Against Decolonisation

Download or read book Against Decolonisation written by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò 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: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Download or read book Out of the Dark Night written by Achille Mbembe and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Achille Mbembe is one of the world’s most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and planetarity. In a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders of European intellectuals, analyzing France’s failure to heed postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out of the Dark Night reconstructs critical theory’s historical and philosophical framework for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.

Download or read book Against Decolonisation written by Doug Stokes and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a moral panic gripped the US and UK. To atone for an alleged history of racism, statues were torn down and symbols of national identity attacked. Across universities, fringe theories became the new orthodoxy, with a cadre of activists backed by university technocrats adopting a binary worldview of moral certainty, sin and deconstructive redemption through Western self-erasure. This hard-hitting book surveys these developments for the first time. It unpacks and challenges the theories and arguments deployed by ‘decolonisers’ in a university system now characterised by garbled leadership and illiberal groupthink. The desire to question the West’s sense of itself, deconstruct its narratives and overthrow its institutional order is an impulse that, ironically, was underpinned by a more confident and assured Western hegemony, which is now waning and under great strain. If its light continues to dim, who or what will carry the torch for human freedom and progress?

Download or read book Decolonization written by Pierre Singaravélou and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Full of gripping historical vignettes and evocative photographs, an accessible overview of the dynamic figures who resisted colonization, from India, Senegal, and Algeria to Vietnam, Kenya, and Congo. Decolonization started on the very first day of colonization. From the arrival of the Europeans, the peoples of Africa and Asia rose up. No one willingly accepts subjugation, but in order to one day regain freedom, you first and foremost need to stay alive. Faced with the Europeans’ machine guns, the colonized hit back in other ways: from civil disobedience to communist revolution, by way of soccer and literature. It was a struggle marked by infinite patience and unlimited determination, fought by heroic men and women now largely unknown. Condensing a wealth of scholarly research into short, lively chapters, Decolonization brings their extraordinary stories to light: Manikarnika Tambe, the Indian queen who led her troops into battle against the British; Mary Nyanjiru, the Kenyan activist who spearheaded a protest in Nairobi; Lamine Senghor, the Senegalese infantryman who became an anti-colonial militant in Paris; and many more. With them, a current of resistance swept the world, culminating in the independence of almost all the colonies in the 1960s. But at what price? In the atomic India of Indira Gandhi, in the Congo subjected to Mobutu’s dictatorship, or in a London shaken by the rioting of young immigrants, we can see just how crucial it is that we understand and learn from this painful history.

Download or read book Decolonization written by Jan C. Jansen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of colonial rule in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was one of the most important and dramatic developments of the twentieth century. In the decades after World War II, dozens of new states emerged as actors in global politics. Long-established imperial regimes collapsed, some more or less peacefully, others amid mass violence. This book takes an incisive look at decolonization and its long-term consequences, revealing it to be a coherent yet multidimensional process at the heart of modern history. Jan Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel trace the decline of European, American, and Japanese colonial supremacy from World War I to the 1990s. Providing a comparative perspective on the decolonization process, they shed light on its key aspects while taking into account the unique regional and imperial contexts in which it unfolded. Jansen and Osterhammel show how the seeds of decolonization were sown during the interwar period and argue that the geopolitical restructuring of the world was intrinsically connected to a sea change in the global normative order. They examine the economic repercussions of decolonization and its impact on international power structures, its consequences for envisioning world order, and the long shadow it continues to cast over new states and former colonial powers alike. Concise and authoritative, Decolonization is the essential introduction to this momentous chapter in history, the aftershocks of which are still being felt today. --

Download or read book Decolonisation and the Pacific written by Tracey Banivanua Mar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the previously untold story of the mobility of Indigenous peoples across vast distances, vividly reshaping what is known about decolonisation.

Download or read book The Brutish Museums written by Dan Hicks and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.