Decolonial Dilemmas: The Deception of a “Global Knowledge Commonwealth” and the Tragedian Entrapment of an African Scholar
- Yusuf Serunkuma, K U Leuven
This webinar explores the impact of multiple initiatives and efforts to grant African scholars “global visibility” as part of the decolonisation agenda. These efforts have included aiding and enabling African scholars to publish in journals of international renown, speaking or curating courses at Ivy League universities, and being experts on issues about Africa in international media. Other efforts include collaborations and citations in discourses about Africa. While these efforts and opportunities are intellectually and practically irresistible to a scholar from the subaltern world – as they are to those offering and facilitating them – they are actually counterproductive to a decolonisation project. The positive energy they generate obscures the histories and power dynamics that govern so-called global spaces and audiences of knowledge production. Problematically presented as benign and benevolent spaces for participation in the “global knowledge commonwealth,” from which mutual understanding grows, and racism and exploitation could be ended, global spaces/audiences, rather grow out, and are core parts of the revolving doors and constantly mutating infrastructures of colonialist hegemony and control.
Booking
Event Notes
Please find the General Privacy Policy of UCL, one of our partner universities, here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/legal-services/privacy/general-privacy-notice
Share this event
Yusuf Serunkuma is an anthropologist, playwright (The Snake Farmers) and occasional columnist for The Observer newspaper in Uganda. He co-edited ‘Before the First Drop: Oil, Capitalists and Wretcheds of Western Uganda’ (Mahiri Books, 2021) and wrote ‘Non-Essential Humans: Essays on governance, ruin and survival in Covid-19 Uganda’ (Mahiri Books 2022). After his BA in Literature and English, Yusuf was apprenticed as reporter and editor at The Independent magazine, in the able hands of Editor Joseph Were, and Charles Bichachi. In late 2008, he joined Fountain Publishers as editor until 2012 when he left for an Mph/PhD in Social Studies at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). His doctoral research was on Somali literary cultures. He has held posts at the Max Plank institute in Halle, working on a project entitled ‘African Studies in Germany through the lens of Critical Race Theory’ and his current project at Leuven is entitled ‘Breaking Bureaucracies, on the liberating/resistance potential of forgery and counterfeit in postcolonial Africa’ . Yusuf continues to be closely engaged in a range of projects in Kampala. His forthcoming book is provisionally titled “Surrounded: An Ethnography of New Colonialism.”
