Who Dey Fear Donald Trump?

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

In his 1990 article, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Indian-American anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, called attention to a reconfiguration and reconditioning that was happening among various regions and peoples of the world in terms of their cultural, economic, social and political relationships. Appadurai highlighted that a new global cultural economy was emerging, noting that this emergence could not be fully understood through the usual binary models like centre-periphery, push-pull factors and consumers-producers.

Instead, this new global order was based on ‘nonisomorphic paths’; in other words, it was disjointed. These paths were not exactly new, but the ‘sheer speed, scale, and volume,’ with which they occurred, Appadurai argued, were central to ‘the politics of global culture’.

I begin this foreword by referring to this seminal article because it provides an illuminating basis through which we can engage the current global multipolar order, which itself is part of a longer history of multipolarity. It is also a postcolonial reality whose roots go back to the years of anticolonial campaigns across Africa and other regions of the global South and to the Cold War era. Against the backdrop of these moments, the emergence of China and Russia particularly fractured global power structures, bringing about the need to redraw the contours of sovereignty, resistance and state power, and a continuous shift in global alliances. The unprecedented magnitude of this disjuncture is shaping the emerging multipolar world order. More importantly, Africa’s role is becoming increasingly direct; it is, the authors in this issue highlight, no longer just a matter of decisions being made for the continent, but also about how African states, regional organizations, and initiatives respond to and influence these shifts in the interest of the continent.