Suchergebnisse

"This volume brings together reflections on citizenship, political violence, race, ethnicity and gender, by some of the most critical voices of our times. Detailed and wide-ranging individual reflections, take the writings of prominent Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani as a touchstone for thinking about the world from Africa. Contributors apply this theory to argue that we cannot make sense of the political contentions of difference, identity and citizenship today without understanding the legacies of colonial rule on our world. Chapters examine the persistence of the past, and how we must reckon with its tragedies, its injustices, and its utopias in order to chart a new politics; the politics of possible futures that are more inclusive and more egalitarian, and that can think of difference in more equitable ways. In a time when the call to decolonize knowledge, and politics rings loud and clear, this is both a timely and a crucial intervention"--

Abstract
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 of assimilation and the history of difference in a way that survives colonial assimilation.

This article offers a few vignettes on the humanities in contemporary Africa. It suggests that the different fates of the humanities and social sciences have corresponded to changes in political conjunctures, particularly in relation to nationalism in the wake of independence and conceptions of development and neoliberalism after the Cold War. It further takes up the debates in South Africa, the last African country to confront the dilemmas of decolonization in the sphere of knowledge production, most acutely expressed through the Rhodes Must Fall movement and other student movements that emerged in 2015.

In 1965 apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. Taking apartheid as a moment in the career of colonial law in South Africa, Pillay's essay considers the political effects of a debate among a section of South Africa's liberal critics. It hinged on whether or not to work within the categories of apartheid law, and what the strategic yield of that choice might be politically. In reconsidering this debate, this article explores the relationship between law and politics and considers how working within the legal tradition of colonial and apartheid law framed the objects of political criticism, making more prominent the problem of human rights violations, and rendering more obscure the foundational settler colonial question. It considers whether the politics of this choice was to have the effect of bringing apartheid as such into question, or whether its effect was rather a civilizational one: to secure the law, as a Western legal tradition on the southernmost tip of Africa.