Decolonizing African Studies Pedagogies

This book offers a nuanced, realistic, thought-provoking, and rich menu of ideas for addressing epistemic racism and disrupting oppressive structures of knowledge creation and mobilization. —Thomas Kwasi Tieku, King’s University College, University of Western Ontario, Canada. The theme and collection constitute a timely and an impressive cutting-edge contribution to both the theorizing and praxis of epistemic agency. —N’Dri T. Assié-Lumumba, Cornell University, USA. This book makes a vigorous contribution to the struggle for epistemic decolonisation from Eurocentrism. It is daring yet still accessible. Read this book and learn! It’s a gift to us. —Leon Moosavi, University of Liverpool, UK Despite the long history of decolonization as a ‘third world’ political project, decolonization as an intellectual project has gained tremendous momentum in recent times, signalled by movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackInTheIvory, and Why Is My Curricula So White among others. These movements situate the coloniality of power within ongoing practices in academia and seek to disrupt systemic racism and oppressive structures of knowledge production and dissemination. Assembling critical perspectives of scholars engaged in African Studies and other cognate disciplines on the continent and in the diaspora, the book elucidates and fuses ideas together to produce nuanced pedagogical advances in the service of students, academics, and educators. It contributes ideas on how to navigate systems, curricula, and academic contexts that have perpetuated a colonial toxicity that undermines Black agency and epistemic justice. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, educational leaders and policy makers across diverse disciplines interested in championing a decolonial praxis in academic spaces and universities. Nathan Andrews is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. Nene Ernest Khalema is Professor and Dean/Head of School of Built Environment & Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.