Volume 2
Response | Jeannine Kantara
Last summer an American friend and journalist came to visit us in Berlin. I asked him whether he believed that Barack Obama would be the next US president. The excitement about his remarkable race to the democratic nomination was in full swing in the United States. In Germany, the phenomenon of Barack Obama came to the public's attention more slowly. My friend thought about the question for some time and said: „I think racism will rear its ugly head." Today, Barack Obama is the designated presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, my friend is right. Racism is rearing its ugly head, on both sides of the Atlantic.
On June 5th, 2008, just after Barack Obama's historic victory in the Democratic primaries, the left-leaning Berlin daily tageszeitung (taz) ran the headline „Uncle Barack's Cabin" right above a photograph of the White House. Could there be a more offensive show of contempt for whom may be the first black US President? The reference to the tragic figure of the all-pleasing slave who sacrifices his life is insulting and a well-calculated blow below the belt. Is it futile to hope that German commentators have finally put aside their prejudices regarding Barack Obama's skin colour? Such verbal lapse is neither new nor surprising, if one does not confuse left and liberal with anti-racist credentials. There is no automatic match!
Response | Julius Nyang'oro
Two months after senator Barack Obama effectively secured the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States, it is gratifying to note that the pan-Africanist intellectual world has not for the most part, been lulled to sleep by the Obama "moment." Instead, as demonstrated by most contributors on this eSymposium, serious guestions are being raised as to the meaning of this "moment" and whether we are about to enter a new phase of politics in the United States, and how developments in the United States will impact the broader pan- African world, and especially US policy towards Africa.
The discussions provided in this eSymposium range from the importance of recognizing the symbolic importance of the "moment" especially in the critical fact that for the first time in US history, a black man stands a better that even chance to become president of the United States, to the skepticism that a US president, let alone a black one, would fundamentally change the thrust of US policy towards Africa and the pan-African world. In other words, Barack Obama, with all of his goodwill and determination, is effectively a prisoner of the structural realities of the American political economy. As the US tries to weave its way through the challenges of globalization, and the indeterminate nature of what it may mean to be the lone super-power, any US president will be under tremendous pressure from domestic constituencies to be narrowly focused on "American national interests."
Response | Leigh Johnson
Miracles, for the most part, fall outside the purview of academics' intellectual consideration. In fact, the miraculous is by definition disruptive of and anathema to reasonable, rational, and coherent systems of thought. True miracles can be neither anticipated nor predicted; their probability is incalculable and their occurrences are, by most philosophical measures, either mistaken or inexplicable. And, yet, but... the etymology of the word "miracle" suggests, interestingly, that miracles should be the primary interest of philosophers. The English word "miracle" derives from the Latin miraculum ("object of wonder"), from mirari ("to wonder at"), which ought to remind us of the words Plato so carefully placed in Socrates' mouth in the Theaetetus: "...wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder." The Greek words rendered as "miracle" in the English Christian Bibles were semeion ("sign"), teras ("wonder"), and dynamis ("power")-in Vulgate translated respectively as signum, prodigum, and virtus. That is to say, the miraculous, the wondrous, the powerful signs-whether rooted in God, in Nature, in human being or in human making-have been, for ages in the "West," the recognized stimuli for intellectual inquiry.
The Meaning and Implications of the Obama Phenomenon
.jpg)
The euphoria over Senator Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic Party primaries in early June as the party's presumptive nominee in the presidential elections in November is now giving way to serious reflection on what his nomination and a possible Obama presidency might mean for the United States, the Pan-African world, and the world at large. There is little question that Senator Obama's campaign has been electrifying in its audacity and implications.
The historic appeal of Senator Obama's candidacy can be attributed to complex social forces in America's contemporary domestic and international political economies, not least the country's utter exhaustion following eight years of the Bush Administration, perhaps the worst in American history. The Bush presidency has bankrupted the country at home and diminished it abroad, left its economy in recessionary tatters and its international reputation terribly battered, thanks to the dangerous marriage between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, the lethal consummation of capitalist and imperialist hubris.
Driving the Obama phenomenon are other complicated dynamics, including generational, racial, gender, and class shifts in the ecology of American society and politics. Some of these forces are easily discernible, others barely perceptible, representing long-term and conjunctural trends including the possible collapse of the Republican coalition and supremacy over political and policy discourse in America's post-civil rights and post-Cold War realignments. The Bush presidency has severely devalued Republican currency as the custodians of national security, moral values, and economic management. Race is their last card.
Structural forces cannot of course be the sole explanations. There is also the organizational prowess of the Obama campaign, combining old-fashioned grassroots community organizing, hardball party politicking, and digital mobilization into an electoral juggernaut that vanquished the indomitable Clinton machine. In this equation, we must add Obama's own complex biography, which taps into four narratives of historic and contemporary American political discourses. In other words, Obama's biography, as he himself states in The Audacity of Hope, serves "as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
There is the son of a Kenyan father, the Obama of the migrant narrative, deeply etched in the myth of the American dream for non-black Americans. There is the self-declared black man married to a black woman, the Obama of the African American narrative of longstanding oppression and marginalization. There is the person born in Hawaii and partly raised in Indonesia with a multicultural family on several continents, the Obama of the transnational narrative that America's cosmopolitan classes aspire to for their despised country. Then there is the son of a white woman, the Obama of the biracial narrative for those who dream of a postracial America.
Each Obama appeals to different constituencies at home and abroad: Africans and African Americans seeking redress, biracials in search of recognition, whites desperate for redemption, and the rest of the world looking for respite from America's imperial arrogance and violence. "As such," Obama writes, "I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them." That has already started to happen as he is forced to spell out specific positions on the thorny issues facing America's domestic and foreign policy from the Iraq war to the price of gas.
The contributors to the eSymposium insightfully address many of these questions: Obama as the signified and signifier of black citizenship and globality, the symbolic and substantive implications of his candidacy, the power of hope and the limits of structural change his presidency would represent, the quintessential Americanness of this most gifted of politicians and the anxious Pan-African expectations pinned on him. While celebrating the historic achievement and possibilities that Obama's candidacy imply, all the contributors caution against investing a possible Obama presidency with the illusions of transformational power.
I fully share their caution. For all the excitement generated by his candidacy, Obama is not a radical figure by any stretch of the political imagination. He is beholden more to capital than labor, to the elites than the poor, to neo-liberalism than social democracy, to American hegemony than global disarmament, to American supremacy than Pan-African solidarity. In fact, as far as the Pan-African world is concerned, it is remarkable how little he has spoken about Africa, the Caribbean and other countries with large African diaspora populations. His first post-primary victory meeting was to shamefully supplicate before the Jewish lobby.
Obama's Africa, as outlined in his book The Audacity of Hope, and on his campaign website, is the conventional pathological Africa of disease, poverty, corruption, dictatorships, and war that plunges him "into cynicism and despair," until he is reminded that charity, western philanthropy, not trade and partnership, can go a long way to help this benighted continent of his father and numerous Kenyan relatives.
If Senator Obama is to develop a more progressive policy towards Africa and the African diaspora at large including those in his own country who have helped catapult him to the dizzying heights of American politics that no African American has ever reached, we have to hold him accountable by keeping vigilant and offering critical support and principled criticism.
