Chielozona Eze, Race, Decolonization, & Global Citizenship in South Africa

Summary

Contemporary global political-economic events in the past two years suggests that we are at a very crucial juncture in our postmodern history in which the inevitable reality of globalization, i.e. political-economic and cultural integration, is being powerfully contested. The new cultural reality of global entanglements is being vehemently rejected by the proud promoters of singular Euro-American nationalism and nativist ideologies. Although we are now confronted daily by a global postmodernity marked by intense political-economic and cultural interconnectivities fostered by innovations in communication and transportation technologies, these new impulses of cultural singularity and intolerance signal a vigorous resistance to notions of a shared humanity, of economic interdependence, cultural cross-fertilization, global citizenship, transnational morality, and all of the cherished values of humanism associated with modern European civilization. What we are witnessing is a relentless reversion by the heirs of the pioneers and frontrunners of Euro-American modernity – who once emphasized internationalization, humanism and cosmopolitanism – into the unenviable and detested culture of selfishness and intolerance of pre-modern civilization.

Chielozona Eze's recent book, Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa (2018) could not have emerged at a more opportune moment in contemporary global history. And its real intellectual purchase is revealed in the extraordinary ways in which it functions as a powerful manifesto of philosophical ideas and cultural values about how to live together as global citizens at a moment of intense existential anxiety about difference and the now popular obsession with cultural singularity and familiarity. Drawing heavily on South African history and cultural representations, especially in literary narratives, Prof. Eze argues that ‘Nelson Mandela's and Desmond Tutu's emphases on empathy, forgiveness, Ubuntu, and other virtues that actively bind people, rather than divide them, define the difference between the responses of South Africa and those of other African countries to the colonial experience’ (7). Bypassing the liberal condescension often associated with elitist cosmopolitanism, Eze argues that in a new world order marked by new moral challenges, what he calls ‘empathetic cosmopolitanism’ might offer a new way forward as a meaningful political tool and existential resource to foster integration, mutual recognition and unity in the face of the rude realities of diversity and difference. He insists that ‘as a humanizing principle, empathetic cosmopolitanism enables us to embrace the humanity of others by putting ourselves in their position, and we do so without messianic assumptions’ (7).