(Dis) Investing Homi Bhabha’s Emancipative Discourse (from) in Post-colonial Project Management: Re-thinking the Amodernism of Imperial/African Political Economy

Abstract

Drawing from Bruno Latour’s amodernist organization theory, which illuminates the canonization of epistemological boundaries in the field of project management studies, this paper argues that Homi Bhabha’s emancipative project in postcolonial research, has failed to assert itself in this globalizing age of projectification of societies. In its historiographical context incarnated in writings by management scholars, the field of project management orientalized Africa as underdeveloped and in need of occidentalist modernization. This Latourian insight driven by the quest for the ‘purified canon’ portraying the metropole as ‘centre’ of civilization and the colonies/Africa, as the Other, was tragically misjudged by nationalist ideologues fighting for independence, post-independence leaderships in Africa, who met in the Bandung Conference, advocates of a New World Economic Order, pan-Africanists, because their interventions were grounded chiefly in hybridization. But hybdization means the demise of the amodern and since the occident will not stand by to witness this decanonization with an applause, the Third World was already ‘mal parti’ (to cite Denan) because its post-independence leadership needlessly staged the post-colonial project on the path of a hybridization logic of inevitable confrontation rather than in a light of participation and solidarity. Hybridization in post-colonial management studies connotes with the inevitability of ‘confrontation’ at a time when the Third World does not have the means to deal efficiently with it. Hybridization can also mean ‘participation’ and ‘solidarity’ (in the sense of understanding the Other’s viewpoint and embedding it) without radiating the perception of threat and taking no responsibility or showing any competence to deal with the  consequences of that perception. It concludes that, instead of ‘playing’ the ideological game at the level of the ‘super-structures’, more emphasis should be placed on building greater competency in the Latourian amodernism of development, entrepreneurship, etc. The Third World needs to build more projects by investing in the knowledge industry of amodernism while incorporating its cultural values. The West and the emerging world should not see this as a ‘threat’ to amodernism but as a ‘richness’; but for this to happen, they should actively invest in sustainability of this process by supporting the intelligentsia of knowledge producers and interpreters in the Third World.