Diplomatic Para-citations : Genre, Foreign Bodies, and the Ethics of Co-habitation

This book combines poetry, prose, and theory in ways that speak to each other to offer new insight to the connectedness of the colonial world.

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,