Joseph Tonda’s Postcolonialism Imperialism challenges the binaries of much of decolonial studies whilst firmly inhabiting decolonial forms of discourse. It does so by asking readers to see what has been rendered invisible using the book’s own ability to dazzle and confuse: namely, that colonialism is a matter of dystopian exchange in which Blackness colonises the White imaginary of power, sex, and money and – often through the affordances of the digital screen – renders the imagined real, as products to be bought and sold in a capitalist marketplace.
Drawing on his own earlier scholarship, literature, literary theory and his observations of the cultural visions of militia, influencers, and performers, Tonda entrances his readers with grotesqueries in which African and diasporic tropes inform the world. Imaginaries of Black and White are not, says Tonda, opposites or radical others, as in the writings of Frantz Fanon, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Edward Said. Rather they inform one another. They are in relation, although the relationship is exploitative and cruel.
For example, among Tonda’s ‘inversions and reversals…’ are the ‘schemas of the “obscenity” of [reductive] sex-bodies’ that have become ‘…proof of civilisation, humanity or emancipatory liberation from the taboos of primitives (173). This distorted interdependence in which the coloniser’s unconscious is colonised by ‘the Other’ (7) has been invisible to scholars of the humanities and social sciences because we, too, have been blinded by ‘the primitive of Black’ in the academic imaginary.
Tonda centres his study on African societies and their diasporic communities to describe a global tortured, torturing human state from which there appears to be no escape. His metanarrative establishes that we are all entangled as victims of ‘by the perverse complicity of dark values and powers’ (7) of neoliberal capitalist forces.
Reading Tonda’s swirling, evocative prose, his poetic turns of phrase, his use of literary theory, and his extension of the limits of language (in French or the impressive English translation by Cheryl Smeall) created for me the dazzlement he describes (70-72). The shock and squinting confusion of crossing a threshold from light to darkness or darkness to light is Tonda’s central image, and a threshold is named in each chapter title. It is an experience in which the division of reality and illusion, vision and apparitions cannot be immediately discerned. It is also the experience of reading a book that, with insight and sophistication, wheels between encounters with local militia leaders, observations of sex-bodies of film stars and sex workers, conversations with influencers, engagement with artists, and the critique of novels.
I should admit, however, that my appreciation for the way in which form and style illuminate the content is grudging. I am a social historian of religious movements. My training tells me that if a complex and dynamic social situation is worth explaining, it is worth doing so with language that is as precise, straightforward, and jargon-free as possible. I accept that this opinion is rarely held by literary theorists whose terms Tonda employs throughout. Nevertheless, it becomes difficult to be sure that I am seeing what Tonda wants me to see and, therefore, that I am able to evaluate it, when his prose is blinding. (The exception to this is the final chapter on the impact on Black and White scholars of the global inequalities and exclusions of academic research, which is all too recognisable.) It is clear, however, that Tonda’s exploration of the way in which all humans are trapped together in postcolonial imperialism is worth the effort of peering into the dazzling text. My comments can only scratch the surface of this discomforting book.
To make my own sense of the book, I sought to find my own ‘anchor points’ (the title of chapter 2) in things broadly religious. This may be unfair to Tonda. The book is not about religion, and I read across his themes to explore it. Nevertheless, he has previously written on witchcraft, which, along with other religious forms, appear briefly as examples, reference points, and metaphors throughout the book.
Tonda names religion as one of the constraints upon African scholarship (156) and says that all scholars have used ‘the world of religion and magic’ to embed Blackness in white consciousness (17). Black people are distinguished by their primitive reliance on spirits and ritual, and this in turn becomes an exotic appeal that is commodified.
He names Pentecostalism as par excellence the ‘revealer of postcolonial imperialism’ (16). In the same way as globalised capitalist power, Pentecostalism ‘reinforces its magic and induces perverse complicities between indigenous and exogenous logics’ (81). Capitalism and Pentecostalism both extend their influence ‘by harnessing the pagan spirits of witchcraft and the animistic spirits of the fetishism of lightning bolts, of stars, and of other “forces” of nature, in their perverse complicity with guns, bombs, images of the Virgin Mary or Christ’ (97). Images on screens show ‘the deadly Other… the Beast’ (187). Spiritual combat in the name of Christ focuses on money as king, with wealthy pastors exhorting their congregations to give donations to achieve their material goals (188).
Despite Pentecostal rhetoric against indigenous practices, pastors seek protection against witchcraft from nganga and claim power over spiritual marriages. For Tonda’s purposes, religion isPentecostalism, with its mimicry and collusion with anti-witchcraft practices and its materialistic, capitalist consumption. Other forms of religion are not explained or described.
His description of Pentecostalism is recognisable but it is also, in my view, reductive. Pentecostalism is a complex set of movements and institutions with seemingly contradictory elements within it which cannot be so neatly summed up. Does it matter that only the excesses of certain forms of Pentecostalism provide examples for Tonda’s wider concern that so-called ‘Black’ and ‘White’ things are inextricably entwined?
Perhaps not. Even in complex monographs such as this one, authors cannot be even handed in every aspect. Yet, the gathering of disparate evidence and the simplification of complex social movements to make a theory compelling necessarily instrumentalises or reduces some complexity. Tonda’s thought demands this: no doubt the book would be impossibly lengthy and even more dazzling in style without it. Nevertheless, it has consequences that I will lay out.
Beforehand, I’d like to consider the role of digitality – screens, images, media, etc. – in the book. Tonda introduces but does not fully explore how digitality impacts the phenomena he describes. Since the book was first written in French in 2015, it can only sound the alarm on destructive aspects of social media (81) and cannot comment on the rise of artificial intelligence. He analyses the impact of the screen and the way media tropes – of black women’s bodies, of militarised clothing – are exchanged and deranged in the pursuit of sex and money in a world ‘possessed by fantasies’ (180).
Tonda’s recognition that the human condition is particularly warped by the effects of digital technology and the speed of communication seems increasingly prescient with the public access and increased capabilities of forms of artificial intelligence since 2022. The macabre ways in which this binds humanity together in shared, globally circulating images and tropes are forensically examined by Tonda. However, his demonstration of the operation of the digital world provoked the question of whether the terms connected with ‘post/de-colonial’ and ‘imperial’ still provide sufficient theoretical salience in the current age.
Tonda uses ‘postcolonial imperialism’ to indicate that even after the end of settler and exploitative colonies in Africa there is still a command and power structure from a distance: a helpful and plausible engagement with this vocabulary. Yet, the way in which tech companies, in particular, exert their global power seems to be historically distinct from the various imperialisms of the past, even as continuities will always be identifiable, too. I wonder if the decolonial language that remains persuasive to many does not also occlude the mechanisms and values of new forms of power by continuing to push the boundaries of definition of polity formations into an all-encompassing theory.
Tonda is persuasive in his challenge to the boundaries of previous decolonial theories that highlight fissures along constructed racial lines. Perhaps the language of that framing needs to change as well. The screens that dazzle our imaginations and obscure reality and the powers that control them may demand a greater social theorisation of powers of digitality. This book certainly provides persuasive material for it.
The dazzlement Tonda describes evoked in me an emotional reaction of hopelessness as well as confusion. Peter Geschiere’s Afterword asks readers to see Tonda’s visionary rage as a glimmer of hope in a bleak neoliberal world of entangled, commodified images. Geschiere’s desire to seek hope resonated with me, although I was less convinced that Tonda pointed to it.
My scholarship, although much more modest in explanatory scope, has also identified the entangled nature of flawed human endeavours and shared visions even within asymmetrical, racialised relations across societies. By Tonda’s lights, my appreciative enquiries into religious movements may be, at best, naïve and overly material, at worst, a misleading and harmful distraction from the globalised imagined-become-real horrors that he highlights. The roots, causes, and expressions of violence and conflict certainly do require identification and analysis: proper diagnosis is required for cure. However, the reduction of religion to Pentecostalism as a monolithic entity does not allow for a complete diagnosis. It fails to investigate elements that adherents find constructive and life-giving or to identify alternative images and discourses.
I shall continue to muse on Tonda’s insightful analysis. Yet, its focus on negative and harmful forces, without either an articulation of the values or virtues that allow him to make such searing critique or an identification of lived expressions (however flawed) of alternatives, creates nihilistic despair at a moment when visionary hope is ever more necessary.
