Diplomatic Para-citations: Genre, Foreign Bodies, and the Ethics of Co-habitation

(Hardback)

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Taking seriously the critical conception of diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement (by James Der Derian, Costas Constantinou, Noe Cornago et al), this book turns to the politics and laws that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures and the genres of Man that they privilege.

In an attempt to read the diplomatic from the African postcolony, the book probes the injunction at the center of the law of genre that states that genres are not to be mixed. This enables it to investigate the citational/recitational forms of knowledge and practices of recognition that reproduce the diplomatic and colonial order of things in the African context.

Through a reading of literature, philosophy, and a multiplicity of everyday practices in Africa and its diasporas, the book explores amateur diplomatic practices that provide a counter-force to laws that prescribe faithfulness to a norm/form while proscribing the mixing of genres.

The main themes running through the theoretical and fictional texts include: amateur diplomacies, colonial laws of genre and genres of man, and the ethics of co-habitation. The different chapters focus on multiple conceptions of the foreign body (as extra-terrestrial aliens, disease, foreign organ, monsters, diplomats, non-citizens etc), postcolonial urban life,

Reviews

"The obsessions of Sam Okoth Opondo are love, family, violence, the sacred, the erotic, memory, and the power of stories. His mode is poetic assemblage. His voice is now a choir, and now ecstatic solo. Diplomatic Para-citations, a living manifesto, a new Poetics of Relation." --Abdourahman Waberi, Assistant Professor of French, George Washington University

"Transgressing the laws of genre, Diplomatic Para-citations unveils the forms of knowledge and practice that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures, and the painful moral and legal cartographies they entail. Against the reproduction of that order of things, Opondo places in the politics and poetics of amateur diplomacies an unpretentious but promising foundation for a more life-affirming ethics of everyday co-habitation all over the world." --No Cornago, Associate Professor of International Relations, University of the Basque Country

"A sweeping vision, matched in its seriousness of purpose by its delight in deeply explored details, Diplomatic Para-citations combines political science with literary, cinematic, and philosophical analyses. Opondo's originality and breadth of expertise make his bold theoretical interventions essential for challenging epistemic violence and for the transdisciplinary understanding, historicization, and problematization of contemporary issues on the continent and the Diaspora." --Nathalie Etoke, Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY

"Diplomatic Para-citations is a feat of intellectual creativity and humanistic knowledge in a profane, genre-bending form. Opondo's 'amateur diplomacy', along with his ethical stance, centers what is at stake in the most basic of interactions. Moreover, he examines that which is at stake in interactions that are foreclosed or already coded within the epistemic violence of capitalist imperial modernity." --Shiera S. Malik, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of International Studies, DePaul University

A sweeping vision, matched in its seriousness of purpose by its delight in deeply explored details, Diplomatic Para-citations combines political science with literary, cinematic, and philosophical analyses. Opondo's originality and breadth of expertise make his bold theoretical interventions essential for challenging epistemic violence and for the transdisciplinary understanding, historicization, and problematization of contemporary issues on the continent and the Diaspora.

Diplomatic Para-citations is a feat of intellectual creativity and humanistic knowledge in a profane, genre-bending form. Opondo's 'amateur diplomacy', along with his ethical stance, centers what is at stake in the most basic of interactions. Moreover, he examines that which is at stake in interactions that are foreclosed or already coded within the epistemic violence of capitalist imperial modernity.

The obsessions of Sam Okoth Opondo are love, family, violence, the sacred, the erotic, memory, and the power of stories. His mode is poetic assemblage. His voice is now a choir, and now ecstatic solo. Diplomatic Para-citations, a living manifesto, a new Poetics of Relation.

Transgressing the laws of genre, Diplomatic Para-citations unveils the forms of knowledge and practice that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures, and the painful moral and legal cartographies they entail. Against the reproduction of that order of things, Opondo places in the politics and poetics of amateur diplomacies an unpretentious but promising foundation for a more life-affirming ethics of everyday co-habitation all over the world.

Author Bio

Samson Okoth Opondo is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College.