Charisma

From charismata to rizz, the concept of charisma continues to swell and transform in intriguing ways. The Oxford University Press declared the slang term "rizz" the 2023 word of the year, noting a significant expansion in the ways we talk about charisma in English.1 This religious concept dates back to the 1600s, it was significantly refashioned through sociological scholarship in the early twentieth century, and later adopted by environmental conservationists in the 1980s. It has continued to gain a new dimension and a new form. As it is actively reshaped in this slang form, charisma concurrently continues to perform a structuring function in the fields of cultural production and humanities scholarship. Informed by the ecocritical discourses on nonhuman charisma, this concept emerges as a useful framework for thinking about the ways we approach space, place, and objects of study. As the term is applied beyond the human, it underlines the role of narrativization in routinizing channels of attention. That is, it captures the outcome of the narrative processes of mythologization through which a figure, landscape, or story comes to be viewed as exceptionally appealing, interesting, and deserving of devotion or attention. With this in mind, my question is: What can charisma do for framing the discourses of Postcolonial Studies?

Charisma constructs how we see and what we tend to engage in representations and studies of postcolonial spaces. Highlighting the mechanism of charisma illuminates a problem of attention. I was, for instance, struck by the large absence of Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, in Nigerian literature. This omission by itself would not be too surprising given that Abuja is a planned capital and has only existed as a built city for about three decades. However, whenever Abuja was mentioned at all in these stories, (Adichie's Americanah or Cole's Every Day is for the Thief, for instance) it was often contrasted with Lagos — a city deeply and continually studied and storied for its exceptional layered histories, population density, economic viability, disturbing realities, creative fecundity, and the ceaseless chaos and cacophony of an exemplary postcolonial urban metropolis. Abuja, when it is mentioned at all, is often depicted as a creatively arid landscape, a city without character, or a pretentious emblem of progress from a failing federal government, having no real life of its own. That is, a city without charisma.

I was interested not only by this incomplete (mis)characterization, but I was intrigued by the idea that a landscape or city can possess a distinct character which may be perceived as unappealing or unattractive for narrativization. However, it was notable that in these depictions, Abuja was often compared to the exciting bustle and chaos of Lagos, against which its relative calm and orderliness was read as inauthentic in its Africanness, and as a mere façade of postcolonial national progress. In thinking through the relationship between Abuja and Lagos, the idea of spatial charisma emerged. Inspired by the concept of charismatic megafauna, and informed by ecocritical discourse on nonhuman charisma, I turned towards spatiality and space-making through narrative. I became captivated by the idea of charismatic spatiality as well as the problems it engenders.

Just as a hyperfocus on flagship species in a large and complex ecosystem, can pull attention away from other species in the same habitat with damaging consequences, a large global scale of attention on Africa necessitates a focus on the brightest, most exceptional points on the map, such that the particularities of other spaces are easily obscured. Africa's charismatic megalandscapes, so to speak, from densely populated megacities to the wide open wilderness spaces come to possess a routinized magnetism through repeated focus and narratives of their exceptionality. The teeming bustle of Lagos enacts a pull towards chaos, postcolonial difference, and the awe of endless urban entropy. This spatial charisma means that Lagos often readily emerges as a spatio-ideological synecdoche for Nigeria. An outcome in which one space or one idea of a place becomes singularly representative of a nation or region is dangerously limiting. A charisma-based framework of attention forestalls extensive engagements with the already marginalized spaces and peoples that are central to postcolonial studies.

Earliest recorded uses of the word date back to the 1600s and it had mostly resided in the realm of the religious and spiritual.2 Charisma, charismata, or charisme all describe a special gift from God, a spiritual intervention that grants exceptional attributes to an individual. In this context, the exceptionality of charisma was understood to be metaphysical. Informed by Paul's letters, Max Weber however uses charisma to theorize the nature of authority — of obedience and followership. His work in the early twentieth century on the sociology of authority is credited with bringing the term into secular discourse such that its meaning swells.3 He defines it as a "certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary."4 He explicitly expands the definition in order to take the term beyond a spiritual and religious context. Charisma became not merely a function of divine intervention, but could be understood as socially constructed, even if still reliant on belief and recognition. This expansion did not, however, go beyond human charisma.

By expanding the concept further to include charismatic megafauna, we can understand charisma as an outcome of narrativization, where the subject need not be human, and the effect need not be an accumulation of followers. The role that charisma plays in the organization of social groups depends on its definition as a complex and often slippery quality possessed by a human subject by virtue of a combination of social constructions, fictions, and their own innate qualities.5 This usage expands to include the non-human world in the 1980s, when conservationists begin using the term charismatic megafauna to describe "flagship species" that elicited the most positive affective responses from humans and could therefore be harnessed as icons for public engagement. Here is a more expansive utility for this malleable term. Charisma becomes something that could be found and/or cultivated in non-human figures. Propping up charismatic megafauna was a particular strategy for conservationists to appeal to emotions, gather attention, and ultimately donations and resources for these species and their habitats by extension.

Charismatic megafauna thus highlights the structure of attention that is maneuvered through processes of narrativization and invention. This contrasts with charisma as a structuring frame for authority where the balance between innate qualities and emergent relationalities are more slippery. Nonhuman charisma underscores the act of telling a story about multispecies relation in order to manage attention. This species PR — the narrativizations and iconography produced and disseminated — aims to gather and sustain attention for the purpose of securing resources and donations. However, it has also stimulated scholarly discourse on nonhuman charisma, nonhuman agency, and affect. The idea of nonhuman charisma unsettles the subject and object distinction between the human and the nonhuman. And, unlike the earliest definitions that understood charisma to be a God-given or otherwise innate property, nonhuman charisma highlights a relationality that is embedded in narrative and therefore subject to anthropogenic manipulation. These ideas have enlivened significant discourses on nonhuman agency and its multitudinous implications.

Charisma has always been a measure of authority and power, but it becomes more useful now as a measure of attention. The slang iteration "rizz" retools charisma significantly in this context into a measure of one's dexterity in garnering attention by enhancing allure and attraction. Used as a verb, rizz or rizzed boils charisma down to an action performed to elicit enthrallment and sustain positive, typically romantic, attention. The word of the year announcement reads in part, "2023 marked the era of personal — and professional — PR. And what does it take to command attention? A whole lot of charisma, or the shortened form, 'rizz.'"6 This parallel between PR — the practice of curating and dispensing information in order to manage and influence perception — and the goal of commanding "attention" represents the exact intersection of the role of narrativization, and charisma as a structure of attention. The charisma of charismatic megafauna is a particularly useful expansion because it emphasizes the practice of strategic narrativization deployed to maximize affective response and attention. This narrative mechanism operates upon attention and is particularly significant in postcolonial thought, where discourses on center and periphery are foundational to the field. It is also productive for African studies which is invested in countering imperialist traditions of nonrecognition with recuperative attentiveness to African realities and narratives. However, a framework of attention that privileges the magnetism of a subject entrenches and reproduces socio-spatial peripheralization.

For instance, thinking through charisma illuminates the system of magnetism at play in the spectacle of alterity that forms the basis for trade in the postcolonial exotic. Exoticism is inextricable in the relationship between postcolonial literary production and the market.7 The making of individual authorial figures, the stories that are told, how peoples and places are depicted, can all be shaped unduly by the pursuit of institutional recognition, and wider, global attention.8 This is evident throughout the work and public image of globally recognized African authors. For instance, the gripes Binyavanga Wainaina explores in "How to Write About Africa" sit alongside his self-aware pursuit of the kinds of African themes and stories that would win him the "bloody colonizers'" attention via the Caine Prize, and provide much needed resources and networks for his livelihood.9 Attention and the market are generally entangled, and exoticism — strategic or otherwise — constructs alterity and difference into institutional, cultural, and market value.10

In ecocritical discourse, feral charisma describes the magnetism of species whose main qualities are not appealing and might even repulse or disgust. It underscores an attraction to difference and illustrates the idea that qualities perceived positively are not the only ingredients, or even sure components, for generating the attention that charisma elicits.11 For instance, it explains the difference in the texture of attention on the cuddliness of a polar bear versus the strangeness of a dung beetle. The magnetism of a subject can find its hook in a variety of qualities, possessed to an exceptional degree, including beauty, charm, and genius, but also, abjection, difference, chaos, and spectacle. In the context of storying Africa, a structure of attention based on charisma does produce an appealing kind of magnetism in exceptional and hypervisible public intellectuals like Chimamanda Adichie. However, it overwhelmingly generates a feral magnetism to stories of abjection, catastrophe, and the spectacle of difference. The result of this magnetism varies, as it spawns a range of affects and responses including, desire, disgust, admiration, repulsion, enthrallment, protectiveness, curiosity, dedication — all of which still function to heighten and routinize the pull towards the subject. The postcolonial exotic cultivates a kind of attention akin to that produced in feral charisma. They both draw an implied reader towards alterity. Feral charisma's reliance on (radical) alterity sheds a different light on the preponderance for affordances in postcolonial texts that lend themselves to readings of exoticism and difference.

Ultimately, the organizing effect of charisma channels attention selectively, and can easily foreclose or eclipse the possibilities held within less exceptional subjects. Erica Edwards identifies the "fiction" of charisma and illustrates how its "limiting" capacity in guiding attention can be immensely detrimental, particularly when the structuring function of charisma goes unrecognized.12 Just as environmental activists resist the undue focus on charismatic megafauna that hinders the protection of less charismatic species, so might post colonial theorists resist the charismatic framework in other spheres. This mode of attention sets the stage for certain stories, landscapes, and even authors, to emerge as synecdoches for entire regions, countries, and in the case of Africa, often for the entire continent. The danger here is that charisma renders subjects falsely transparent, as for example when African cities are harnessed in Urban Studies for nightmarish and negative depictions that approach them as wounded, crisis-stricken, and ripe for alarmist and pessimistic engagements.13 These routinized channels of attention magnify alterity that highlights what Katherine McKittrick describes as the "tension between absence and [hypervisuality]" of a subject.14 The framework of charisma renders some subjects and topics hypervisible while obscuring much more.

And the question of which African subjects and topics warrant attention for their charisma reflects a global and frequently neoimperialist gaze. The field of African literature and African literary criticism is shaped according to a barometer of spectacle and magnetism, and institutionalized economies of attention construct and reinforce a spectrum of African subjects and stories that neglects the unexceptional or even "uninteresting." The narrative rhetoric of exceptionality overlaid onto globally visible and cosmopolitan spaces like the city of Lagos for instance, or stories like that of the oil industry in the Niger Delta, does not account for the full range of locally relevant stories being told in and about both these charismatic spaces, as well as in the less notable intermediary spaces. Privileging magnetism continues to inform the cultivation and visibility of individual authorial figures, the material objects of study in scholarly discourse, the hierarchy of attention to various genres of literature, and the recurrent subject matters and issues that become hypervisible in the fields of cultural production. Postcolonial theorists can work against this detrimental function of charisma by embracing the perspective of its structuring function and theorizing its effects in defining the shape of the field. The tradition of illuminating and reshaping the imperialist constructions of disregard and marginalization will be sharpened by a critical understanding of charisma.

I query charisma by engaging unlooking as a methodology — deliberately turning toward the uncharismatic, mundane, or less attractive subject to understand what it can reveal, and to locate what might be obscured. My work on Abuja is one example of this approach. Attuning to the modality of charisma underlines an attention issue that is especially pertinent in a field of study historically concerned with constructions of margins and peripherality. The structuring function of charisma offers an important critical lens that casts the economies of attention in relief. The economics that direct, shape, and value attention are a pivotal factor in any robust understanding of, or engagement with, narrative-making about the African continent. First recognizing the structuring framework of charisma, and then unlooking the charismatic subject from time to time, allows us to see what limits are constructed, what subjects are rendered invisible, seemingly transparent, or even ungeographic by this system of attention. As a method, unlooking contests these structures and can vitalize what McKittrick terms "alternative geographic formulations" and complementary "remappings."15 In parsing spatial charisma, I approach spaces as subjects, observing that spaces have distinct unfixed and ever-changing characters. I am returning to the case of Abuja for instance to attend to the city's character outside the shadow of Lagos' looming charisma and understand it instead in the more lateral spatial context of Nigeria's Middle Belt region. This non-charismatic approach helps me tap into intra-national and intra-regional imaginaries of the space and see particularities of the city's evolving character.

The continual construction of margins and nonrecognition through charisma-wrought channels of attention is a key concern for postcolonial studies. In a 1965 lecture where Achebe meditates on his duty as an African novelist, he mentions a few strategies for global black liberation among which he certainly imagines the onus on the writer to recuperate African history and thus educate. He concludes that these strategies are "props we have fashioned at different times to help us get on our feet again. Once we are up we shan't need any of them anymore".16 The hope in this last sentence begs the question: What new possibilities open up to the African novelist or storyteller who no longer has education and historicization as their primary duty? Where are we free to go next? The structures of attention that shape prevailing topics and tropes for the narration of the continent must transform and expand over time, or the sense of duty that Achebe describes becomes in itself a shackle. In this moment, postcolonial studies must continue to reach for stories that go beyond representing and translating itself for recognition or in response to cultural imperialism. Beyond this admirable sense of duty, the financial and cultural capital at stake in the cultivation of charisma play a major limiting role as Wainaina's example indicates. What kinds of unfreedoms are perpetuated by this duty to educate or inform, or these expectations to garner and sustain attention through African spectacle and alterity? How might we interrupt these patterns with a turn towards mundanity, frivolity, and smaller scales of spatial relationality that offer a more expansive image of Africa and African subjects?

By resisting charisma, postcolonial studies can advance the "right to opacity" that Édouard Glissant describes: the right to have one's unknowable depths to be recognized as such, not rendered falsely transparent and thus remade into an Other.17 As I read Glissant, he is suggesting that the postcolonial subject has the right to have inexhaustible shallows as well as unknowable depths. And that is to say that postcolonial subject has the right to be mundane, banal, uninteresting, uncharismatic, and frivolous as well as exceptional, spectacular, or otherwise charismatic. No single feature of the landscape may stand in for our entire image of the whole, nor need it be cataloged exhaustively or endowed with the capacity to be rendered fully known or knowable. The function of charisma limits all of these rights by supporting the economies of attention that are overdetermined by a global imperialist gaze. Every act of storying "Africa" entails the routinization of very specific channels of attention, trained as they are on key spaces, subjects, and people that must become hypervisible.  Opacity gives way to a false transparency, which paradoxically creates conditions for a kind of invisibility and obfuscation. The hypervisible charismatic subject looms large and excessively familiar, casting less charismatic subjects, spaces, and stories into the shadows of invisibility. By redirecting attention with intentionality, postcolonial studies can challenge these structures of attention produced by charisma.

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Comfort Azubuko-Udah (@Prof_Comfort) is an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at the University of Toronto. She is finishing a book project about the unspectacular and less charismatic spaces of African literary and cultural productions. She teaches and researches African literature and postcolonial thought with emphasis on narratology and ecocriticism.

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