Contrapuntal reading of ‘Africa rising’: seeing Africa in International Relations beyond the exceptional

Abstract

How can we read International Relations from the perspective of Africa in a way that does not perpetually put the continent in a permanent state of exception vis-à-vis global politics? What strategies are available to study Africa without overhyping narratives of its rise or demise? This article contends, drawing on Edward Said, that adopting contrapuntal reading enables reading Africa’s place in international politics beyond narratives and counter-narratives of Africa moving from one exceptional state of despair to an exceptional state of prosperity with nothing in between. The article uses the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and its counter-narrative of Africa as a place of perpetual lack, deviance, and demise to illustrate how to practically adopt contrapuntalism as a method and as an ethos when engaging African perspectives in IR. It argues that contrapuntalism is a commitment to practicing critical thinking and questioning Eurocentric modes of thinking when approaching mainstream accounts of the history, origin, or interpretations of any political event. Contrapuntalism acknowledges that dominant narratives need to be read side-by-side with narratives of resistance and that non-Western concepts do not always need to be translated or rendered legible by creating (forced) Eurocentric equivalents for them to be legitimate or valid.