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Against Decolonization

Taking African Agency Seriously

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Against Decolonization

By: Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
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About this listen

Decolonization 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.

Olúfemi Táiwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of 'decolonization' to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonization industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds 'decolonization' 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: "decolorizers" themselves are disregarding, infantilizing and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.

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

©2022 Olúfemi Táíwò (P)2023 Tantor Africa Politics & Government World

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All stars
Most relevant
A tour-de-force: a powerful case for how equating modernity with coloniality is both factually and morally wrong.

Anticolonial, but not decolonial

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The richest and most diverse continent on earth need not limit itself from the feeble mimetic grand narratives of progressives & decolonial activists.

See also Rasheed Griffith & John McWhorter.

Excellent listen full of powerful paradigm shifting ideas.

Deep and hard hitting

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