<\/p>\n
Prologue: Chanting What is Lost<\/strong><\/p>\n After his first collection of poems, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982), it took the reluctant poet, Harry Garuba, another thirty-five years to commit the whispering of the muses to paper. Animist Chants and Memorials (2017) is the literary responses to the memory of what used to be, and what ought to be; the animist murmurs beneath the oppressive burden of modern consciousness and being. In \u201cNaming Day,\u201d the poet got an intimation\u2014at birth\u2014from the knowing mother (we presume), about the tragic trajectory from the remembrance of the being of the world, and its non-remembrance lost in the ways of the world:<\/p>\n This is a chant you will remember and not remember, she said, a name you will know and not know This is the name you will recall but not remember, This epistemic paradox of the sense of being came to pass when, in \u201cLeaving home at 10,\u201d the poet was initiated into the modern educational system that instigated the trajectory of the mind\u2019s migration into the epistemic penumbra:<\/p>\n On initiation night, I recited the prescribed words: Soon after I lost the language of guavas and spirits I miss the language that once lived in my body.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is a bit unsettling because modernity has always been read as a progressive enlightenment that keeps swallowing all vestiges and vagaries of the dark past and its traditions. And thus, the young boy at 10 was in for an excruciating initiation into the modern. Forget your old ways\u2026you must be modern! Yet his mind kept excavating the memories of what was. And eventually when remembrance began to crawl out of the penumbra of forgetfulness, it was already a bit late to deliver the language\u2014already deeply cooked in the cauldron of the hybridized memory\u2014from the clutch of the mixed metaphor, or ontologies. Thus the poet, in \u201cEquatorial farewell cake,\u201d invoked:<\/p>\n and armed with the faith of my doubt, mixing stolen scriptures May you never set out when the road waits famished The rest of the chants is remembrance, borne on the vibrant vibration of embedded memory, and the angry twang of rebellious arguments, that teases the animist unconscious:<\/p>\n animist chant\u2014 Animism as An African Order of Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n Harry Garuba\u2019s argument for animism as an ontological and epistemological perspective in Africa are spelt out most rigorously in two essays, among others. The first, published in 2003, is titled \u201cExplorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading\/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society.\u201d The second, published in 2012, is \u201cOn Animism, Modernity\/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.\u201d These two essays address the age-old issues about the \u201cdarkness\u201d that characterizes Africa in terms of its tradition or \u201cre-traditionalization.\u201d Since Hegel wrote his lectures on the philosophy of history, that traced the march of the Absolute Spirit, and Joseph Conrad the Heart of Darkness, Africa has remained the focus of unflattering Eurocentric analysis. Achille Mbembe sums up the reaction to Africa in discourse:<\/p>\n the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation. Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of \u201chuman nature.\u201d Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated, and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind (2001: 1).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cAfrica,\u201d therefore is always beclouded under the sign of the strange, the monstrous and the unknowable. And so, it becomes necessary to \u201crationally\u201d dig into this continental abyss where \u201creason is supposedly permanently at bay, and the unknown has supposedly attained its highest point\u2026a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos\u201d (ibid: 2). To read about African life today is almost to be transported back a hundred years, when the newly established colonial powers \u201crevealed\u201d to the world how backward Africa was, how much it needed to be civilized. Today, like yesterday, our perception is that Africans continue to be singularly superstitious: the occult is alive, witchcraft is thriving, ritual ceremonies abound, the link with the ancestors is as strong as ever and African religious communities are growing in strength. Not only does it appear that African societies are failing to become more secular, as they were widely expected to do, but there is a sense in which they are \u201cretraditionalizing\u201d\u2014in [sic] that realm of the \u201cirrational\u201d is seemingly gaining in importance. Accorded the recognition of non-recognition, animist understandings of the natural and social world functioned within discourses of colonial modernity as the aberration, the past-in-the-present, to be disciplined to create civilized worlds and subjects. The colonial modernist order of knowledge, built on translating\/transforming these animist worlds and subjects into modernity, spawned the various dichotomies that have defined the study of Africa. In other words, animism has functioned as the metaphoric receptacle for everything that is a negation of the modern, and the goal and structure of the African order of knowledge bequeathed by colonialism has been to decipher and translate\/transform these worlds into European constructs and fit them into European theoretical models\u2026 (4).<\/p>\n And what better way to complicate the Western fetishization of the binary or dualist epistemic order, and indeed inaugurate animist epistemology as an alternative regime of knowledge, than a reference to Marx\u2019s fundamental complication of the object or commodity as a simultaneously material and mysterious thing. In Garuba\u2019s reading of Marx\u2019s formulation, the dichotomy between the knowledge of the material and that of the mysterious is spurious and already overridden by the argument that mystification is a necessity for materialization of the commodity. This implies, for the animist project, that \u201ctwithout animism, the values of positivist science are difficult to imagine\u201d (6). Animism becomes a spectral presence that constricts the objectifying demands of modernist epistemology. Garuba argues further that it is not sufficient to just iterate animism as an epistemological alternative. On the contrary, to make it a proper alternative conceptualization of an African order of knowledge, animism must be energetically rescued as a knowledge paradigm deodorized by the West for the production of new Western knowledge. Animist epistemology, for Garuba, must be conceptualized as an already there and functional coeval epistemic presence. And what Garuba offers as the starting point of rescuing animism is to recognize fundamentally what he calls the \u201canimist unconscious\u201d\u2014a code that \u201coperates basically on a refusal of the boundaries, binaries, demarcations, and linearity of modernity\u201d (7). Animist thought, Garuba argues, leads to a continual re-enchantment of the world, rather than a disenchantment, as Max Weber claims. The animist logic \u201ccontinually spiritualizes the object world, acknowledging and appropriating recent material developments and discoveries and animating them with a spirit\u201d (7).<\/p>\n In \u201cExplorations in Animist Materialism\u201d (2003), Garuba spells out his vision of an animist materialist framework that could be taken as an optimal alternative conceptualization for understanding African societies. Indeed, this conceptual recuperation is already manifest in the precolonial and the postcolonial cultural and political practices of the African elites and nation states. For him, this recuperation should not be taken as a \u201cconscious nationalistic appropriation\u2026nor is it entirely a consequence of the dialectic of \u2018residuality\u2019 and \u2018emergence\u2019\u201d (265). The animist mode of thought is so embedded in the material and economic activities of the people that it manifests in cultural and social life, and hence becomes \u201ca producer of effects and therefore acts as a driving force in the formation of collective subjectivity\u201d (269). The animist unconscious is therefore already there as the structuring principle for African cultural beingness. But he is at pain to insist against an essentialist reading of the animist unconscious. By delineating it as a \u201ccontinual re-enchantment,\u201d he argues that he is dissociating himself from reading the animist thought \u201cas the natural, immutable, collective instinct of a people\u201d (266). And then Garuba drives this argument through African literary, ideational and social world to outline the manifestation of the animist unconscious: Within the animist world-view\u2026the physical world of phenomena is spiritualized; in literary practice, it devolves into a representational strategy that involves giving the abstract or metaphorical a material realization; and in the social world of human relationships, and economic and political activity, the mediating meanings that animist thought posits as the currency of social exchange are instrumentalized, more often than not in ways that serve only local elites and leaders (284-285). The conceptual base of Garuba\u2019s expostulation of animism is found in the deployment of materialism and the unconscious. And he acknowledged his debt to Frederic Jameson (on the notion of the \u201cpolitical unconscious\u201d) and Raymond Williams (on the idea of \u201ccultural materialism\u201d). We are therefore immediately alerted to the Marxist orientation of the idea of animist materialism. The animist unconscious becomes the base upon which the superstructure of the African cultural and social life is built. And we just have to wonder why Harry Garuba took this materialist course; indeed, why did he vote for animism: in what sense would the animist unconscious serve the purpose it is meant for\u2014establishing an African order of knowledge? And, to boot, animistic materialism is a simple and straightforward adaptation of Marx\u2019s idea of fetishism.<\/p>\n Marxism and materialism constitute two theoretical legacies that are deeply suspect for any adaptation strategy. Marx has remained the focus of an intense critical discourse to determine its European and Eurocentric pedigree (Naved, 2008; Agozino, 2014; Rabaka, 2010; Pradella, 2013; Sarno, 2020). But much more than this is Marx\u2019s complicated relationship with the subject-object philosophy which Garuba is at pain to undermine and dissociate from the animist epistemology. What matters, within Marx\u2019s materialism, as Garuba utilizes it, is the materialization of ideas. This is consistent with the materialist\u2019s rejection of the causal capacity of ideas in the world. Humans, for Marx and the materialists, are \u201cmaterial beings and their social world should be understood as material in its actuality. To say this in another way, Marx has a materialist conception of the world and of human thought\u201d (Holt, 2015: 41). This understanding of reality disdains Hegel\u2019s idealism and its idealization of the material world. In the history of western philosophy, Kant demonstrated why the monocausal dynamics of materialism and idealism are patently false. Reality is too complex to be understood within the context of any of the theories in their binary opposition. Raymond Williams is even more critical of materialism\u2019s valorization of its own capacity for \u201cdemonstrable physical investigation\u201d: The question is to what extent this critique of materialism applies to cultural materialism, a movement Williams helped founded. For both Marx and Freud, fetishism constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of reality of capitalist dynamics. In other words, \u201cTo identify a fetish is to expose the inadequate beliefs of those who revere it for what they believe it is capable of, by pointing to the real, material, qualities of the object and identifying its presumed capacities as really residing elsewhere – in the \u2018true\u2019 god; in human labour; in arousal by a person of the opposite sex\u201d (Dant, 1996: 496). The important point to make is that Marx meant his deployment of the term, in \u201ccommodity fetishism,\u201d to serve as a cultural critique. Marx\u2019s realist critique is meant to outline the fetish in its stark nature as an illusion. However, even though Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the significance of the fetish as being important in the figuration of social value, the critical point I am making here, following Dant, is that contrary to Garuba, the symbolic power that the fetish has cannot be reduced to its material representations. What is real or unreal is determined according to cultural framework of meanings. A further argument is that the locus of a fetish is not always clear between the subject or the object. Indeed, it exists in a free zone between the two (Dant, 510). This then troubles the neat subject-object distinction against which Garuba sets up the animist epistemology as a counterpoint to modernist epistemology. <\/p>\n At another level, it would seem that Harry Garuba does not sufficiently interpret the Max Weber\u2019s characterization of modernity and its supposed disenchantment. Animism, for Garuba, is a function of the inversion of the Weberian growing disenchantment with the world, into a continual re-enchantment. This implies a tacit agreement with modernity\u2019s perception of its own borders, vis-\u00e0-vis the premodern. Yet, Bruno Latour boldly argues, in his 1993 work, We Have Never Been Modern! And his argument is simple: Cartesian dualism is a gross misrepresentation of the reality of so-called modern societies, and the supposed separation between nature and culture. This dichotomy is essentially dubious, according to Latour: All human societies anthropomorphize; all human societies possess animist tendency! And this everyday social and cultural practices invalidate modernity\u2019s Cartesian illusion of subject-object dualism (Hornborg, 2006: 22), and Garuba\u2019s acceptance of that illusion. To save the baby of western civilisation and modernity, I suggest we disabuse it of obvious inadequacies. These include its tendency to claim completeness and superiority often with little evidence to substantiate such extravagant claims. We should also disabuse it of the reluctance to see the realities of others in historical perspective, or to selectively employ history when it suits its purposes. The western(ised) baby needs to be disabused of epistemologies that tend to privilege neat dichotomies and dualisms, and to caricature, dismember or confine reality to sensory perceptions or to essences. The baby must be invited to pay greater attention to the interconnections, hierarchies and gradations that spring from and are consolidated by the ever-evolving messiness of lived experiences that continually reconfigure human reality (Nyamnjoh, 2015: 3).<\/p>\n To understand Africa\u2019s endogenous universes is to immediately understand its incompleteness. Reality is not open to any simple or simplistic dichotomies or dualisms. And experience is not just sensory. Consciousness is determined by being and becoming in multiple manners. In fact, as Nyamnjoh argues, there are multiplicity of consciousness that promises multiplicity of possibilities. In such universes, there is no unity of being. Perception is challenged and constantly built up and undermined. Relations and interconnections are key to understanding the mediation between being and nonbeing. The relationship between subject and object is subject to a continuum of flux and shape-shifting dynamics. Nothing is permanent except change. The border between the natural and the supernatural is equally flexible and elastic. And there are no essences or ontological closure. This endogenous universe \u201cis a universe of agency ad infinitum, one in which structures exist only to the extent they can be humbled by the agency of those who make structures possible. Agency is not a birthmark or permanence, but something to be discovered, cultivated, nurtured, activated and reactivated to different degrees of potency through relationships with others, things and humans alike\u201d (4). References Retrieving Africa\u2019s Order of Knowledge: Harry Garuba and Animist Epistemology Prologue: Chanting What is Lost After his first collection of poems, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982), it took the reluctant poet, Harry Garuba, another thirty-five years to commit the whispering of the muses to paper. Animist Chants and Memorials (2017) is the literary responses to the memory…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4606,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-garuba-tributes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4600"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4651,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4600\/revisions\/4651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThis is the name the wind and the water will whisper to you
\nThe name by which the tree will know
\nthe name that will come with the night when the moon visits you
\nthe rousing name that will stir your dreams with stars<\/p>\n
\nLodged in your heartbeat like a song you know and do not know<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\u201cI am a fag, a rotten green toad. I promise
\nto give up all my rustic and outlandish ways
\nand to become a true student of Government College, Ughelli.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAnd ever since I have been boarded up in a new home,
\nA new language with neither spice nor bite
\nI miss all the coarse and colourful words I can no longer use
\nThe power and potency of the curse uttered with a gob of spittle
\nLet loose in the language of the body and the spirit<\/p>\n
\nof shrine and synagogue like metaphors, I repeat in remembrance:<\/p>\n
\nThe Lord shall protect your going out and your coming in
\nThe wisdom of the ancestors and the light of the angels
\nwill guide you in all your byways and pathways
\nAnd feed you with the secret sacraments of open rivers<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\na chant that wakens
\nthe souls of things
\nanimate and inanimate
\na spell that rouses the spirit
\nthat lives in bone and stone<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nAnd when Africanists take a second look, beyond the western racist ideologies, Africa becomes so many things that does not sit quite easily with their probing modern gaze. Garuba himself gives a good example in the work of Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz. In Africa Works, the two authors were at pained to come to terms with the failure of Africa\u2019s development aspiration vis-\u00e0-vis the expectations of the West. Taken in terms of rationalization demanded by modernization, Africa is a litany of woes. A representative quote, taken by Garuba (2003: 282) from Chabal and Daloz, is apposite here as an example of the angst in scholarship about the trajectory of understanding Africa, and especially its re-traditionalization:<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\nThe seesaw between the modern and the premodern is something that both authors could not fathom. And hence, re-traditionalization seems obfuscating in the face of the challenges of development or modernization. How could the traditional (and hence the irrational), rather than rationalization\u2014or the continual disenchantment of the world\u2014be the basis for development?
\nGaruba\u2019s project, therefore, is to supply the rational logic of the \u201cirrational\u201d found in what he calls \u201canimist materialism\u201d and the \u201canimist unconscious\u201d\u2014a project that demands, contrarily, the continual re-enchantment of the world. The larger context for this project is situated within the discourse on the African order of knowledge vis-\u00e0-vis the Western epistemic violence and injustice against Africa as a dark and obscure Other that cannot be reckoned with in terms of knowledge and development. Western philosophy was founded on the subject-object distinction, and an object-ive epistemology that speaks to a material and knowable reality. And through the dynamics of colonial difference, this modernist order of knowledge, and a knowledge\/power framework, undermined alter\/native epistemic possibilities. What Mudimbe described as the \u201ccolonizing structure\u201d ensured a trajectory that led from any indigenous order of knowledge (like animism) to the modern epistemic paradigm. Garuba argues that animism, within this colonial\/modern context, becomes the \u201cspectral Other that simultaneously constitutes and haunts the modern\u201d (2012: 4). Its inclusion is already foregrounded on its exclusion from the knowledge calculus. <\/p>\n
\n
\n
\nAnimism and the Relational Ontologies<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\u2026material investigation, grounded in the rejection of categorical hypotheses of an unverifiable kind, and basing its own confidence in a set of provisional working procedures and demonstrations, finds itself pulled nevertheless towards closed generalizing systems: finds itself materialism or a materialism. There is thus a tendency for any materialism, at any point in its history, to find itself stuck with its own recent generalizations, and in defence of these to mistake its own character: to suppose that it is a system like others, of a presumptive explanatory kind, or that it is reasonable to set up contrasts with other (categorical) systems, at the level not of procedures but of its own past \u2018findings\u2019 or \u2018laws\u2019 (1980: 103).<\/p>\n
\nCultural materialists, of course, reject subjective idealism and its separation of culture from material social life. It essentially substantiates \u201cthe material character of cultural practices\u201d (Klaus, 1993: 90). And this is where Garuba stands. And it is on this materialist framework that Garuba erects the animist worldview. For him, animism is defined by
\nits almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits. Animism is often simply seen as belief in objects such as stones or trees or rivers for the simple reason that animist gods and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits. Instead of erecting graven images to symbolize the spiritual being, animist thought spiritualizes the object world, thereby giving the spirit a local habitation. Within the phenomenal world, nature and its objects are endowed with a spiritual life both simultaneous and coterminous with their natural properties. The objects thus acquire a social and spiritual meaning within the culture far in excess of their natural properties and their use value. Rivers, for example, not only become natural sources of water but are prized for various other reasons. The animist urge to reification may have been religious in origin, but the social and cultural meanings that become attached to the objects often break off from the purely religious and acquire an existence of their own as part of the general process of signification in society (2003: 267).
\nFrom this perspective, materialism is essentially the theoretical scaffold that animism requires to achieve its concrete significations. And the theory of fetishism provides an appropriate mold through which objects become animated as the \u201cphysical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits.\u201d I will outline two worries with Garuba\u2019s animist materialism, and then recommend what I consider to be an alternative conceptualization that hold more promise as a representation of Africa\u2019s relational ontology than animism.<\/p>\n
\n
\n
\nThe essential point of this modern Constitution is that it renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids [part nature, part society] invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable. Does this lack of representation limit the work of mediation in any way? No, for the modern world would immediately cease to function. Like all other collectives it lives on that blending. On the contrary (and here the beauty of the mechanism comes to light), the modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies. By playing three times in a row on the same alternation between transcendence and immanence, the moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social, and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work, and that God no longer intervenes (1993: 34).<\/p>\n
\nThus, Garuba\u2019s critique of the modernist epistemology is spot on in its understanding of its hypocrisy and racist prejudices. But its premise does not justify labeling the African ontological and epistemological reality as animist, and juxtaposing it as the spectral Other to modernist epistemology. Latour\u2019s argument that we are all animists even in our modernist sensibility undercuts the supposed specificity of animist materialism to Africa. It becomes unenlightening to retort that while modernist epistemology has submerged its animist unconscious, it is alive and functional in the African ontology. On the contrary, Niyi Osundare is as animistic (as Garuba argues) as William Wordsworth. The disenchantment that Weber lamented about the rationalized modern world must not be taken at face value, as Garuba seems to have done. For Latour, \u201cHow could we be capable of disenchanting the world, when every day our laboratories and our factories populate the world with hundreds of hybrids stranger than those of the day before?\u201d (1993: 115) Thus, antimoderns like Harry Garuba got it all wrong: \u201cYou are disenchanting the world; I shall maintain the rights of the spirit!\u201d (123-124)
\nIf it is correct to delineate animism as the unacknowledged underbelly of modernist sensibility\u2014we are neither modern nor premodern\u2014what is required is to look for a different alternative conceptualization of African relational ontology. Latour provides one possibility: we hold on to the analytical strength of the nature-culture distinction while \u201cusing the premodern categories to conceptualize the hybrids\u201d (134). Unfortunately, such an option will not be salutary to Africa, since its fundamental essence struggles to be ontologically relational. In this regard, one could contrast Garuba\u2019s animist materialism to Francis Nyamnjoh\u2019s analysis of Africa\u2019s incompletist relational ontology and its epistemic instability that invites openness and conviviality. This incompletist ontology is not burdened by an oppositional imperative that speaks from a premodern margin. Indeed, Nyamnjoh is at pain to ensure that in any attempt at establishing the validity of an African epistemological and ontological dynamics, we must resist the temptation to throw the western baby out with the bathwater:<\/p>\n
\nConsciousness matters more than the containers that house it. Consciousness can inhabit any container \u2013 human and non-human, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible \u2013 regardless of the state of completeness or incompleteness of the container in question. Both reality and the universe are imbued with endless possibilities of being and becoming, thanks to the multiplicity of consciousness available to inhabit them. Things, words, deeds and beings are always incomplete, not because of absences but because of their possibilities (4).<\/p>\n
\nWe may therefore concede that while Harry Garuba\u2019s animist materialism is the far more theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of the African endogenous reality, the incompletist relational ontology provides a more plausible and robust iteration of Africa\u2019s endogenous universes, within an epistemic framework that refuses oppositionality and exclusion.<\/p>\n
\nAgozino, Biko. 2014. \u201cThe Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent,\u201d Review of African Political Economy 41, no. 140: 172\u201384.
\nDant, Tim. 1996. \u201cFetishism and the social value of objects,\u201d The Sociological Review, Vol. 44, 495-516.
\nGaruba, Harry. 2003. \u201cExplorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading\/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,\u201d Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring: 261-285
\nGaruba, Harry. 2012. \u201cOn Animism, Modernity\/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections,\u201d e-Flux Journal, #36, July. 1-9.
\nGaruba, Harry. 2017. Animist Chants and Memorials. Ibadan: Kraft Books.
\nHolt, Justin P. 2015. The Social Thought of Karl Marx. Los Angeles: Sage.
\nHornborg, Alf. 2006. \u201cAnimism, Fetishism, and Objectivism as Strategies for Knowing (or not Knowing) the World,\u201d Ethnos, Vol. 71: 1, March, 21-32.
\nKlaus, H. Gustav. 1993. \u201cCultural Materialism: A Summary of Principles,\u201d in W. John Morgan and Peter Preston (eds.) Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters. New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press.
\nLatour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
\nMbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
\nNaved, Shad. 2008. \u201cThe Colonial Encounter in Marxist Terms,\u201d Social Scientist 36, no. 11\/12: 33\u201346.Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2015. \u201cIncompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality,\u201d Journal of Asian and African Studies, advance online publication, 1-18. DOI: 10.1177\/0021909615580867
\nPradella, Lucia. 2013. \u201cImperialism and Capitalist Development in Marx\u2019s Capital,\u201d Historical Materialism 21, no. 2: 117\u201347.
\nRabaka, Reiland. 2010. Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books.
\nSarni, Micco Raiden. 2020. \u201cCapital is not Eurocentric,\u201d Medium https:\/\/medium.com\/@miccors\/capital-is-not-eurocentric-2833e21fa398
\nWilliams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"