Conference: Becoming Independent

[Toyin Falola]

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/toyin-falola-nationalism-decolonization-the-emergence-of-knowledge-tickets-636169669607

 

  

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

paradoxes

this talk is being given at Cambridge Uni by a Nigerian  academic based in the US.

Which academic polities have led the decolonization charge since the 80s when Nigerian and perhaps other African academics exodused to the West, particularly the US?

Apart from the South African Rhodes Must Fall movement, has the decolonization movement, at least in relation to African Studies, not been centrally Western based? 

What level of resistance or support have decolonization scholars in Western academies experienced?

These  scholars have been heavily encouraged  in their career developments by the institutions in which they work, from Edward Said's creation of Postcolonial Studies with the publication of Orientalism, as one view puts it, to Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Spivak, Ali Mazrui, Valentine Mudimbe and others.

Their work has been integrated with that of  scholars in the Western academy, such as Michel Foucault,  who were not working on non-Western contexts but whose work is important to understanding the intersections of knowledge, politics, economics and other systems as forms of power in constructing Westocentric hegemonies, adapting a term I learnt from Nkiru Nzegwu.

To what degree do scholars working on these decolonizing agendas in African Studies openly recognize the enablement of their agendas by the very Western systems they are criticising?

How reflexive are they in response to this seeming contradiction?

In my reading of contemporary decolonial literature by some  African scholars, I encounter what i see as sweeping, unqualified  references to Western epistemic hegemony.

I find this approach disturbing bcs it is ahistorical. 

One of the greatest enablers of non-Western thought and expressive forms is the Western academy, in its movement from the earlier days represented by such expressions as a Western scholar referring to the African as so mentally deficient he is not aware if the headache he has is in his head or in the roof of his house, Hugh Trevor Roper's  declaration that the only history Africa has is that of Europeans in Africa, one Caucasian trying to belittle me at UCL in 2005 in declaring that the term ''African philosophy is an oxymoron'', leading me to gaze at the atavistic creature in wonderment about such sublime ignorance about the history of the field in question, to encouragement I received in my work on African knowledge systems at Kent, SOAS and UCL in my MA degrees there btw 2004 and 2005, to SOAS wondering what they would teach in response to students' request to study non-Western theory in the comparative literature program at that time to the school's later resolve to do exactly  that some years later, the Western academy is best understood as a moving train which its unrealistic to characterise in terms of its dominant state at any point in time.

Yes, Western knowledge systems remain globally dominant and are likely to be  so for a long time. The dominant conception  of higher education is Western. The dominant epistemology, represented by the relationships between the human faculties, across the senses, imagination, intellect, emotions and intution, is Western and Western scholarship seems to have developed the most prominent effort to think through the relationships between these various faculties, as well as the world views emerging in relation to these conceptions, a prominence reinforced by the fact that in the effort to renegotiate the relationships of these faculties with each other scholars and of world views emerging accordingly, scholars have succesfully built on Western scholarship to pursue this, even when working in relation tro non-Western contexts, as in ecological philosophy represented by David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensous, which correlates phenomenology and ecologies of non-Western peoples, Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, correlating  Asian thought and modern science, and Nimi Wariboko, correlating Kalabari thought, Christian theology and Continental philosophy. 

These efforts to rethink the relative roles of various human cognitive faculties and develop correponding world views also corresponds to developments inWestern esotericism and other Western spiritualities, forms of knowledge such as Christian spirituality and theology,  which have been decentralised in the Western academy.

In sum, in referring to Western espistemic hegemony, what is being referred to within the complex of Western thought and its institutional contexts?

thanks

toyin

On Mon, 15 May 2023 at 09:56, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com> wrote:

awesome. 

ii would be great if the entire event and not just a section as planned,  will be livestreamed and recorded on YouTube.

this lecture is an addition to another Falola event scheduled for Cambridge uni, the Audrey Richard Lecture in African Studies meant for the 7th of June which will be livestreamed. 

its also related in subject to a worskhop in the Netherlands i think where Falola gave two talks a few years ago.

this is the second set of high profile public addresses on african creativities by leading african scholars in the cambridge/oxford axis  in recent times as known to me, the first being chika okeke-agulu's appointment as the Slade lecturer at Oxford.

i hope these developments will imply that African Studies will be more integrally harmonized with other disciplines in these universities, such as making it possible to study African art to a high level in the depts of art and art history and African philosophy maximally in the dept of philosophy, if these opportunities dont exist already, opportunities implying hiring experts in these fields.

thanks

toyin

On Sun, 14 May 2023 at 23:51, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/toyin-falola-nationalism-decolonization-the-emergence-of-knowledge-tickets-636169669607

 

  

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]