Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

My daughter, Bisola Falola and my friend, Professor Vik Bahl, do assist, but it is a minimum of four hours a day, and adherence to Google regulations regarding LGBT, anti-Semitism, etc. And I don't like people to abuse one another—an insult is not an argument.

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA <chidi.opara@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 8:12 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

"TF's recovery would be speeded

up by rational postings"-Gloria.

 

I don't think so. I think that Oga TF should entrust the moderating of this platform to trusted aides for now.

 

The man just turned 70, he needs to take a brief break from mental exertion to recover fully.

 

I don't have to be a medical professional to know this.

 

Once again, quick recovery Sir.

 

-CAO.

On Friday, February 24, 2023, 'Emeagwali, Gloria (History)' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

TF hits the nail on the head.

Great intervention.

 

Attacking scholars who speak

about decolonization is a Eurocentric 

ploy and propaganda stunt. 

TF's recovery would be speeded

up by  rational posting.

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association

 

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2023 9:22 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

 

EXTERNAL EMAIL: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click any links or open any attachments unless you trust the sender and know the content is safe.

Oga,

 

I agree with some of what you wrote and disagree with others, but none of that matters at this point. Your quick and full recovery trumps everything else. So when you're out and fully back to your routine, we'll continue. Knowing you though, I am convinced that even in your condition, and probably against the advice of your doctor and family, this conversation is helping you somewhat to cope and exercise your fecund mind and restless intellect. Please rest sir. And let us know, even if privately, when it's ok to call and how.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 24, 2023, at 8:10 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:



Ok, let me frame the question differently:

If people want to use decolonization to write their own history, why not let it be?

 

If IPOB wants to write the history of Biafra the way they want it, let it be?

 

The Yoruba say Oduduwa is their father? Let it be. Christians never wake up say he is not their father.

 

How many nations in the world who wake up on do what they do to us---writing their history for amusement parks?

 

There is a liberal attack  on decolonization as it is an anti -racist paradigm. It is is racist component that is the issue.

 

The real argument is that there is nothing new about decolonization, just as there was nothing new about subaltern studies. What you now call decolonization is what an earlier scholars were calling Nationalist Histori0graphy, African Perspectives, etc. What Santos, Mignolo, Sabelo added to is no more than a heavy dose of race and racism.

 

How can Africans lived under apartheid and we will call it an "episode." It is white liberals who popularized its usage. If the Mau Mau killed my people, colonialism cannot be an episode.

 

Let people continue to use as it applies to their trauma, their sexuality that was assaulted that pushed them skin bleaching, their sense of beauty that pushed to the skinny being more beautiful than the plumb; their villeages where they blended communities.

 

Can Australian aborogines wake up and be praising white people?

Can 14 million Indian population wake up and be debating decolonization?

Let us decolonize if it does away with useless democracy

Let us decoonize if does away with useless intellectual disciplines

Let us decolonize if its proponents will give its home grown theories

Let us decolonize if it empowers the use of our indigenous languages.

But to attack it, the way I have seen it done, is entrenchment of white power and not African agency.

TF

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, February 24, 2023 at 7:27 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

"I see attacks on decolonization as seeking useless relevance in white scholarship"

 

This is highly uncharitable. No one is attacking decolonization per se, but is Simon Gikandi seeking relevance in white scholarship when he writes robustly about African and African-Caribbean agents in the making of colonial modernity and colonial culture?

 

Are Black scholars who write about the persistence and flourishing of African cultures in the Americas and the Caribbean looking for relevance in white scholarship or telling a story of Black resilience and the limits of oppressive power?

 

Is Olufemi Taiwo looking for relevance in white scholarship for critiquing the excesses and wrong premises and assumptions of the current fad of decoloniality and decolonization?

 

Are these scholars not simply giving Africans on the continent and in the diaspora their due and resisting the epistemological move to attribute everything and an all-conquering omnipotent hegemony to the white man?

 

Ultimately, is this a debate about the relevance in specific, defined contexts, of decolonization or about nuance and the current trend of wrongly and ahistorically labeling everything "colonial" and calling for its decolonization?

 

My original piece clearly stated, and I've repeated since, that I am not against decolonization and decoloniality where the objects are clearly defined and delineated, and that my short intervention is only a plea for epistemic moderation.

 

What worries me and other critics is the burgeoning epistemic extremism. 

 

What rankles is that some people in our field who have no sense of the complex history of colonialism, the polyvalent African agency in it, and the long genealogy of intellectual decolonization on the continent, are claiming that all our current epistemic practices are colonial, that past generations of Africanist scholars and thinkers have allowed this to persist, and that they're on a mission to solve this problem.

 

Is this historically or even factually correct? And should it not be critiqued?

 

And finally, by all means people in formerly or presently colonized spaces should reclaim their personality and their erased or suppressed singularities, but as scholars we should critique the distortion of history and the denial of local agency—good and bad—in that noble project.

 

If such matters are beyond academic critique or scrutiny then we might as well change professions. 

 

And if that is the case then why has decolonization not remained strictly in the political and sociocultural realms and has instead been brought into the academy as a theoretical and epistemic enterprise?

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

On Feb 24, 2023, at 3:03 AM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:



Aborigines in Australia, indigenous Indian populations have insisted that this is not an academic issue

It is like saying a raped woman gained something from it.

Decolonization is just a new label to describe what has been with us since Moses took the children of Israel  out of Egypt.

 

Get Outlook for iOS

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2023 6:27:47 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

 

Ken,

 

That's my point, not Okey's. Okey is arguing the opposite point. 

 

If African cultural practices, ideas, and knowledges survived and in some cases thrived through 350 years of brutal Atlantic slavery, I don't understand why the idea that colonialism had at best an uneven and shallow impact and that many African thoughts and cultures survived the tragedy strikes some people as implausible.

 

And what about the appropriation and rechristening of African and Africa-derived ideas and practices as "colonial" by colonizers? What do we make of this? Do we reify this colonial appropriation by calling for the decolonization of those appropriated and colonially rebranded ideas or do we deconstruct their alleged coloniality?

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

On Feb 23, 2023, at 5:48 PM, Harrow, Kenneth <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:



simon gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste is all about the point okey is making about how africans were agents in the production of knowledge, cultures, values, perspectives even when they were enslaved, and especially thereafter including the colonial period.

ken

 

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2023 3:58 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Epistemic Decolonization and the Flight of Academic Common Sense

 

"Here's one example of mental slavery that captures the correct and generally accepted definition of the "decolonial perspective."

 

Okey, 

 

This quote above is emblematic of the problem. It is precisely what I'm critiquing--the tendency to dismiss, denigrate, and devalue African choices, adaptations, etc without recognizing the agency of Africans in sticking with things associated with colonialism or in modifying or adapting those things to their colonial and postcolonial lives.

 

Colonialism ended almost 60 years ago in Kenya, and in that period the British have not held a gun to the head of Kenyan lawyers or Nigerian lawyers to compel them to abandon the wig or to prevent them from replacing it with an Africa-originated headgear. You don't think that it's the choice of these Kenyans to retain the wig, that they have self-consciously chosen to keep it, and that they may have their own logic, separate from the original colonial logic of the wig, for keeping it as part of their professional sartorial ensemble?

 

Isn't this haughty scholarly omniscience--when, instead of humbly studying the logics of cultural adaptation, retention, hybridity, domestication, etc, among our people, we descend into haughty, Manichean devaluation of how some Africans choose or chose to engage colonial cultures, participate in them, or appropriate them?

 

This is one of the points Olufemi Taiwo makes in his recent book, Against Decolonization. We think we know better than the Africans who were and are prolific participants in, strategic users of, and crafty adapters of colonial influences and ways of knowing and seeing.

 

As Ken asks, the English language is a legacy of colonialism, but can we honestly still call English a foreign language in Nigeria? Would that not insult the agency of Nigerians, who have domesticated, enriched, and invented new logics, grammars, uses, and instrumentalities for the language?

--
Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, IIM Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates (https://updatesonnews.substack.com)

--
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