Nadia Yala Kisukidi

Geopolitics ofthe Diaspora

Sometimes a given economic, political, or socialconjuncture will lay bare in no uncertain termsthe insurmountable contradictions inherent incertain ideas. For instance, it is nearlyimpossible to disregard the context of the Covid-19 pandemic when thinking about the contoursof the idea of “diaspora,” or more precisely the(geo)politics that it delineates. The borders ofnation-states were closed, putting a stop to theongoing cycle of trips back and forth that shapediasporic lives. The pandemic slowed down,when it did not actually block, the transfer offunds to their countries of origin from diasporas– especially African – in Northern countriesfacing an economic crisis.1 A whole economy ofexchanges and movement came brutally undone.đđđđđđđđđđAt this point it seems wise, beforeproceeding any further, to not keep my place ofenunciation in the dark. Because this placeexplains in part the thoughts that follow. I live ina Northern country, in France, crossed by aborder – that of the Democratic Republic ofCongo. This border may not be physical insofaras it does not materialize a barrier between twoneighboring geographic regions, but it isnonetheless real. According to Gloria Anzaldua,borders are truly present whenever people ofdifferent cultures occupy the same land: “Aborderland is a vague and undetermined placecreated by the emotional residue of an unnaturalboundary. It is in a constant state of transition.The prohibited and forbidden are itsinhabitants.”2 The border that Anzaldua evokes inher writings is a real physical territory located atthe point of contact between Texas and Mexico.The border I’m speaking of presupposes aprocess of affective, symbolic, and culturalexternalization that accompanies itinerancy, theexile of a family. The “Congo” sign runs throughand recomposes, in a minor key, the Frenchspace I inhabit. The “Souths” live in the “Norths”;multiple spatial expanses shape the private livesof families. Landscapes are superimposed andconjoined in the inner life of the individual. Thisis how life in the diaspora is territorialized.đđđđđđđđđđThe health security policies that have haltedthe constant trips that characterize diasporicexistence have partitioned the planet into aseries of hermetic physical spaces thatreestablish boundaries. Planet earth is not one:it is a multiplicity of small worlds, whichcoincide, unsurprisingly, with the borders ofnation-states. The preventive measures3intended to protect oneself and others from thepandemic force people to stay put, to be rootedto a spot, to relocate their activities. The veryidea of the “diaspora,” insofar as it designatesthe ability of certain populations to form a unity,a people “despite the spatial dispersion of theirmembers, by way of the unifying reference to a

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Kiripi Katembo, Subir, from the seriesđUn Regard, 2011. Copyright:đKiripi Katembo. Courtesy Fondation Kiripi Katembo Siku et galerie MAGNIN-A.đ

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land or a territory,”4 supposes at the very least atension between two places, return trips,uninterrupted circulation around the globe.Diasporic existence describes a way of being inthe world, forced or desired, which requiresmobility – that tenacious paradigm of theglobalized twentieth century. The sense ofcommunity withstands long distances and isconfirmed in the joy of reunions.đđđđđđđđđđThe spatial concatenations of whichdiasporic lives are composed describe a concreteform of ubiquity. To think about the idea of thediaspora does not necessarily entailproblematizing the “self” in reference to a nativeland that would give it its ontological substanceand identity; it involves thinking about the ideaof inhabiting. And more radically still, the idea ofinhabiting two places, two lands at the sametime. Diasporic life relies on an economy ofmovement, indifferent to finitude, requiringcombustion and spending: flying, travelingacross oceans, hitting the road, sending money.All this movement has been undermined by thepandemic and what it reveals about theecological catastrophe.đđđđđđđđđđFamilies scattered to the four corners of theworld may no longer be getting together becauseof the virus, yet it is hard to give up on thepolitical potentials of conceiving of the diasporaas a “double presence,”5 in other words as amatter of “inhabiting two places at the sametime.” We must give thought to the politicalfecundity of ubiquity, and even more, give it aprecise meaning, when the ecological situationno longer presents a unified planet, but insteadworlds in conflict. What does it mean to inhabittwo places at the same time, when these placesare in an antagonistic relationship? The idea of“place” and “world” function hereinterdependently: “place” refers to a realphysical location and “world” refers to a wholethat materializes through interrelating amultiplicity of human productions and geo-situated forms of life.đđđđđđđđđđBy taking a position on a boundary at oncereal and imaginary – the boundary separatingFrance and the Democratic Republic of Congo –criticism grounds itself in a concrete terrestrialsituation. Diasporic life traces the contours of a“geopolitics,” whose meaning is almost literal: apolitics of the land, or yet again a politics ofspatial localization. In spite of the pandemic andthe immobility it imposes, it is important for usto think through the real political fecundities ofthe constant passage from one land to another. đđđđđđđđđđ***đđđđđđđđđđGeopolitics. To reflect on worlds in conflictmeans to focus not only on war and tensionsbetween sovereign states but also on aneconomy of death and life. Colonization,

understood as the appropriation of lands andpeople, stands as the paradigm of this sort ofvital economy. I would like to illustrate thisthrough a look at some moments in the history ofCentral Africa.đđđđđđđđđđCentral Africa’s encounter with the West,which started in the fifteenth century – the erawhen the Eurocentric order and a certainconsciousness of global space was instituted –opened a cycle of “extraordinary violence,” inrepeated patterns of collapse.6 Because worldscan indeed collapse several times. The slavetrade developed after the arrival of thePortuguese in the Congo in 1482.7 Thekidnapping and enslavement, along with thedrain on the labor force, destabilized localinstitutions and demographics. African landswere turned into a huge reservoir of manuallabor, feeding trade channels that werebecoming increasingly international.đđđđđđđđđđIn the nineteenth century, explorers andcolonial societies competed on African soil in thename of European states.8 The Conference ofBerlin in 18859 established the legal terms of theEuropean occupation of Africa, guaranteeing thesovereignty of each European nation andgranting them all “complete freedom of trade.”10This conference, which consolidated the rules of“commercial imperialism” that developed inAfrica throughout the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, is to be understood as thepoint in time when “the European statesimposed capitalism on the coasts of Africa.”11 Inthe Congo Basin – by then the property of theKing of Belgium – rubber exploitation led toviolent forms of extractivism12 that included thedestruction of villages, the appropriation of land,the massacre and mutilation of localpopulations, the destabilization of collective life,forced labor, and the exploitation of naturalresources to profit foreign companies. Congoleselands fueled the development of the secondindustrial revolution in Europe.đđđđđđđđđđThese cycles of depredation and pillage arebeing reconfigured in contemporary postcolonialCongo. We must be able to reinterpret them froma vital standpoint: the life of some requires thedeath of others. Societies of superabundanceimply the extinction of societies that functionexclusively as reservoirs of energy and material.This is one of the formulations of theconflictuality of worlds in the Capitalocene era.The two Congo wars, which gripped the regionwith violence in the late twentieth century andhave continued into the first quarter of thetwenty-first, have accompanied the revolution ofdigital electronics, with Congolese mineralresources being introduced into the globalmarket.13 The systemic violence raging in theDemocratic Republic of Congo supports an

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“international supply systems coupled with aform of national and regional redistribution ofresources.”14 Mass massacres, the forceddisplacement of populations, rape, the increasedvulnerability of human life, etc. The North/Southdivide is too broad to account for theconflictuality of worlds. The economy of pillageand extraction that has taken hold of the regionis supported by international industrial andfinancial predations, but also by intra-Africanalliances15 and a revenue system maintained bynational elites.đđđđđđđđđđFaced with this economy of violence, hugedumping grounds have been established whereunneeded populations, deemed useless, arecondemned to live. Whole expanses have becomezones of infra-life. The globe is riddled withholes, haunted by shadows, dispossessed of theminimum required to satisfy vital needs.đđđđđđđđđđ***đđđđđđđđđđThe conflictuality of worlds that is ondisplay in Central Africa testifies to a becoming-vampire, for the vampire is that mythicalcreature that feeds on the blood of the living toincrease its vital forces. It is not the generalcollapse of the planet that is being manifestedbut rather the way in which some worlds requirethe collapse of others to maintain their standardof living, in a context where limited resourcesimply their rationing, and hence theirappropriation by some. The death of some, whichpreserves the life of others, can never beconsidered a scandal; at best, it deserves to beforgotten. In this context, many words –“Humanity,” “Universalism,” “Cosmopolitanism”– are emptied of their utopian overvaluation.Because it is a matter above all of grasping whatthey do not allow us to think through, notablyhow the life of some presupposes the death ofothers,16 and how life in superabundancepresupposes the continual reiteration of acts ofmassacre, the consent to the murder of thosewho, by their very existence, take up too muchroom.đđđđđđđđđđIn this framework it may be interesting toresignify, politically, the idea of “diaspora.”Beyond the synthesis of opposites17 that itoperates, the idea does not refer exclusively to aspatial conception of identity that putsnationality, territory, and citizenship understrain. Diasporic existence unhinges exclusiveaffiliations with the body of the nation. To live inthe diaspora is to be a member of two spaces atonce.đđđđđđđđđđThis double presence18 sheds light on theutopian powers that run through diasporicexistence. Such an existing (exister) presupposesheterological self-construction, whichincorporates the other – any other possible place– into the definition of what individuals, peoples,

and communities are. It entails the possibility ofa disaffiliation from the national, a breakingdown of borders that complicates relationshipsto places of origin and arrival. It contestsrhetorics of authenticity and loyalty that demandtotal allegiance to a nation defined as a block, asubstantialized body. Diasporas can develop asui generis way of life by forming “transnationaland transcultural minorities,” indifferent to thelogic of existing nationalities.19đđđđđđđđđđTo think about the diaspora as a doublepresence is not to privilege one world over theother. The lack of loyalty of which those whoselives unfold across several places are accusedneeds to be recoded positively as multipliedpresences. Diasporic existence is a refusal, therefusal to choose between two worlds. Thisrefusal assumes a singular form when the twoworlds are in conflict. It summons a whole vitaleconomy that contests a geopolitics founded onthe logic of predator and victim.đđđđđđđđđđ“Double presence” has a material,terrestrial significance. To think about thediaspora is to ask a question that is not so much“Who am I?” as much as “Where do I live?” Theanswer is unambiguous: the diasporic beingliving at the intersection of antagonistic worldsinhabits a political conflictuality. On theFrance/DRC border, this conflictuality is brutallyapparent: modes of consumption in wealthysocieties rely on exploiting “blood minerals” fromthe Congo.20 In diasporic lives, geopolitics andinternational relations become family affairs.They run through the affective lives ofcommunities. We must not shy away from theviolence of the conclusion: the inequality ofworlds sometimes means that one inhabits asociety that feeds on the blood of one’s ownfamily. The dialectic is poor: to live well requiresthe negation of the other.đđđđđđđđđđSo we must develop a practical approach tothe idea of diaspora, as the refusal to see oneworld disappear so that the other can live. As therefusal to see one’s kin die. Under whatconditions are worlds in conflict equallyhabitable? How can they provide the sameconditions of habitability to their populations, tofamilies separated by a border? The point is notto reactivate, in these finite times, a co-development logic that is overly invested in thedevelopment paradigm, and that appears as thehumanitarian facet of policies controllingmigration flows in wealthy countries.đđđđđđđđđđDiasporic practices are micropolitics; theytake the form of an internationalism that issituated rather than abstract. Suchinternationalism is not some sort of idealizedassumption of responsibility for the planet’sfuture, theoretically positing a shared humanity.It is concerned, on the contrary, with concrete

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modalities of action implemented by the peoplewho are interpellated by two places at the sametime – two places in conflict that shape the bodyof their biographies and their attachments.đđđđđđđđđđTo think from two places in conflict is not amatter of feeling nostalgia for the world’s lostoneness but rather of questioning the way inwhich both spaces can be equally habitable. Allof which implies a certain political practice ofpostponement.21 To postpone the extinction, thedeath of a world, on the one hand. And topostpone the economic and political logics thatincrease superabundance, on the other. Povertyof words, poverty of solutions, at a time whencertain processes of destruction appearirreversible. But what we need to think about isthe way in which geopolitics are embodied inpersonal lives. And traversing the modes ofexistence that they demand, we need to try toawaken their revolutionary potentials, knowingthat revolution here is firstly a refusal – therefusal to see the death of one world support thelife of the other. This is the utopia of diasporicexistence: to be present in two worlds at once inspite of the poor dialectics that link them, and tomake it possible in each of them to inhabit and todevelop the possibilities of a life in spite of all.đđđđđđđđđđ×Translated from the French by Gila Walker.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi was born in Brusselsđto aCongolese (DRC) father and a Franco-Italian mother.She is Associate Professor in philosophy at Paris 8Vincennes-Saint-Denis University, and AdjunctDirector of the research center Les LogiquesContemporaines de la Philosophie (LLCP). She wasvice president of the Collège International dePhilosophie from 2014 to 2016. She is a member of theeditorial committeeđofđCritical Time (DukeUniversity)đand cocurator of the Yango II Biennale,Kinshasa / RDC (2021).

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đđđđđđ1Marième Soumaré, “Transfertsde fonds: Dangereuse chutepour les ménages et … lesbanquiers,” Jeune Afrique, May17, 2020https://www.jeuneafrique.com/945715/economie/transferts-de-fonds-dangereuse-chute-pour-les-menages-et-les-banquiers/.

đđđđđđ2Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands /La Frontera: The New Mestiza(Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 19, 25.

đđđđđđ3(In French, such protectivemeasures are called gestesbarrières – literally “barriergestures.” – Trans.) See BrunoLatour, “Imaginer les gestes-barrières contre le retour à laproduction d’avant crise,” AOC,March 30, 2020https://aoc.media/opinion/2020/03/29/imaginer-les-gestes -barrieres-contre-le-retour- a-la-production-davant-crise /.

đđđđđđ4Stéphane Dufoix, La dispersion:Une histoire des usages du motdiaspora (Éditions Amsterdam,2011), 16.

đđđđđđ5Nadia Yala Kisukidi, “Du retour:Pratiques politiques afro-diasporiques,” in Politique destemps, ed. Achille Mbembe andFelwine Sarr (Philippe Rey,2019), 147–74.

đđđđđđ6Isidore Ndaywel È Nziem,L’invention du Congocontemporain, vols. 1 and 2(L’Harmattan, 2016), 143–44.

đđđđđđ7Raphaël Batsîkama ba Mampuyama Ndâwla, L’ancien Royaumedu Congo et les Bakongo(L’Harmattan, 1999), 4.

đđđđđđ8Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of theEarth in the International Law ofthe Jus Publicum Europeaeum,trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press,2003).

đđđđđđ9Carl Schmitt observes that the“culmination of this race … wasa great international land-appropriation congress – theCongo Conference in Berlin(1884–85).” Nomos of the Earth,216.

đđđđđđ10Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth,219.

đđđđđđ11Vincent Hiribarren, “Berlin,1885: Questions sur uneconférence,” L’Histoire, no. 477(November 2020).

đđđđđđ12Anna Bednik, Extractivisme –Exploitation industrielle de lanature: Logiques, conséquences,résistances (Le PassagerClandestin, 2016). For thesituation of the Congo, see AdamHochschild, King Leopold’s

Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror,and Heroism in Colonial Africa(Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

đđđđđđ13Apoli Bertrand Kameni, Mineraisstratégiques (PUF/Le Monde,2013), 156.

đđđđđđ14Kameni, Minerais stratégiques.

đđđđđđ15Colette Braeckmann, Lesnouveaux prédateurs: Politiquedes puissances en Afriquecentral, 2nd ed. (Éditions Aden,2009).

đđđđđđ16Starting from the situation of theDRC, it is a matter of questioningthe logic of the production of lifedetermined by the logic ofinternational commerce. On theAfrican continent, forms ofproducing life exist that are notconnected to the relationshipwith societies of overabundance.(I thank Felwine Sarr forsuggesting this point to me.)

đđđđđđ17Dufoix, La dispersion, 327.

đđđđđđ18On the issue of double presence,see Nadia Yala Kisukidi, “Duretour”; and Dufoix, Ladispersion, 514ff.

đđđđđđ19Richard Marienstras, Être unpeuple en diaspora (FrançoisMaspero, 1975).

đđđđđđ20Christophe Boltanski, Mineraisde sang (Grasset, 2011).

đđđđđđ21I’m borrowing the term fromAilton Krenak, Ideas to Postponethe End of the World, trans.Anthony Doyle (House of AnansiPress Incorporated, 2020).

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