ABSTRACT
In attempting to map out the relations between Africa and Japan, this chapter takes its cue from history, and its inspiration from Michel Foucault’s exhortation to go ‘beneath the great continuities of thought, beneath the solid, homogenous manifestation of a single mind or of a collective mentality, to . . . try to detect the incidents of interruptions’ that may illuminate the ‘new search for rationality and its various effects’ (1972: 4). The intention is not so much to break away from tradition as to try to specify and understand the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, the phenomenon of rupture) in the flow of historical events (Foucault, 1972: 4). It is also to acknowledge that although ‘historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves’ (Foucault, 1972:5).
