Contemporary debates on decolonising knowledge production, inclusive of research on Africa, are crucial and challenge researchers to reflect on the legacies of colonial power relations that continue to permeate the production of knowledge about the continent, its peoples, and societies. Yet these are not new debates. Sixty years ago, Ghana’s first president and pan-Africanist leader, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, highlighted the importance of Africa-centred knowledge. Similarly, in the 1980s, Claude Ake advocated for endogenous knowledge production on Africa. But progress has been (...) slow at best, indicated by the enduring predominance of non-African writers on African issues within leading scholarly journals. Thus, we examine why decolonisation of knowledge production remains so necessary and what can be done within the context of scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. These questions are addressed at two levels, one more practical and one more reflective . At both levels, issues of power inequalities and injustice are critical. At the practical level, the asymmetrical power relations between scholars in the Global North and South are highlighted. At a deeper level, the critiques of contemporary African authors are outlined, all contesting the ongoing coloniality and epistemic injustices that affect knowledge production on Africa, and calling for a more fundamental reorientation of ontological, epistemological, and methodological approaches in order to decolonise knowledge production. (shrink)

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and thereby (...) co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship. (shrink)

We live in an era that normalized absurdism and abnormality. From successive devastating economic and environmental havoc, the world is now before a pandemic with a lethal footprint throughout the planet. The pandemonium became global. This paper situates the current COVID-19 pandemic within the context of an endless multi-plethora of devastating sagas pushing humanity into an unimaginable great regression. In doing so, the paper examines, how such pandemic reflects the very colors of an intentional epistemological blindness that frames Eurocentric reasoning, (...) which crippled the political economy of global capitalism deepening and accelerating a never-ending and non-stop crisis that started in 2008. The paper explores also the social construction of the current pandemic and argues for alternatives ways to think and to do education and curriculum theory alternatively to challenge Modern Western Eurocentric reasoning. In doing so, advances itinerant curriculum theory as a just approach, a just alter-curriculum ‘theory now’, one that respects the world’s pluri-epistemological diversity, and aims to walk way from utopias framed within the borders determined by coloniality towards an anti-decolonial climax, and ‘heretopia’. (shrink)

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of (...) dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalized writing into academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous centered feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is (...) pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalizing of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning. (shrink)

Based on Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the term, we conceive the decolonial turn as a form of liberating and decolonising reason beyond the liberal and Enlightened emancipation of rationality, and beyond the more radical Euro-critiques that have failed to consistently challenge the legacies of Eurocentrism and white male heteronormativity (often Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism). We complement Maldonado-Torres’s account of the decolonial turn in philosophy, theory and critique by providing an analysis of the trajectories of academic philosophy and clarifying the relevance of (...) decolonising philosophy and of the decolonial turn for current efforts in transforming philosophy in face of the challenges of social movements such as the Third World Liberation Front and Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and England. After a brief analysis of the trajectory and current status of philosophy as a discipline in the modern Western research university, we provide examples of the decolonial turn and of decolonising philosophy in three areas: the engagement with (1) Asian and (2) Latin American philosophies, and (3) debates in the philosophy of race and gender. (shrink)

The conversation presents Prof. Em. Nina Lykke's contributions to feminist technoscience studies as well as entrance points to feminist epistemologies and methodologies.