Diplomatic Para-citations

Taking seriously the critical conception of diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement, Diplomatic Para-citations 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, Sam Okoth Opondo explores amateur diplomatic practices that provide a counterforce to laws that prescribe faithfulness to a norm/form while proscribing the mixing of genres.