Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West's direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing "morality" or "authenticity;" it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.

Olà femi TàÃ-wà fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of 'decolonisation' to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds 'decolonisation' of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society's foundations. Worst of all, today's movement attacks its own cause: "decolorisers" themselves are disregarding, infantilizing and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.

This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today's 'decolonisation' truly serves African empowerment. TàÃ-wà 's is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesizers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Author: Olã°femi Tàã-Wã²
Publisher: Hurst & Co.
Published: 09/15/2022
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.86lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.53w x 0.91d
ISBN13: 9781787386921
ISBN10: 1787386929
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | World | African
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | General

About the Author

Olúfemi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and current Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.