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? What about differences between deracialising and decolonising the curricula taught at universities across disciplines? Through a range of reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects from Africa and Latin America, this book explores the pitfalls and possibilities that face a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge. The distinctions between Africanisation, decolonisation and deracialisation are often conflated in the political demands put to universities. Suren Pillay emphasises all three as important but distinct imperatives. If an intervention is undertaken with the aim of decolonising the university while actually addressing deracialisation, it can undermine the effort to decolonise. Similarly, if an initiative to Africanise the university does not address decolonisation, both processes can be undermined. Drawing on more than two and a half decades of the author’s participation in these debates, these essays aim to intervene in and elucidate questions and predicaments, rather than offering blue prints; they are dialogical in spirit even when polemical in tone. In conversation with existing continental African and Latin American experiences, they offer incisive reflections on current South African debates.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Suren Pillay is the A C Jordan Chair and Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.
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