k_d_s: Deception and Complicity—the Strange Case of Jessica Krug

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Пишет DK (k_d_s)
@ 2020-09-27 15:04:00

Настроение:	cold
Entry tags:	afrika, angola, literatur, lustig, usa

Deception and Complicity—the Strange Case of Jessica Krug
All this was on the basis of Krug’s 260-page book Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom, published in 2018, the very year she attained tenure. It was a reworking of her doctoral dissertation and, as she explains in a preface, at least one seminar paper she had written in graduate school. The publisher was the Duke University Press. The Duke Press is famous, or infamous, for its booklist of trendy but nearly unintelligible—because thick with impenetrable postmodernist jargon—academic writings on such voguish subjects as gender and post-colonial theory. One of its publications is Social Text, the deconstructionist journal that in 1996 published New York University physics professor Alan Sokal’s hoax paper claiming, among other things, that the force of gravity was a fiction constructed by power-seeking scientists. (Social Text is still going strong, with a current issue devoted to the “biopolitics of plasticity.”)

Krug’s book is no exception to the Duke Press norm of inscrutable jargon that skeptics might prefer to call pure mush. Its theme is Kisama, an arid region of present-day Angola (it’s a wildlife preserve today) that, according to Krug, was a center of “resistance” to Portuguese colonizers and slave traders over the centuries, inspiring “global iterations of the Kisama meme” as “maroons”—fugitive slaves—in the New World engaged in their own periodic “violence” against “state power.” Krug paints Kisama as a kind of anti-state collectivist utopia that sent its “widely circulating” meme of resistance on a “remarkable odyssey” across the Atlantic. Her biggest problem is that, as she admits, “neither oral nor written records” in Africa or anywhere else provide any evidence that this occurred—beyond the fact that many Latin-American slaves were of Angolan origin, some of them apparently from Kisama. Another problem is Krug’s inability or unwillingness to write chronologically straightforward history. In order to find a coherent account of what actually happened with the slave trade in 16th and 17th century Angola you need to consult Wikipedia.

So Krug pads her book: chapters are given murky but fashionably prolix titles such as “Social Dismemberment, Social (Re)membering: Obeah Idioms, Kromanti Identities, and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Memory, c. 1675-Present.” Postmodernist buzzwords and buzz-phrases abound: “praxis,” “bodies,” “imbrication,” “subjectivities,” “masculinities,” “reputational geographies,” “subaltern,” “interrogation,” “coloniality,” “discursive mobilization,” “gendered topographies of labor.” In order to make sense out of the book’s maps, you have to turn them upside-down or sideways, because Krug believes that conventional north-oriented cartography is unacceptably Eurocentric, reinforcing “the relationships of power that brought millions of Africans across the ocean in chains.” Sentences go on and on. A sample: “If the fundamental unit of being is not the liberal subject—the atomic individual with rights and obligations ensured by the legal apparatus of state—but rather a collective self, fashioned through the instrumental deployment of historical memory and rituo-political choreography, then, unsurprisingly, biography must function differently.”

In what is surely the book’s daffiest footnote, Krug decides that the 17th century warrior-queen Njinga (a national heroine to many present-day Angolans), who called herself a “king” when she led her troops into battle, was transgender—so Krug refers to her by the pronouns “they” and “them.” Other presumed genderqueers with unpronounceable ethnic designations pop up here and there: the “palenquerxs” and the “Palmarinxs.” The book concludes with a rambling peroration against “neoliberalism” “transnational capital,” and law-enforcement brutality in locations ranging from today’s Angola to Krug’s own South Bronx “block,” together with perhaps predictable laments over the deaths of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.