Decolonizing Nationalism: Reading Nkrumah and Nyerere’s Pan-African Epistemology (original) (raw)
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This class is an advanced introduction to the broad topic of coloniality and decoloniality. It is an interdisciplinary class in nature, with a heavy focus on historical, theoretical, sociological and anthropological readings. The class starts with an introduction of some key concepts on coloniality and decoloniality, such as the colonial and the post-colonial and the de-colonial, as well as the meaning and the nature of the colonial structure and the centrality of race in the colonial project. The class is divided into four parts. The first part is examining some examples from different historical waves of colonialisms such as the colonialism of the "new" world, and the scramble for Africa, with a brief examination of some selected cases. The second part is the study of some of the key approaches to study colonialism and imperialism, such as the Marxist approaches, post-colonial theory, indigenous perspectives, the black radical tradition and sociological approaches. The third part is an examination of the key types of colonialisms such as settler-colonialism, and imperialisms/new imperialism, as well as some of the key problematics in the field as the relationship between the state and the colonial project and the gendered nature of colonialism and imperialism. The class concludes with the study of decoloniality as a theoretical approach and as a praxis.
Kronos, 2021
Decoloniality emerged in the last two decades as a new mode of critique against colonialism and coloniality. While its insights are inspired by dependency and postcolonial theories, decoloniality challenges them both, particularly their inability to depart with modern Western epistemology. Written in response to Arjun Appadurai's recent critique of On Decoloniality by Catherine E. Walsh and Walter D. Mignolo, this article attempts to articulate decoloniality's approach to epistemology and discourse analysis. Whereas Appadurai describes Walsh and Mignolo's position as an anachronistic attempt to "return to the precolonial past," this article underlines his inability to transcend the modern linear order of time.
Unsettling Coloniality: Readings and Interrogations.
Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, 2018
During the 1990s, various disciplinary debates took place within Latin Americanist circles regarding whether Latin America indeed falls under the category of the postcolonial. Many argue that Latin America, being a former Spanish colony, has, ultimately, very little in common with the conditions and legacies of colonization as elaborated by British and French postcolonial critics and theorists. These discussions went on for years, and in many ways have never ceased. As a result of these rather unresolved debates Latin America never fully obtained critically as a site of postcolonial inquiry. Instead, the field came to see what is now known as decolonial theory, and not postcolonial thought, emerge over the past twenty years as an increasingly prominent analytic approach for the study of Latin America's colonial legacies. Defined in opposition to postcolonialism, which many Latin Americanist critics found to be still too imbedded within the Western critical tradition, "Decoloniality" or the "decolonial option" came to serve as the name for a theoretico-political paradigm promoting indigenous, aboriginal, or other previously colonized and relegated modes of knowledge as a means to challenge Western Reason's claim to universality. Walter Mignolo differentiates between the two in the following way, "decolonial thinking is differentiated from postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking ("Epistemic Disobedience" 46). While this distinction is carried out somewhat tautologically, the point made is that while postcolonial theory continues to rely heavily on certain strands of post-structural thought, decoloniality claims not to. Through concepts such as border thinking, delinking (Walter Mignolo), transm odernity (Enrique Dussel), and the coloniality of pow er (Anibal Quijano) decoloniality positions itself as a uniquely non-eurocentric critical tradition that diverges from and aims to surpass other prominent theoretical models such as Marxism, deconstruction, as well as postcolonial theory itself. Within various fields and disciplines, ranging from literary and cultural studies to history and anthropology, the decolonial option has become established as a methodological platform and has been heralded by some as a revolutionary paradigm for the cultural and political emancipation of formerly colonized cultures from western modes of knowledge and power.
Critical Times
This article explores the ways in which Latin American decolonial theory is drawn on to make sense of colonial legacies in contemporary Africa. For Latin American decolonial theory, colonialism is characterized by enforced assimilation enacted through epistemic violence. Latin American decolonial theory self-consciously rejects thinking about colonialism as historically specific in favor of the more abstract concept of coloniality. When Latin American decolonial theory travels to Africa, its emphasis on colonial assimilation obscures a significant experience of colonialism that enforced difference rather than assimilation. The article discusses the key underpinnings of apartheid education as a form of colonial education, in order to show how colonialism was responsive to particular conditions and combined both epistemology and institutions. To think the problem of colonialism in the present requires a comparative account of the problem of colonialism that embraces both the history o...
Coloniality: Key Dimensions and Critical Implications
Emerging from sociological and philosophical inquiry into the history of the colonial encounter in Latin America, the notion of coloniality (and the larger field of decolonial theory with which it is now associated) has become a crucial theoretical resource for scholars across a range of disciplines. Investigations of the structure and processes of coloniality challenge received ideas about power, knowledge, and identity in modernity, and these investigations have significant implications for educational philosophy. Nevertheless, decolonial scholarship remains less known among educational theorists than postcolonial theory, with which it shares many concerns but from which it also sharply differs in crucial respects. In our presentation of the notion of coloniality, we first describe the history and key dimensions of this idea. The second part of the article develops several of the most crucial implications of the notion of coloniality for scholars and educators, with particular attention to how this tradition offers a rethinking of familiar categories in critical theory and pedagogy.
In spite of many years of slave trade in Africa, this paper finds relevant contemporary political economy relationship with the current politics of development and under development in Africa with Europe. The paper, by way of political economy analysis, argues that Europe did not start the slave trade. African societies had sold slaves to each other for centuries and for export to North Africa and Asia across the Sahara through Ethiopia and the Azanian ports. However, the flow of slave across the Indian Ocean was very minimal compared with transatlantic trade. It is the sheer volume of the slave traffic across the Atlantic and the brutality/the current impact that has continued to affect Africans that this paper investigates. The paper interrogates the ideological metamorphosis of nomenclature to globalization and capitalism and examines its implication in our contemporary society with particular reference to Nigeria and recommends that the issue be readdressed in the light of the present capitalism
Colonialism (Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed.)
Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
European colonialisms (circa. Late 1400) are complex, particularized, and changing political- economic-social-religious systems of domination. In the pursuit of capital accumulation and appropriation, Western European colonialisms generated and benefited from racialized and racist logics. Following the “formal” decolonization of much, but not all, of the colonized world—from Haiti in 1804, to Cameroon in 1960, to Papua New Guinea in 1975, to Timor-Leste in 2002—colonial structures, relations, and imaginaries often persisted in altered forms. Social scientists draw variously from political economy and historical materialism as well as postcolonial thought and cultural materialism within the broader field of colonial studies to both critique European colonialisms of the past and reveal the persistence(s) of colonial relations/structures in the present. Colonial “durabilities” and the “coloniality of being” continue to inform post-colonial political economies, social relations, and knowledge productions, creations, circulations, and contestations. The protraction of colonial domination(s) into the early 21st Century have given rise to reinvigorations of anti-colonial and postcolonial critique, including decolonial options and polygonal projects of decolonization. Widespread discontent regarding the persistence of “colonialism in the present” are manifested in the vocal and visible debates within early 21st Century universities around decolonizing knowledge, including struggles to decolonize the discipline of geography.