Horizons of Impossibilities, from abu Dhabi to Kinshasa

Remaindered Life and The Surrounds lend themselves to a generative pairing. They share the same attention to the disenfranchised and an expansive take on urbanization, which embraces the planetary extension of "globopolis" and "city-everywhere." The act of reading the two books in tandem does not collapse their singularities, but it suggests a strong kinship in the rhythm of their writing. Neferti X. Tadiar and AbdouMaliq Simone both approach theory as a form of exacting poetic construction. There is a distinct scansion in the textual organization of their works. They progress through repeated returns to motifs that escape exhaustion and that lead, in Simone's musical rendering of his book's architecture, to new "trajectories of sonic possibilities."1 As he emphasizes, narrative assemblages are a key component in the infrastructure of the everyday in a multiplicity of urban contexts. And, like Tadiar, he replicates in his writing the potency of these assemblages.Carefully metered, the two volumes resonate and inspire. They coalesce around horizons of impossibilities, registers of exposures and inclinations, and the demarcation of humanity and inhumanity. Simone's approach develops around the ethnographic and the hermeneutic. Conversely, Tadiar extends, although critically, a theoretical tradition that engages with the world as a totality—engaging, among many others, Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg, Étienne Balibar and Silvia Federici. Both Remaindered Life and The Surrounds demonstrate an acute interest in how spaces of fragility are navigated. Tadiar's project advances a years-long confrontation with historical mechanisms of oppression in the Philippines and beyond, as well as a close dialogue with the artistic critique of these mechanisms. Simone similarly builds on a long association with traders, members of religious brotherhoods, and fellow "urbanists" in cities across Africa and Asia. They both speak to what it means to live under conditions shaped by colonialism and imperialism, global capitalism, and precarious urbanities. The conceptual mapping that they suggest is particularly evocative. Simone explores peripheral urbanities in the global South through the lens of abolitionism and the Black radical tradition; Tadiar retraces histories of global servitude in dialogue with Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, and Angela Davis. Their works are anchored in the materiality and historicity of specific sites, from metro Manila to Mindanao, Jakarta, and Dakar, but they offer a geography that cuts across multiple borders and, in so doing, advocates against residual provincialisms in the scholarly apprehension of our global present.· · ·In one of the last articles he published before passing away in 2002—a study of youth aesthetics, delinquency, and institutional violence in Dakar, Addis Ababa, and Kinshasa—the Congolese scholar Tshikala Kayembe Biaya intuited that the new street cultures of the 1990s in Africa "reflected the end of decolonization and heralded a new phase in urban memory."2 Two decades later, Simone's work offers a compelling response to Biaya's call for an epistemological break that would move away from postcolonial logics. At the center of The Surrounds, in a chapter about urban temporalities and "forms of doing time" that enable temporary forgetting and a radically new understanding of one's position vis-à-vis the world, Simone develops a fascinating ethnographic vignette about Kinshasa. Focusing on a crew of young men that Simone knew in the Kasa-Vubu district of Kinshasa, this vignette departs from approaches that contrast youth urban subcultures with mainstream social dynamics. The men that Simone writes about were university graduates, but they were also part of a group that professed an affiliation with the US-based Bloods gangs. They shared some of the sensibilities and dispositions of the "tropical cowboys" of earlier generations and of the shegue (or street children) that inspired Biaya's observations about the break in Kinshasa's urban imagination.3 Yet, Simone's description of their daily activities at the Gambela market does not show them inhabiting positions of marginality. Instead, they were central in the working of this market, one of Kinshasa' largest. They had no goods to exchange and were not engaged in extortion. Rather, they served as information brokers and transaction facilitators, adeptly navigating the market's decaying infrastructure and the city's larger complex ecology. Simone illuminates their role as "purveyors of a surround" who engaged in a form of economic activity that stretched beyond mere commerce. Their sophisticated dance with the urban fabric responded to the various elements that shaped daily life in Kinshasa, from the inconsistent supply chains to the amalgamation of human and nonhuman elements, in what sociologist Sylvie Ayimpam calls the city's get-by economy.4 The Bloods' intervention was mostly speculative. They anticipated consumer desires and reckoned with a volatile market and an ever-changing urban environment. Their complex actions went beyond the material to include a profound understanding of temporality. They embraced the uncertainty emerging from the chaotic background surrounding exchanges in the market as a source of opportunity.Simone ends this story with a note on further impermanence. When he returned to Kinshasa years later, there was no trace of the Bloods, as if they had never existed or only at a fleeting moment in Kinshasa's ever-shifting urban landscape. Such ephemerality echoes the vulnerability and possibilities of an urban setting that Filip De Boeck famously associates with the register of the invisible and the imaginative.5 It also resonates with the writing of André Yoka Lye in Kinshasa, signes de vie, where he illuminates how the city functions as a theatre of aspirations and a mirror of collective self-obsession.6 For Yoka, Kinshasa is a machine for transforming matter into symbols, a labyrinthic theatre of hedonism and narcissism. He portrays the city as a spectacle of contradictions, a Narcissus reflecting collective myths and individual desires. In contrast with the exhibitionism described by Yoka, Simone's crew of university-educated street brokers strategically opted to remain away from the light at the Gambela market. Yet they too participated in transforming matter into symbols, converting the raw stuff of urban materiality into promises of economic opportunities. Ultimately, the vanishing of the Bloods is indicative of the new urban memory intuited by Biaya in the late 1990s—memory as a structure of impermanence.· · ·In another of the book's powerful vignettes, Simone redefines pan-Africanism from the perspective of Amadou Diallo, one of his late friends from Guinea who became a successful trader by operating on multiple frontiers of informality through West Africa and Asia. Simone alludes to Diallo's Fulbe background and his participation in an Islamic infrastructure of transnational sociability, with its epicenter in the Futa Jallon. Yet he ties Diallo's entrepreneurial mobility back to his origins in a neighborhood of Conakry known as Chicago—a name emblematic of its residents' desire to inscribe themselves within cosmopolitan horizons of global belonging.Simone portrays Diallo as someone who looked at his neighborhood, Conakry, other cities in the region, and Africa in its totality, as hinges that offered "a shifting vantage point from and through which to engage the world" (42). Questions of negotiated access and mutual assistance in the navigation of long-distance opportunities took prominence in this set of projections into the world. Pan-Africanism appeared, in this historical moment of global circulation, as a mental accompaniment crucial to infrastructures of mobility oriented toward fugitivity. For Diallo and others willing to escape definitive emplacement, the pan-Africanism of Chicago encouraged "dreams of spreading out" and living lives on the move. Simone's narrative around Diallo brings us far from earlier understandings of postcolonial African mobilities that center on the paradigm of what Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane called the "ambiguous adventure" with its ensuing conflicted identities.7 How do we historicize the volatile dispositions of Diallo's generation and their tensions with the project of postcolonial African state-making supported by earlier iterations of Pan-Africanism?In contrast with a later vignette in the same chapter that evokes the complexities of contemporary circulations between west Africa and southern Europe, Simone's narration of Diallo's life runs longitudinally from Abidjan to Mumbai, Bangkok, and Guangzhou. It is interesting that Dubai and Sharjah also feature centrally in Diallo's journey as regional entrepôts and centers of Islamic sociability. The Arabian Gulf is indeed a part of the world in which both Simone's and Tadiar's insights on urban lives strikingly open up to generative analytical possibilities. Diallo was active in the Gulf mostly in the 1980s, and Simone accordingly reflects on the role of Gulf cities as an "infrastructure for coming and going" (45) during this specific period. Since then, these cities have remade themselves into crossroads of a much broader magnitude, with the ambition to radiate as centers in a new age of global capitalism. Yet even in the newly highly capitalized, speculative, spectacular, and authoritarian urbanization of the Gulf, the processes of improvisation studied by Simone continue to define many inhabitants' relation to their cities. For instance, anthropologist Laure Assaf has showed how foreign Arab youth in Abu Dhabi "practice belonging" through the everyday use of "empty parking lots, residual lands and vacant plots."8Tadiar's work also sheds light on the tensions at the core of the accelerated emergence of the region. Her discussion of the life-times of exported migrant workers from the Philippines privileges examples from different locations (such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Israel, and Palestine), but it obviously translates very well to the cities of the Gulf. Upon reading Remaindered Life, I was struck by its many reverberations with Temporary People, a recent collection of short stories by the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan.9 Mostly set in his hometown of Abu Dhabi, Unnikrishnan's book offers phantasmagoric takes on the lives of migrant workers. In one of those stories, a greedy autocrat literally engineers obedient Malayali workers, which he grows like plants in industrial greenhouses; in another story, workers are taped back together after they have fallen from buildings and construction scaffoldings. Unnikrishnan's turn to the supernatural in these stories offers him a way to express the excessive nature of the peripheral lives that Tadiar and Simone both theorize in their accounts. Unnikrishnan writes of figures that are essential to the production of the Gulf's opulence, even as they are firmly maintained in positions of social, economic, and cultural marginality. His depiction of migrant workers as machines and modulable assemblages of gluable limbs is born out of the specific, intense vulnerabilities faced by unprotected noncitizens with roots across Africa and Asia in the Arabian Gulf. But Tadiar's work shows how these migrant lives are emblematic of a broader new moment in the global order, which she situates in relation to a longer history. She posits the universal reach of what she calls "the war to be human" and its frictions with the project of "becoming human in a time of war."10 In fact, one of the most salient contributions of her book is the incisive lexicon that rearticulates the critique of global capitalism in the present in light of the legacies and enduring forms of imperialism.· · ·As a historian of Africa in the global 1960s, I find Tadiar's historicization of decolonization particularly insightful. She refers to decolonization not as a metaphor or floating political horizon, but as a moment of past struggle with continuous reverberations in the present. Remaindered life, she posits, emanates directly from unfinished struggles waged by the dispossessed against imperialist subjugation. Liberation struggles and decolonization were the most significant historical developments across Africa in the 1960s. But the decade also saw the heyday of modernization theory, which swept through the global South, largely aided by the rapid development of what historian Gregory Mann calls nongovernmentality: the new deployment of "private indirect rule" in postcolonial countries in which the prerogatives of the states were de facto transferred to international organizations, foreign agencies, and nongovernmental organizations.11 Some critical voices then warned against the effects of modernization, particularly the Green Revolution. They feared that expanding capitalist forces would successfully bring into the market sectors of society that had managed to escape full capture under colonialism. Here, Tadiar offers an alternative model. She draws attention to what Claude Meillassoux called the "domestic mode of production," arguing that it has indeed been the target of attacks by capitalist forces but that it is also a necessary appendage in the production of global capital (47–72).Positing servitude as a vital infrastructure and paradigmatic social relation of modern capitalism, Tadiar insists on the intricate and necessary connections between the human and the becoming-human, between valued and disposable life. She dissects the mechanisms of necropolitics—most specifically in the Philippines—but also insists on the persistence of noncapitalist social formations and forms of life-making in the midst of continuous subjugations. What is remaindered is what is in excess of capitalist reproduction. It is waste that cannot be fully disposed of, neither fully inside nor outside the movements of global capitalism.If there is one significant dissonance between Tadiar and Simone, I would locate it in the respective affective prosodies of their books. Simone speaks of material resistance beyond agency, while Tadiar envisions the possibility of new politics of transformation and insurgency. However, Simone also sees the surrounds as the prefiguration of a politics of abolition. Their peripheral and tangential positions in relation to urbanity are not dissimilar to the relation between the human and becoming-human in Tadiar's work. Still, the type of interstitial and liminal spaces that Simone explores support infrastructures of heterotopic possibilities. They lack permanence and clear orientations but have the power to create and conjure moments of suspension and improvised propositions. By comparison, Remaindered Life never escapes from catastrophe and extinction. Instead, it presents the world's current state as proceeding from the generalization of the experiences of expenditure that have historically marked the possibilities of life-making for the enslaved and the colonized.Historians of the decolonization era have written about processes of state violence and Cold War ruination. Yet their projects often suggest elegiac, nostalgic, or restorative engagements with the liberationist potentialities of a moment of revolutionary turmoil. It is difficult to imagine a history of this period outside of these affective modalities. Yet, it would be interesting to revisit this decade in Africa and beyond, in relation to Simone's invocation of the possibilities of "rebellions without redemption," or Tadiar's history of uninterrupted imperialist warfare and destruction.A cross-reading of Remaindered Life and The Surrounds thus elicits a series of intriguing questions, both methodological and thematic. In light of the persisting crises of humanity, Tadiar's call to examine the experiences of the becoming-human is particularly urgent. It complements Simone's invitation to explore the "viability of possible outsides" (15). The two books reverberate beyond their specific contexts. They make visible a multiplicity of spaces, modalities, and subjectivities that are central to the world we live in. The intellectual companionship they offer enlarges our collective capacities to build new architectures of knowledge and radical possibilities.I am grateful to Julia Elyachar for her invitation to participate in this kitabkhana. Her generous encouragements and guidance, together with the support of Liz Beasley, were extremely helpful through the writing and editing of this contribution.