Photo by Ali Hedayat / Unsplash Over the weekend, Iran announced that it would allow ships through the Strait of Hormuz again—on the condition that oil be paid for in yuan rather than dollars. For some, this was the long‑awaited sign that the spell was breaking: proof that Washington had finally overplayed its hand, that the dollar’s reign was ending, that the multipolar world was no longer just a seminar topic but something you could see on a tanker’s balance sheet. The tone online was unmistakable: the giddy satisfaction of watching a bully stumble, of seeing history, for once, seem to turn in your direction. The people paying most directly for this war are in Iran, where devastation reigns. But the costs do not stop there—they travel, in fuel prices, food costs, and debt distress, to Harare, Khayelitsha, and dozens of other places where governments had no say in the decision and whose populations will absorb the consequences quietly, without making the news. The glee on the timeline feels, somehow, still inside the story it thinks it’s escaping. The yuan-at-Hormuz moment is being narrated as a move in a game whose rules—superpower competition, the Washington-Beijing axis, the drama of American decline—remain entirely intact. We are cheering a change of cast, not a change of script. Recently, the editors of n+1 published a sharp diagnosis of what they call “Sinophobic Sinophilia,” the American condition in which fear of China and envy of China turn out to be the same thing, with China functioning less as a real country than as a screen onto which American anxieties are projected. Even the most anti-American Americans, they argue, are dreaming in American. It’s a brilliant observation. But the analysis is still written from inside the house being diagnosed—its closing question, whether a smaller, weaker America could finally become just, is still an American question, addressed to an American audience, with America as the central dramatic figure. The deeper problem is that this condition is not only American. Across the Global South, including in Africa, we have also learned to narrate our hopes and defeats on a Washington-Beijing axis. Our anti-imperialism has often been organized around America as the thing to escape, resist, or replace—which means America remains the fixed point around which our political imagination orbits. We have been dreaming in American too, and the yuan at Hormuz doesn’t change that. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard published America nearly 40 years ago and was widely dismissed as a provocateur. He may have been the most perceptive theorist of his generation. Writing before the internet had finished its work, he described the US not as a country among others but as a total environment—a desert of signs in which image had swallowed reality so completely that critique from outside had become almost impossible. Not because dissent was suppressed, but because the outside had ceased to exist. America was not powerful so much as it was total: a seeming utopia already achieved, a dream that had forgotten it was one. Forty years on, this reads as an understatement. The internet did not globalize American power so much as it globalized the American imaginary—the forms, genres, and rhythms of attention and desire that American culture had spent a century perfecting. We scroll through feeds designed in California, argue in idioms shaped by American culture wars, and measure our political lives against American benchmarks. The infrastructure of imagination is American, and it has no obvious exterior. The historian of religion and capitalism Eugene McCarraher, in The Enchantments of Mammon, offers the complementary argument: that capitalism is a displaced religion, carrying its own liturgy, sacraments, and eschatology. American capitalism is its fullest expression—a complete liturgical order, with its own account of what freedom means, what progress looks like, what a successful life requires. And liturgies do not end when empires decline. The Roman Empire fell; Roman categories organized European thought for another thousand years. A change in the reserve currency does not dissolve the liturgy. The dream may outlast the dreamer. McCarraher’s implied answer is conversion—in the full theological sense. You do not break a liturgy by finding a better product. You break it by reorienting desire toward a different account of what life is for. That is a demanding ask. It is also, I think, the right one. Conversion requires resources—alternative imaginaries, other ways of understanding what flourishing means. And this is where, from the vantage point of Africa, the question becomes genuinely open. There are traditions here that do not organize themselves around the American account of the good life: ontologies of relational personhood rather than the sovereign individual; liberation theologies that measure progress from below; ways of understanding time, land, and belonging that predate and exceed the liturgy of growth. I am not romanticizing these. They have their own histories of violence and contradiction, and they have been under sustained assault for long enough that they survive now in fragments. But they exist. They are not nothing. The analysts are probably right that US material hegemony is declining. The overreach in Iran, the tariffs, the tantrums of a power that has run out of ideas—the charts all point the same way. But Baudrillard would likely have been unimpressed. Empires of territory end when the armies go home. For an empire of images, the equivalent moment is harder to identify and may not follow from military or economic decline. Which brings me to the question I cannot answer. If the ships in Hormuz start paying in yuan tomorrow, if the dollar weakens, the aircraft carriers rust, Washington’s bluster finally exhausts itself, but we go on imagining history as a contest between superpowers, narrating every development as a move in someone else’s game—has anything actually ended? The people killed in Iran do not choose to be symbols of American decline or proof of imperial overreach. They are just people. The dream that makes their deaths legible as moves in a geopolitical game is the liturgy that will not end when the dollar weakens. And until it does, the question of whether anything has truly ended seems worth sitting with, not from Washington, not from Beijing, but from the places that bear the cost of the answer. – William Shoki, editor |
