I read Joseph Tonda’s Postcolonial Imperialism: A Critique of the Society of Dazzlements in Colombia during an intense period filled with highly mediatized events: the World Cup’s global spectacle; the electoral process which brought a far right political project with strong links to the MAGA movement to the presidency; and, more recently, an earthquake which left hundreds dead and disappeared compatriots in regions of my country where structural racism has historically produced forms of recalcitrant violence, inequality, and marginalization. These are just a few of the events that dazzled, to use Tonda’s dense concept, my mind and heart through the compulsive consumption of screen images while engaging this book’s provocative arguments (to use another of Tonda’s important notions to which I will come back at the end). I want to recall, from the outset, some of these images whose dark constellation will punctuate my remarks on what, in my view, this book’s “extravagant theories” (to use a term from Achille Membe’s blurb on the back cover) help us to think regarding our overwhelming present—as well as on those aspects of its theorizing the social, political, and religious depths and complexities of our current world which I find profoundly unsatisfying and problematic.
The first scene that comes to mind is a bizarre video that circulated on social media when the presidential election season in Colombia was just kicking off. It showed one of the presidential candidates, an extravagant businessman who had made his fortune as a defense lawyer for high-profile clients linked with organized crime, appearing on stage at a rally. He was scolding the logistics people who failed to activate the fireworks that should surround his “spectacular” entrance into the stage. The fireworks machine failed, but the rally speech couldn’t start without them, so the entrance had to be redone after the energetic reprimand from the candidate himself to the backstage operators, as the uncomfortable impasse was filmed in real time. The line of criticism from the left was predictable: the scene demonstrated the rival candidate and his campaign’s lack of substance, content, program, vision, statesmanship, competence, seriousness, and rationality. He was derided and despised as a decadent spectacle, a commodity.
Tonda’s book makes one think that what this sort of critique entirely lacks is an attentiveness to the spiritual, or more precisely, the diabolical dimension of this type of political phenomenon—one in which the strongman’s militaristic discourse, the vertiginous automaticity and saturated production of screen images proper to the digital marketing of spectacle politics, and the voracious racist violence channeled through it in oblique or direct ways, are structurally articulated in a complex assemblage or technology. Tonda’s book helps us see that this assemblage or technology has a “spiritual” character, and it functions within the spectral, automaton-like character of capitalist value production of the digital age, diagnosed through Marx and some strains of Marxist critical theory. Furthermore, the book shows that this spiritual character should be thought in terms of a “perverse complicity” between the archaic magic of racialized peoples and the “supermodern” magic of digital media (38).
Diabolical imperialism, which Tonda calls “postcolonial,” works in the coupling of these two forms of magic:
This dark colonialism, unsurpassable in capitalist society, the society of dazzlements, is that to which the diabolically divine dazzlements of value, in its perverse complicities with the native powers it transforms into “heritages” of national or racial cultural identity, blind the powerful, that is, the white people. (7)
What these two magics would have in common, according to Tonda’s analysis, is the power of possession in the ambiguous meaning of this term, both as being possessed by a spirit (the force of an abstract, invisible entity constituted by its peculiar inhabiting of the threshold between life and death, which incarnates itself in bodies and atmospheres) and as taking possession of a territory, in the movement of expansive imperialist domination. Tonda shows how this ambiguous possession takes place today in a sui generis territory, the human collective psyche (the “imaginary” in Castoriadis’s terminology, which Tonda takes up), through a distinctive medium, the compulsive repetition and circulation of viral screen images.
This means that postcolonial imperialism is not unidirectional but multidirectional, or circular: It is not a one-way imposition of techniques of power and forms of violence from the colonizer to the colonized as separate “social groups” but rather a spectral, expansive materiality that dominates both—their complex relations, political, economical, cultural, etc., in equal measure. And it means also that the forms of racism in this “postcolonial” form of imperialist domination is not dichotomic, as in the assumption of an oppressive pressure exercised by one dominant supremacist people over subaltern racialized communities, but hybrid and mutually reinforcing.
Images of the darkness and abjection of the colonized are operating latently or explicitly as they colonize—that is, take possession of—the psyche of the colonizers, structuring it. Obscene images of wealth and pleasure produced by the colonizers are incorporated with their spectral force in the bodies of racialized peoples in the form of the “sex-body” or the “machine gun-body.” This hybridity is a mutual and circular possession which Tonda characterizes as diabolic, or demonic, because it is guided by an invisible spiritual force, or the force of a “Spirit,” that devours and consumes the bodies of which it takes hold through taking hold of their desire. “This makes civilizing or modernizing capitalism the metonym of Satan, his true ‘Spirit’, which Max Weber had not clearly ‘seen’, dazzled as he was by his dark Enlightenment” (13).
This adventurous and sweeping thesis would be well served by at least a little bit of the patience and judiciousness of archival or ethnographic research or of theological nuance that the “old school” Weber so competently exhibited and that Tonda’s analysis lacks almost entirely. Yet Tonda’s insights remain intriguing, for example, concerning the “epistemic privilege” that he attributes to globalized Christian Pentecostalism in the spiritual battle, or catastrophe, in which Satan attempts to consume us all alive after dethroning God. (When and how did this happen? To answer, one would need more theology than the book offers.)
Charismatic Pentecostalism, which is, from my point of view, the magic of capitalism and from this point of view, the revealer of postcolonial imperialism, in both the sense of the development of photographs and in the religious sense, makes no mistake about this, because it denounces these domains as domains of Satan. (16)
In Tonda’s undeveloped theopolitics, it is as if Satan had to cannibalize himself, or more simply, possess himself, by producing his image and projecting it on an “external” spiritual enemy (a vernacular religious figure or practice) in order to ingest it and hence capitalize, produce value, on the complicity between the “ancestral” and the “supermodern” or “hyper-digitilized” forms of magic. By identifying spiritual enemies in the patron saints or spirits of racialized people’s lived forms of religiosity (Tonda mentions Mami Wata as an example, but the list would be long in Colombia and Latin America: la Guadalupe, el Señor de los Milagros, el Divino Niño, not to speak of the spirits of practices like Santería and other forms of vernacular witchcraft), Pentecostalism in the postcolonial geographies of Africa or Latin America would reveal the spiritual dimension of the battles revolving around late capitalism’s extractive and violent forms of value production. It would do so by showing the spiritual apparatus of capture by which the ancestral forms of magic of racialized peoples is incorporated into the phenomenality of Satan as metonym of racist capitalism, as if by antagonizing the Black other’s religious practices as diabolic it integrates them into that circular haunting, bodily and psychic, between colonizer and colonized through which postcolonial imperialism works; as if independently of the speaker’s intentions (exorcise, denounce, attack, redeem), this battle against the devil, played out vocally by Christian Pentecostalism in its global expansion, would have the epistemic advantage of bringing its potential insight into the speech situation of “postcolonial imperialism.”
This process of satanic auto-cannabalism reveals images of this psychic circuit and battle space: think of the photo ops of Trump being blessed at the Oval Office by his army of evangelical pastors or Bolsonaro’s supporters kneeling, praying, and exorcising the government offices of Planalto, in Brasilia, before they stormed them, violently alleging fraud in an echo of the January 6 attack to the US capitol. Colombia’s recent presidential election could add several photos to this album, since the candidate derided by the left as an “empty marketing product” was also supported by a powerful coalition of urban evangelical megachurches who had proclaimed him the Colombian “Cyrus” (in reference to the pagan king of the Hebrew Bible who contributed to the liberation of the Jewish people from Babylon’s rule and their liberatory return to the promised land, to be then converted to the faithful and rightful).
These spectacles are framed as crusades against the forces of the “devil” that threaten the family and the nation. They draw on ultra-pagan imaginary of animalistic totemism (the leader calls himself the “tiger” leading the herd of his followers), coupled with a militaristic fetishism (the army being characterized as the tiger’s beastly bite), animating an aggressive marketing strategy through digital media, all of which underscores Tonda’s hypothesis regarding the “perverse” alliance of archaic and hyper-technological forms of magic in late capitalism: demonic and beastly dark skin in white evangelical masks.
The Colombian presidential campaign had played out in biblical grammar, with the winning candidate invoking a spiritual battle against the forces of Satan that were denounced as having taken hold of the state in the form of corruption in the public service and linking one of his opponents to Santería (supposedly proven by the immaculate white outfit he happened to wear on several occasions in the last weeks of his mandate). The obscure and delirious psychic stage of this “spiritual battle” is undoubtedly one of the strongest reasons why electorally powerful Christian evangelical churches supported this political project and gave it a decisive push to victory.
Just a few days after his inauguration ceremony on August 7th, 2026, the government of the “Colombian Cyrus” had to face its first challenge in office, the country’s worst and most destructive earthquake in decades. Before activating emergency management protocols, the government considered it essential to declare that Colombia supports Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in Syria, becoming the second country in the entire international community, along with the US, aligned with such a delirious stance in international politics. This extravagant diplomatic move in the midst of highly tragic domestic circumstances can only be understood as a way of appeasing “the Beast,” another of the names of Satan used by Tonda for late capitalism’s “violent imaginary” and its racist libido. Why would you need to appease the “Beast” before caring for your own people after a devastating earthquake?
The links between spiritual war and geopolitical wars, where the racist violence of contemporary capitalism and its military apparatus in a globalized digital age are deploying themselves most fiercely, are very clear in the delirious diplomatic declaration about the Golan Heights. A few days later after the declaration, a battalion of Israeli soldiers presented as rescue workers were operating heavy machinery in the search for survivors under the rubble, exhibiting in unbelievable fashion the “humanitarian” face of an genocidal army. Even if Tonda’s argument with respect to this demonic dimension of “postcolonial imperialism” is profound and insightful, it would be more compelling if he analyzed more carefully globalized techniques of statecraft in late capitalism, following the steps of Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics” as an expansion of Foucault’s “technological” analytics of power relations in forms of colonial and neocolonial statecraft.
In this respect, despite the global reach of Postcolonial Imperialism in thinking through how this complex assemblage of spirituality, state power, militarism, and media works on the ground in a specific culture and geography, one would need, methodologically, to look away from the dazzlements of screen images, and one would need to avoid the temptation of positing grandiose, one could even say “dazzling,” theoretical schema into which the drama of the imperialist capitalist “Beast” burning us alive neatly fit. Tonda argues in a poignant and persuasive way that a historical critique of the production of value and the concurrent deployment of necropolitics in our digitalized age requires attending seriously to the ontological or metaphysical background where everyday relations to spirits impinge on our collective flesh. His call to attend to how archaic forms of magic or religion assemble with the “supermodern” powers of spirit-like possession of digital media is a groundbreaking fruit of his research. The characterization of the psychic, and hence largely unconscious, stage or space in which this background metaphysics of contemporary social struggles takes place is a strength of his masterful integration of psychoanalytic resources into his social critique.
However, ontologically speaking, reducing the spiritual or metaphysical to the psychic closes every possible opening to transcendence. In Lacanian parlance, reducing the Real to a dark void that propels this demonic mechanism of psychic capture and value production in digital commodities through the obscenity of racialized bodies turn into bodies for sale, and cruel military violence dismembering racialized “flesh and bone” bodies through lethal autonomous weapons dropping bombs from high in the sky—reducing the Real in this way is to deny outright the critical force of its negativity. This catastrophism of immanence describes aspects of a technology of power actually operating in our world with great and groundbreaking insight, but, in its provocation, it makes us helpless with its dazzling statement.
Tonda cites Dany-Robert Dufour’s analysis La cité perverse in order to characterize “obscene provocation” as the distinctive mode of address of the screen-image, the main agent of postcolonial imperialism: “When I make a provocation, I therefore call on the other to follow me, challenging them to dare to follow me. To provoke, in this sense, is therefore to know that one is saying what should not be said” (182). Dazzlement is hence the effect of a certain form of transgression. Now, in articulating a critical theory of the society of dazzlements, what type of transgression do we have to perform in order not to be devoured by the logic of that which we critique?
Consider the lack of attention to racialized communities’ lived forms of religion in Tonda’s book. This is perplexing for a theory that makes such a strong claim about how the sense of the supernatural, miraculous, or magical in these experiences participates in the technology of power that possesses the bodies taking part in them, in both the spiritual and political sense of the term. One can easily find less “extravagant” or “dazzling” works in the social sciences on the production of screen images that, paying close attention to those experiences, have reached conclusions contrary to those laid out by Tonda’s book.
In a traditional Marxist analysis, devoid of psychoanalysis and media theory, anthropologist Michael Taussig showed many years ago how mine workers in Bolivia and sugar cane plantation workers in southwest Colombia introduced a religious interpretation of the devil in order to make sense of their insertion into capitalist modes of agriculture and mining. In Taussig’s rich ethnographic account of this religious imaginary, he showed how workers considered the fascination with commodities (a form of “commodity fetishism”) that they could be tempted with through their transformed relation to money as a risk of being possessed by the devil, and hence practiced vernacular rituals in bricolage forms of spirituality between magic and religion to protect themselves from this spiritual danger.
Likewise, the 2019 movie Atlantique, directed by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, depicts in powerful, poetic ways how the spectral force of the spirits of young Senegalese men who drowned in the Mediterranean sea while attempting to reach Europe come back to do justice through enigmatic forms of spirit possession, resisting the agents of precarity and necropolitics governing their neighborhoods. As with Taussig’s ethnography, the supranatural, miraculous, or transcendent dimension of vernacular forms of spirituality and their phenomenological and political wisdom are agents of social and racial justice through unexpected and extravagant means. Vernacular forms of magic or religion are not just accomplices of the hyper-technological magic through which racialized bodies are militarized and sexualized.
Vernacular religion thus might unfold a different spiritual drama of late capitalism than the one Tonda’s book stages in such a provocative way. Attending to vernacular religion avoids the paralyzing effect of dazzlement or provocation in the study of images of digital stardom. Attention to ordinary people’s experience has always been the prime site of political resistance, imagining new ways of living human life in common, and developing transformative languages of social critique—all of which we need urgently today.
