The Harsh Reality: Why Hybrid Looking Is Almost Impossible to Realize

Introduction

In my blogs ‘Looking Without Claiming’ and ‘Hybrid Looking: How Gallery Noir Noir Opened Up My Horizon’, I started my journey. A journey in which I am learning to look at art without prejudice, especially art by non-Western makers. Because as I wrote before: in my younger years, there was simply no attention in galleries and museums for African-Caribbean, Surinamese, or African-American artists. The same applied, by the way, to female artists. The art world was completely dominated by white men.

Deceived

Looking back, I feel enormously deceived and manipulated because of this. But as I described in my previous blog post, the cause lies in how the system is structured. Our ingrained mindsets—and therefore also those of curators and museum directors—were shaped by the times in which we grew up. Now, much has changed and the time seems ripe for transformation. Yet that change progresses with difficulty. Art, after all, cannot simply be defined. Not by a white person, but even within the world of African-Caribbean and Surinamese writers, philosophers, and artists themselves, opinions on this vary widely.

Bye-Bye Babar

This brings me directly to an essay that significantly shook up my own ingrained mindsets: ‘Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)’ from 2005 by the Ghanaian-Nigerian writer Taiye Selasi.

At the time, she introduced a provocative concept: the ‘Afropolitan’. She resolutely said goodbye to old stereotypes. On the one hand, to ‘Babar’—the colonial, Western children’s book elephant that simplifies Africa to mere tradition or wilderness—and on the other hand, to the film Coming to America (1988), which at the time presented a cliché, clumsy image of an African migrant.

Selasi shows how the general perception in the years following that film radically transformed from ‘goofy’ to ‘gorgeous’. Instead of those old, one-dimensional frameworks, she showcased a new generation of African global citizens: global, multilingual, successful, and trendy. It was a liberating and glamorous statement, but one that quickly faced criticism. For is this flawless cosmopolitan identity not a luxury position reserved only for a small elite? 

The reactions from the intellectual and artistic world were not long in coming. Three voices stand out specifically: Achille Mbembe, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Marta Tveit, because they each demonstrate how complex our ‘problem space’ actually is. They warn us not to simply step into a new, oversimplified mindset. The first to introduce a profound, philosophical nuance was Achille Mbembe.

Achille Mbembe: From Cosmopolitan Dream to the Harsh Reality

The influential Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe  brought a profound, philosophical nuance to this debate. Worldwide, he is known for his analyses of the lingering impact of the colonial past. This thinker embraces Afropolitanism because it resists a static, isolated culture. He views African identity as fluid, urban, and globally connected, with the diaspora playing an indispensable role. According to him, you do not have to live in Africa to contribute to what it means to be ‘African’ today.

But the theory of ‘free movement’ and ‘hybrid looking’—however beautiful it may sound—is incredibly difficult to realize in practice. Mbembe’s successive publications do not form a passive book list, but rather an active representation of a mindset that grows with the times. It shows the reader why hybrid looking is a true ‘intellectual labor’; a process in which even a great thinker like Mbembe must constantly revise his own frameworks. This is clearly evident from the chronology of his work:

2000 – De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (On the Postcolony): In this early work, he focused primarily on the aftermath of colonialism within Africa itself. He analyzed how the new rulers often copied the systems of the former colonizer and how power in postcolonial states took on an almost absurd, theatrical character.

2003 – Necropolitics (Essay): In this groundbreaking, early essay, Mbembe introduced a pitch-black concept that put him on the global map. He argues that sovereign power ultimately revolves around ‘necropolitics’: the capacity of systems and states to decide which groups of people may live and who are left to die (as later became painfully visible at international borders).

2007 – Afropolitanism (The Afropolitan) (Essay): Shortly after Taiye Selasi’s text, Mbembe wrote his own essay on Afropolitanism. In this specific period, this concept was his only, optimistic escape route: a fervent plea for cultural openness and global citizenship.

2010 – Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (Out of the Dark Night): In this book, he concludes that merely analyzing the past is no longer enough. He shifts his gaze to the necessity of truly decolonizing our mindsets, so that Africa can play a leading and creative role in the modern world.

2013 – Critique de la raison nègre (Critique of Black Reason): His tone hardened definitively when he dissected the relationship between racism and global capitalism. He warns that in our modern era, the entire world risks being treated according to the mechanisms of exclusion that used to apply only to enslaved Black people.

2016 – Politiques de l’inimitié (Necropolitics / Politics of Enmity): The book version in which he expands upon his earlier theories. He analyzes how modern democracies increasingly create ‘enemy images’ and walls to maintain their own power, leading to a world in which we lose connection with one another.

2020 – Brutalisme (Brutalism): In this book, he expresses his fierce criticism of how human beings, nature, and data are ground down into raw construction materials by modern capitalism. He uses the heavy, concrete architectural style as a metaphor for a ruthless system that ‘crushes’ the earth and humanity.

2023 – La communauté terrestre (The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia): His most recent vision on how we must save the planet by forming a new community with all living beings. Here, his gaze shifts radically toward healing: he draws from ancient African philosophies to show that we must learn to share the earth rather than exploit it.         

Although Mbembe now advocates for such an open, common world, his entire oeuvre reminds us that the harsh reality of political borders and exclusion remains painfully felt by many on a daily basis. It demonstrates how complex and layered the ‘problem space’ is in which a thinker operates. Mbembe’s intellectual journey challenges us to critically question our own ingrained ‘problem space’ as well. Only when we dare to challenge those historical and societal mindsets does true space emerge for an open, hybrid gaze.

This is the harsh reality: hybrid looking is not a cozy choice, it is an intellectual labor that constantly tests our ingrained frameworks. And Mbembe primarily guards these large, global, and ecological shifts.

But how does this play out in the practice of the art and culture world? How does a maker break free from the Western format? In my next blog post, I will leave abstract philosophy behind and dive into the tempestuous life of the Kenyan writer and activist Binyavanga Wainaina. He turned theory into direct, dangerous action and refused to let his identity be consumed like a trendy designer brand.

Will you travel with me again next time?

Johanna

Beyond stereotypes: a new generation of global citizens redefining what it means to look, create, and be seen. (Photo by Annie Spratt via Unsplash)

P.S. 1: Want to experience this ‘hybrid looking’ in practice? Don’t forget to visit Galerie Noir Noir. It is exactly the place where these complex artistic dialogues come alive and where your own gaze is beautifully challenged.

P.S. 2 For those who want to hear Achille Mbembe himself speak on these themes, his recent interview ‘Why Africa Is Still Not Free After 70 Years’ on YouTube  comes highly recommended. In it, he reflects deeply on the current state of the ‘postcolony’.

He warns of a global, ‘brutalist-exclusionary’ shift that directly echoes the way art world canons and walls are stubbornly maintained. His insistence that critical consciousness does not emerge spontaneously but must be actively cultivated, strikingly underscores why the ‘intellectual labor’ of learning to look hybridly is so necessary for us to truly learn to relate to the work of Black artists.