The Politics of the Plane

In her digital photomontage Working Woman (1997), U.S.-based Nigerian artist Fatimah Tuggar stages a disjunctive encounter between the aesthetic procedures of the historical avant-garde and a postcolonial feminist critique of the visual imagery of the “Afro-optimism” that became prominent in the late 1990s. Treating the “modern African woman” as a mediatic phantom rather than a taken-for-granted subject-position, Tuggar's work evokes the universal “right to communicate” increasingly claimed by anti-neo-liberal activists in the Global South over the past decade. Notes 1. James Ferguson traces the discourse of “Afro-optimism” in Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order [Citation2006], which more generally discusses “Africa” as an “inconvenient continent” for critical theorizations of globalization that emphasize capitalism as a geographically all-encompassing network. For Ferguson, Africa is obviously not excluded from global capital flows in any simple sense, but the primary patterns of its integration, while heterogeneous and uneven between countries and regions, nevertheless create a general divide between what colonial administrators once referred to as “useable” enclaves of intensive resource extraction and “useless” swaths of territory and population that have been largely abandoned by structurally adjusted and war-torn governments. 2. A series of Tuggar's images appeared in a special issue of Social Text [Summer 2002] devoted to Afro-futurism, which the editor Alondra Nelson posits as a diasporic concept that challenges the racist-evolutionary opposition between “blackness” and “technology” in general. 3. For an exemplary statement, see Hammond [Citation2001]. 4. On the visual cultures of “developmentalism,” see Escobar [Citation1995]. 5. For Judith Butler, appeals to the universal by marginalized agents do not simply call for inclusion in a pre-constituted political space, but disrupt and reconfigure political space itself, exposing it to unforseen democratic possibilities. See Butler [Citation2000]. 6. “African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) Statement for the General Debate at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)” [http://www.itu.int/wsis/geneva/coverage/statements/femnet/c02.doc]. For a critical account of the first two installations of the WSIS (2002 and 2005) and the struggles of Southern NGOs to reframe the parameters of the forum in terms of social justice rather than the market-centric arrangements that are promoted by Northern governments, transnational corporations, and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and WTO, see “WSIS: Bridging the Digital Divide?” special issue of Third World Resurgence [December 2005]. Additional informationNotes on contributorsYates McKee YATES McKEE is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at Columbia University. His articles have appeared in publications such as October and Flash Art

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• Contingency, hegemony, universality

  Judith Butler•Contingency, hegemony, universality•2000

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• Digitally Empowered Development

  Allen L Hammond•Foreign Affairs•2001

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