Critical Perspectives on Decoloniality - (Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies)

About the Book

This book is both a deep dive into and a critique of foundational decolonial concepts and epistemologies, engaging both theoretical analyses of social issues and standpoints from activism. The book represents a critical intervention on decolonial theories and methodologies, and will be of interest to scholars, students and activists.

Book Synopsis

This book is both a deep dive into and a critique of foundational decolonial concepts and epistemologies, engaging both historical, theoretical analyses of social issues and conditions, and standpoints from activism. The chapters are situated within multiple, plural and shifting force fields within the academy, and present a pathway to critically engage political or academic practices within and outside the university. The authors specifically engage contestations and harmonies in approaches of decoloniality, epistemic injustices, Southern epistemologies and epistemologies of the Souths. Alongside the theoretical chapters sit interventions on self-liberation, healing, reconstitution of human life, embracing interdependence and defying boundaries. The book represents a critical intervention in the development of decolonial theories and methodologies, and will be of interest to scholars, students and activists within and outside of academia.

Review Quotes

A fly in the ointment to the coloniality and cartesianism of north-centric "universal" theory, this volume enacts, through strategies of un-booking, onto-epistemological collaborations that promote new coalitions of understanding such that both the proverbial fly and the ointment learn and unlearn from each other in previously unsuspected, non-predatory ways.

-- "Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil"

At a dark time in our history, this volume offers a rare lifeline. Speaking from places long marginal to the centers of planetary power, the authors in conversation here grapple with the contradictions so disfiguring civilization and society in the Global North. In proposing alternative, more generative 'Southern' sites for collective thinking and learning, they give acute, tangible meaning to the often-elusive task of decolonizing the production of knowledge.-- "Jean Comaroff, Harvard University, USA"

About the Author

Dorothy Takyiakwaa is Assistant Teaching Professor of African Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Sinfree Makoni is Director of African Studies and Liberal Arts Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Inviolata Vicky Khasandi-Telewa is Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in African Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Alissa J. Hartig is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Portland State University, USA.