Unpacking African epistemological violence: toward critical Africanness in communication studies

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes African perspectives by unpacking some of the neocolonial dynamics that characterize much of communication studies and its knowledge production in, of, with, and for Africa. I propose a decolonizing framework, critical Africanness, to read and locate African thought, which requires a political ethic and practice of resistance and intentional undoing by unlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions. I propose four modes of critical Africanness: Afro-Epistemilibre, Afrorelationality, Afrosubjectivity, and Afrotransnationality. I conclude by reflecting on the future of critical Africanness and the politics of research of Africanness in communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• decolonialization
• critical Africanness
• Afro-Epistemilibre
• Afrorelationality
• Afrosubjectivity
• Afrotransnationality

Acknowledgements

عالم البشر منقسم الى حدود مختلفة ، لكن العقل لا يعرف حدودًا ، والقلب لا يعرف الحواجز. - مثل مغربي

This project is dedicated to all of the African knowledge producers, philosophers, storytellers, oral historians, and emotional and physical laborers who have made the writing of this piece, and all knowledge production, possible. African stories, intellectual contributions, collective knowledges, and wisdom are a gift to this world for then, for now, and for always.

Notes

1 Chielozona Eze, “‘We, Afropolitans,’” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2016): 117.

2 Arit John, “Confusing a Country for a Continent: How We Talk about Africa,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/confusing-countrycontinent-how-we-talk-about-africa/311621/.

3 Charles G. Ngwena, What Is Africanness? Contesting Nativism in Race, Culture and Sexualities (Pretoria, South Africa: Pretoria University Law Press [PULP], 2018), viii.

4 Godfried Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic: Building Alliances of (Queer) African Eros,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 113–18; Ahmet Atay and Yea-Wen Chen, Postcolonial Turn and Geopolitical Uncertainty: Transnational Critical Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021); Haneen Shafeeq Ghabra, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, Shadee Abdi, and Bernadette Marie Calafell, eds., Negotiating Identity and Transnationalism Middle Eastern and North African Communication and Critical Cultural Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2020); Jenna N. Hanchey, “Agency beyond Agents: Aid Campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa and Collective Representations of Agency,” Communication, Culture & Critique 9, no. 1 (2016): 11–29; Gloria Nziba Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context: An Autoethnographic Journey of the Self across Cultures,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18, no. 1 (2017): 23–31; Gust A. Yep, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, and Ryan Lescure, “Relationalities in/through Difference,” in Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and Across Differences, ed. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 2020), 19–46.

5 Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, “Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 13, no. 3 (2020): 276–99; Godfried Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic”; Joëlle M. Cruz, “Brown Body of Knowledge: A Tale of Erasure,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 18, no. 5 (2017): 363–65; Felicia L. Harris, “‘Tell Me the Story of Home’: Afrofuturism, Eric Killmonger, and Black American Malaise,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 278–85; Ann Neville Miller, Mary N. Kizito, and Kyalo wa Ngula, “Research and Publication by Communication Faculty in East Africa: A Challenge to the Global Community of Communication Scholars,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 3, no. 4 (2010): 286–303; Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies,” Howard Journal of Communications 32, no. 2 (2021): 123–38; Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context”; Donald S. Taylor, Peter Ogom Nwosu, and Eddah Mutua-Kombo, “Communication Studies in Africa: The Case for a Paradigm Shift for the 21st Century,” Africa Media Review 12, no. 2 (2004): 1–23.

6 Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context,” 24.

7 George J. Sefa Dei and Ali Reza Asgharzadeh, “The Power of Social Theory: The Anti-Colonial Discursive Framework,” The Journal of Educational Thought 35, no. 3 (2001): 299.

8 Rachel Spronk, “Sex, Sexuality and Negotiating Africanness in Nairobi,” Africa 79, no. 4 (2009): 502.

9 Shose Kessi, Zoe Marks, and Elelwani Ramugondo, “Decolonizing African Studies,” Critical African Studies 12, no. 3 (2020): 272. See also Alaoui, “Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era”; Godfried Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic”; Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, rev. ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

10 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Challenges of Studying the African Diasporas,” African Sociological Review / Revue Africaine De Sociologie 12, no. 2 (2008): 5.

11 Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context,” 24.

12 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14, no. 1 (1983): 6.

13 Ibid., 11.

14 Kessi, Marks, and Ramugondo, “Decolonizing African Studies,” 271.

15 Zeleza, “The Challenges of Studying the African Diasporas,” 5.

16 Ibid.

17 J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841–1891: The Making of a New Élite (London: Longman, 1969).

18 See, for example, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

19 Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards A Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990).

20 Sylvia Tamale, ed., African Sexualities: A Reader (Cape Town, South Africa: Pambazuka Press, 2011); Keguro Macharia, “Archive and Method in Queer African Studies,” Agenda 29, no. 1 (2015): 140–46.

21 Ann Neville Miller et al., “Still the Dark Continent: A Content Analysis of Research about Africa and by African Scholars in 18 Major Communication-Related Journals,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 6, no. 4 (2013): 319.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 327.

25 Hanchey, “Agency beyond Agents,” 11.

26 Devika Sharma, “Doing Good, Feeling Bad: Humanitarian Emotion in Crisis,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9, no. 1 (2017): 3.

27 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” The Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 2 (1991): 171.

28 Ibid., 171–72.

29 Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui and Shadee Abdi, “Wakanda for Everyone: An Invitation to an African Muslim Perspective of Black Panther,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 229–35.

30 See Rachel Alicia Griffin and Jonathan P. Rossing, eds., “Black Panther in Widescreen: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Pioneering, Paradoxical Film,” themed issue, Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 203–85.

31 Godfried A. Asante and Gloria Nziba Pindi, “(Re)Imagining African Futures: Wakanda and the Politics of Transnational Blackness,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 222.

32 Rachel Alicia Griffin and Jonathan P. Rossing, “Black Panther in Widescreen: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Pioneering, Paradoxical Film,” Review of Communication 20, no. 3 (2020): 211.

33 Alaoui and Abdi, “Wakanda for Everyone,” 231.

34 Ibid.

35 Hakim Adi, “African Political Thinkers, Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile, c.1850–1970,” Immigrants & Minorities 30, nos. 2–3 (2012): 272.

36 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “The Cognitive Empire, Politics of Knowledge and African Intellectual Productions: Reflections on Struggles for Epistemic Freedom and Resurgence of Decolonisation in the Twenty-First Century,” Third World Quarterly 42, no. 5 (2020): 889.

37 Taiye Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar,” The LIP Magazine, March 3, 2005, http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76.

38 Ibid.

39 Emma Dabiri, “‘Why I Am (Still) Not an Afropolitan,’” Afropolitanism: Reboot 28, no. 1 (2017): 65–69.

40 Eze, “‘We, Afropolitans,’” 114.

41 Achille Mbembe and Sarah Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe,” Transition 120 (2016): 30.

42 Ibid.

43 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 271–313.

44 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 21.

45 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

46 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

47 Ibid., 6.

48 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations 5, Summer I (1988): 5.

49 Santos, “The End of the Cognitive Empire.”

50 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “The Cognitive Empire, Politics of Knowledge and African Intellectual Productions,” 5.

51 Samir Amin, “A Note on the Concept of Delinking,” X, no. 3 (1987): 435–44.

52 Kopano Ratele et al., “Some Basic Questions about (a) Decolonizing Africa(n)-Centred Psychology Considered,” South African Journal of Psychology 48, no. 3 (2018): 331–42.

53 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 449–514; Amin, “A Note on the Concept of Delinking.”

54 Chouki El Hamel, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 Kessi, Marks, and Ramugondo, “Decolonizing African Studies,” 277.

58 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 5.

59 Alaoui, “Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era”; Godfried Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic”; Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context”; Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies.”

60 Kehinde Andrews, “Beyond Pan-Africanism: Garveyism, Malcolm X and the End of the Colonial Nation State,” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017): 2503.

61 Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Guilford, 2012), 136.

62 William W. Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994).

63 Marable, Malcolm X, 136.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid.

66 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “The Cognitive Empire, Politics of Knowledge and African Intellectual Productions,” 6.