Postcolonial failure and the politics of nation

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 106, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 727-752

  Hitchcock, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950469677     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-043     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979);
2. and Achille Mbembe, On the Post-colony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14 (hereafter cited parenthetically by page number).
3. Noam Chomsky, Failed States (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Chomsky's argument is a searing moral indictment of American policy at home and abroad and dovetails with much of his other work on this theme.
4. Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, "Anarchy Rules: Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy 89 (Winter 1992-93): 3-21. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.
5. Sara Terry, "Bosnia No Model of Nation Building," Christian Science Monitor, July 1, 2003, www.csmonitor.com/2003/0701/p09s02-coop.hmtl.
6. Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, "Failed States, or the State as Failure.'" University of Chicago Law Review 72.4 (Fall 2005): 1159-96. Brooks's article provides particularly good insight into the juridical measures at stake in the definition of the failed state.
7. See Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, ed. C. P. Dutt, trans. Emily Burns (London: Electric Book Company, 2001).
8. I will not attempt to summarize this research here but suffice to say that together it constitutes a discourse largely absent from prominent discussions of the fate of Somalia. Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State (New York: Times Books, 1992);
9. and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
10. See Ali Jimale Ahmed, ed., The Invention of Somalia (Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1995).
11. See also I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia, 4th ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003). While Lewis displays significant expertise in his research on Somalia, he never quite comes to grips with the role of colonialism in its modern formation. Ahmed's collection, in particular, is critical of much Western scholarship on Somalia, although it does not exempt Somali self-representation.
12. Ahmed, The Invention of Somalia, xi.
13. David D. Laitin and Said S. Samatar, Somalia: A Nation in Search of a State (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). Their analysis, in fact, would permit a reversal of the formula in Somalia's case.
14. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 142-44.
15. Edward A. Alpers, "On Critiques of the Invention of Somalia," in Ahmed, ed., The Invention of Somalia, 223-32.
16. See also E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
17. Nuruddin Farah, Sweet and Sour Milk (London: Allison and Busby, 1979)
18. Sardines (London: Allison and Busby, 1981)
19. and Close Sesame (London: Allison and Busby, 1983).
20. Nuruddin Farah, Maps (New York: Penguin, 1986)
21. Gifts (New York: Penguin, 1992)
22. and Secrets (New York: Penguin, 1998).
23. The territorial disputes over the Ogaden region were long-standing, but actual hegemony was greatly influenced by the competing agendas of the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. This geopolitical overlay represents the continuation of post-colonialism by other means and is a narrative that is all too familiar to African states seeking independence after the collapse of Western empires in the wake of the Second World War. No summary here will do the intricacies of these machinations or resistance to the same much justice (indeed, the matter of justice in the case of Somalia seems permanently suspended), but it is remarkable if not symptomatic that most accounts either smother such "links" under a mantle of econometrics or render the disputes a bare expression of partisanship. See, for instance, Helen Chapin Metz, ed., Somalia (Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, 1993);00 and Jamil Abdalla Mubarak, From Bad Policy to Chaos in Somalia: How an Economy Fell Apart (New York: Praeger, 1996).
24. Rhonda Cobham, "Misgendering the Nation: African Nationalist Fictions and Nuruddin Farah's Maps," in Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalism and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52.
25. Derek Wright, "Parenting the Nation: Some Observations on Nuruddin Farah's Maps," College Literature 19.3 (1992): 177.
26. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 15.
27. Nuruddin Farah, "Why I Write," Third World Quarterly 10.4 (1988): 1597.
28. Hilarie Kelly, "A Somali Tragedy of Political and Sexual Confusion: A Critical Analysis of J Nuruddin Farah's Maps," Ufahamu: Journal of the African Activist Association 16.2 (1988): 21-37, 21.
29. Nuruddin Farah, interview by Patricia Morris, "Wretched Life," Africa Events (September 1986:54.
30. Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, eds., Learning from Somalia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997);
31. and Catherine Besteman, Unraveling Somalia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). To be fair, the subjects of these two books are "armed humanitarian intervention" and anthropological fieldwork, respectively, but my point is that Somalia appears and disappears in the space between imagination and the authority of conventional investigation.
32. Said S. Samatar, "AreThere Secrets in Secrets?" Research in African Literatures 31.2 (Spring 2000): 137-42, 142.The novel in question is Farah, Secrets.
33. Wright, "Parenting the Nation."
34. Nuruddin Farah, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (London: Cassell, 2000), 48-49.
35. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markham (London: Pluto Press, 1991), 84.
36. Farah, Secrets, 280.
37. Chomsky, Failed States, 2.
38. Peter D. Little, Somalia: Economy without a State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
39. Maria H. Brons, Society, Security, Sovereignty, and the Stale: Somalia, from Statelessness to Statelessness (Utrecht, Netherlands: International Books, 2001).
40. Said, Orientalism, 7.