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,
Samson Okoth Opondo is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Vassar College.
Part One: Epiparasites/Introductory Fragments The Ghosts of Eugene-Terre-Blanche Introduction: Laws and Lore of Genre Chapter 1. Apocalypsis: Para-citing and Becoming Malcolm X Chapter 2. Counting with Sister Hypatia Part Two: Bios/Entanglements Chapter 3. Philopoesis and/as Resistance (Essay) Chapter 4. Postscripts (Short Story) Chapter 5. Biocolonial and Racial Entanglements (Essay) Chapter 6. Becoming with' HIV/AIDS (Essay) Part Three: Home/Abjection Chapter 7. Inner-wares (Novella) Chapter 8. Inter-city Half-lives (Essay) Chapter 9. In Extremis: Diplomacies, Extremism, and Enmity Chapter 10. Letters to Yvonne: Words and/as Worlds (Letters) Chapter 11. Fishers-of-Men: A Lamentation (Poem) Chapter 12. Counting Silently/Discretely: A Dirge Part Four: Speculations/Hospitalities Chapter 13. Childhood, Redemption, and the Prosaics of Waiting (Essay) Chapter 14. Children of the Sand and Sea (Poem) Chapter 15. Migricide, Hospitality, and Horror (Essay) Chapter 16. Speculum/Speculations/On Birthing Tomorrow (Poem) Part Five: Stagings/Falsifications Chapter 17. Cinema-Body-Thought (Essay) Chapter 18. Cinema is Our 'Night School' (Essay) Chapter 19. Stagecraft/Statecraft/Mancraft Chapter 20. Abusive Fidelities: Diplomacy and/as Translation Epilogue: St. Augustine's Phallus: Love, Diplomacy, and the Will-to-Convert
