Introduction: The Micro-Politics of Knowledge Production in Southern Africa (original) (raw)
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"Reframing Intellectual History in South Africa", Theoria, 62 (143), June 2015.
This is an uncorrected draft of a review essay that has just appeared, discussing two recent works - Intellectual History in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions, edited by Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton, and Estelle Prinsloo, and Saul Dubow's South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights. The essay argues for a closer engagement with the discursive context of political ideas in South Africa, and for the value of three interpretive frames - imperialism, human rights, and modernity - as supplements to the moderate multiculturalism that characterizes the Vale collection.
Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa
International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, 2015
South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important...
An afrocentric critique of South Africa’s contemporary knowledge production regime
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The politics of knowledge in the world are as old as the cradle of human civilisation. The stakes of knowledge politics are higher in countries that have a rich history of colonialism, such as South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, among others. In the post-apartheid South Africa, there has been a raging scholarly and policy debate about the dynamics of the knowledge industry within our shores. At the centre of this debate has been the role of statutory institutions, such as ASSAf, NRF, universities and research councils. Despite the expressed legislative framework, the role of these institutions in terms of knowledge generation and development has not been applied in line with this framework by their administrators. The policy makers have not yet seriously held them accountable. The consequence is that these administrators have been largely acting not within the national policy framework. In fact, this discourse has largely assumed the form of a conversation between the deaf. Drawing ...
Benjamin Cohen’s disciplinary history of international political economy (IPE) begins with the premise that Africa has had little to contribute to this global discipline. Differing from this view, we argue that disciplinary histories such as Cohen’s elide the relationship between the discipline and its field. It is only through the juxtaposition of knowledge, power and politics that we can arrive at a fuller historical understanding of the international political economy. We further argue that political economy as an intellectual project has been central to the creation of the political economy of southern Africa. In a historical narrative of this idea in this region, we demonstrate that states and markets have remained prisoners of their mainstream intellectual manifestations, although subversive lives of political economy persist in some critical corners.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023
Reflections on the state of geography around the globe have noted multiple challenges and opportunities – including a call for the reconfiguring of the discipline as a critical space of care and praxis (Daya, 2022). Such a call is indelibly connected to broader conversations on the politics of knowledge production and critical engagements with cultures of knowledge production. In order to realise the reconfiguring of the discipline, it is imperative to engage with the multi-scalar politics and practices of knowledge production, to look beyond global inequalities and critically examine the intra-national inequities and structural biases of knowledge production. Through a focus on South African human geography and detailed analysis of publication data and interviews with staff at universities across the country, we critically examine how the ‘haunting’ of apartheid legacies contributes to a double-peripheralisation of staff at historically disadvantaged institutions while critical conversations remain ‘whispered in corridors’. This more granular engagement with the politics and practices of knowledge production highlights the entwining of intra- and inter-national privilege which produces a mosaic of ‘cores’ and ‘peripheries’ in the uneven landscape of knowledge production that requires critical scholars to engage with on multiple scales in order to realised a more just and equitable knowledge economy.