African Miracles and Black Damnation

Abstract As a category tributary to religious imagination, miracle has been quite productive in economic discourse on account of its flexibility. While eminently suitable to normalizing capital’s power in postcolonial Africa, the idea of the “African economic miracle” has acquired, however, distinct and heavily racialized meanings in global expert and institutional parlance. Rather than affirming a spectacular and unpredictable break toward a higher socioeconomic condition, as in conventional usages of miracle in postwar capitalism, dominant opinion came to define an African miracle as a country’s ability to not be an African failure, the position otherwise expected by that very discourse. It is a meaning that projects Africa into the specific temporality of global Blackness as a structured position in which proving economic usefulness from a subordinate status is presented as the ultimately elusive condition for being considered deserving of freedom and independence.