Intermediality: A Paradigm for African Identity in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

One notion of African identity is based on the credo that generally champions the view that so-called Africans should not only celebrate an identity that is predicated on racialised and essentialised blackness, but also seek out (and hopefully render assistance to) any black persons anywhere in the world. Crucially, it was the black experience of slavery, as well as colonialism, that helped to foster such essentialised notions of identity. It is a matter of tragic irony that the very people who were written out of history are architects of some of the continent’s worst excesses, notably ethnic wars, genocides and related manifestations of black-on-black hatred and violence. Rather than giving attention to ideological positions that privilege notions of predetermined “Africanness”, I situate the debate in the disciplinary positions of history, philosophy and literature, and posit the idea of intermediality, meaning a state of in-betweenness, as a model for articulations of identity that not only promote the reality of our “otherness”, but also teach us what it means to be human. I argue that the idea of an African identity that is grounded on an essentialised blackness flies in the face of the history of a continent that has always been defined by “otherness” or difference. In employing intermediality as a core concept of intersubjectivity on all articulations of identity that put the emphasis on respect for difference, I invoke selected post-structuralist and postmodern discourses to argue for an African identity in the twenty-first century that is more fluid and contested than any transcendent regimes of cultural certainty and legitimacy would have us believe. I insist on the primacy and the relevance of the idea of intermediality and, consequently, Africa’s interconnectedness with the rest of humankind.