Predicaments of Knowledge

78 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 58min.
These essays contribute to the debate about what it means to decolonise, deracialise, and transform knowledge after apartheid by problematising and clarifying the stakes involved.Predicaments of Knowledge explores the difficult questions South African universities face after apartheid: Is there a difference between Africanising a university and decolonising a university? Or between deracialising and decolonising curricula taught at universities across disciplines? Through a range of reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects this book clarifies the pitfalls and possibilities that face a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge. Current plans to ‘decolonise’ the university after apartheid often conflate three distinct but equally important imperatives: decolonisation, deracialisation and Africanisation. These distinction between decolonisation and deracialisation is sometimes conflated in the political demands put to universities as well. By parsing out the distinction between decolonisation, deracialisation and Africanisation Suren Pillay emphasises all three as important but distinct imperatives. Drawing on more than two and half decades of the author’s participation in these debates, the essays gathered here are to be read as ‘interventions’ in a larger living debate. They elucidate what our predicaments might be rather than foreclose debate or solutions and are dialogical in spirit even when occasionally polemical in tone. They self-consciously seek to be in conversation with prior continental African and Latin American experiences, as well as offer reflections on current South African debates.Foreword Acknowledgements Acronyms and Abbreviations Introduction: The University, Then and Now Chapter 1: Anticolonial Nationalism and Worldliness: Remaking the Humanities after Apartheid Chapter 2: Between Transformation, Deracialisation and Decolonisation Chapter 3 Provincialising Decolonial Theory: Comparing the Legacies of Colonialism in Africa and Latin America Chapter 4: Conquests, Contracts and Modernity: Political Theory and Teaching the State in Africa Chapter 5 Justice and the Historically Disadvantaged Chapter 6 Decolonising the History of Scientific Ways of Knowing Conclusion Bibliography Index