – he wants to remain in the limelight for his coming to political consciousness. In doing so, however, he proves that whether in blackface or in his own black face, he is still an object of the white gaze. In Tonda’s terms, Manray’s mediated coming to consciousness is problematic because it is participating in a dazzling transitional transaction that is shaped by the dynamics of colonial value and its violence.
Drawing on some classical theories of image and reality, Tonda’s argument is that the dazzlement is the real, not the image of it, and this is the problem with postcolonial thought in particular. That is to say, just because we are able to critique our disciplines from the inside, challenging hegemonies, that “does not lead to a break with the colonial schemas of the discipline” (158). Delacroix called it satire; Tonda calls it postcolonial imperialism – they both dazzle in their application, but in the end sell the same thing that binds us to a problematic logic of exploitation.
Are we not able to escape this register of exploitation that renders everything we do value-driven? Do we really fear disappearance so much that even in our critique we simply want to dazzle, in order to remain relevant and in the limelight? Tonda seems to think so.
Whither Political Theology?
Reading Tonda’s book, I was left with a sense of wonder and bafflement; perhaps dazzled, myself, by not only his methodology, but also the breadth and depth of his scholarship, moving seamlessly between disciplines, theorists, geographies, and visualizations. This includes the way in which he delivers his core thesis so simply; it was refreshing. The book itself works to undo dazzlement, not to bamboozle but to illuminate.
Practitioners of political theology must interrogate recognition, which traditionally functions as a positive concept in liberatory politics. Tonda’s disturbing argument and critique is that recognition in the society of dazzlement is predicated on a negative desire. There is no Levinasian or Ubuntuist sense of recognition. One is already part and parcel of what is being recognized. What does this mean for scholarship? Will we just remain in postcolonial imperialism ad infinitum?
What then of political theology, which fashions itself as a liberatory discourse of sorts – thinking specifically here of our Political Theology Network and its many tributaries of liberation discourse? The critique of dazzlement has implications for our praxes, both inside and outside the teaching machine. In invoking the lure of dazzlement and the master it serves, as an African(ist) in still a largely white academy, how can I escape dazzlement without being made irrelevant because I am not dancing in the manner of Manray?
When I bring religion to my department, Political Studies, I do so dazzlingly because I believe that religion matters. When I challenge theologians in my context to think more politically about religion, I also have to do so dazzlingly because power needs to be scrutinized even more in a context where reference to the divine is supposed to settle matters. Moreover, these are both disciplines that have fractured histories with colonial imperialism. Decoloniality, as a pushback against the limits of postcolonialism, has been my go-to battle armor, not without its limitations also. However, Tonda has given me something to think about in terms of how even this most recent liberatory discourse runs the risk of dazzlement when it becomes a floating signifier. In reading Tonda, I found myself asking whether there is a point in any of it?
In damning us to the fact that we are complicit in our own dazzlement despite being aware of the very beastly nature of recognition, Tonda exhorts us to think about how we are so caught up in value-chasing that we can’t see beyond value. Drawing on Marx and developing his own argument on how value is central to capitalist modes of production, Tonda reminds us that what we are after is value as presented to us, not as it is in itself. Whether this is status, money, or whatever we think it is, it is also part of the academic drill, including liberatory discourses. All this stings, and that is part of the dazzlement.
In his Afterword to Tonda’s book, Peter Geschiere provides a redemptive element to Tonda’s dazzlement as blindness. Geschiere notes that “through its shock [dazzlement] allows us to see into the depths of things” to perceive “that which remains invisible to ordinary mortals” (193). Furthermore, Geschiere notes a second glimpse of hope in the anger of Tonda’s work. He notes that “there is also a real rage toward these dazzlements, which block the vision of people” (194). I am more convinced by the rage-hope than visionary-hope in this context. Tonda’s book made me enraged at myself, at a system that dazzles without discrimination while maintaining an old discrimination constantly in flux. Now, I just have to figure out what to do with this rage.
