Coloniality of Knowledge

Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within decolonial thought, including decolonial geographies and the disunities between the subfields of black geographies and African geographies. To challenge some of these dynamics, we introduce the concept of defiant scholarship in Africa, a form of scholarship that seeks to work against and outside of dominant grammars and prevailing registers and which draws from a powerful and extensive intellectual tradition across the African continent. Working from Walter Rodney's ‘guerrilla intellectuals’ and drawing on Walter Mignolo's ‘epistemic disobedience’, defiant scholarship cultivates those ways of thinking and those practices that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge. We ask what it means for our scholarship to be disobedient to colonial and capitalist epistemes, and, in so doing, we sketch the contours of an African geographies subdiscipline that is anti-racist, decolonial, and in active conversation with black geographies. The result of our engagement is a call for a reinvigoration of African geographies as we currently know and practice them.

We invite proposals for papers to be presented at an international conference entitled ‘In Search of Zera Yacob’, to take place at Worcester College, Oxford, in May 2022. The exact dates have yet to be confirmed, subject to Covid-19 pandemic developments. 

Please note that the revised submission deadline is 31 December 2021, and that the CfP is open to all researchers (rather than just graduate students and early career researchers).

In Search of Zera Yacob will be the first international and interdisciplinary conference on two  remarkable philosophical texts from Ethiopia and the ongoing debate over their authorship. The Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob and the Ḥatäta Walda Heywat have fascinated and puzzled alike since their discovery in 1852, both for their intrinsic philosophical interest and the ways they challenge prevalent ideas about the history of philosophy and African intellectual history. The debate also has implications for the global history of philosophy, and for understanding the relationship between colonial knowledge production and the historiography of philosophy.