African communication studies: a provocation and invitation

ABSTRACT

In this introductory essay to the first of two themed issues, “(Re)Theorizing Communication Studies from African Perspectives,” we explore the decolonial potential of African perspectives in communication studies. African knowledge systems have something to teach, regardless of whether the West is listening. And yet, in the discipline of communication studies, the vast continent and its knowledge systems barely hold a presence. African knowledge systems are easily denied because of the ways that neocolonialism, coloniality, and global anti-Blackness structure Western ontologies and epistemologies. Therefore, we ask: What kind of epistemological decolonization is required in communication studies for the discipline to take African knowledge systems seriously? This Introduction creates a groundwork for interventions by examining the array of work that has already been done in service of the decolonial African communication studies project and the future possibilities of African communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• African communication studies
• decoloniality
• postcolonial studies
• communication theory
• African knowledge systems

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Kathleen McConnell and Sohinee Roy for their labor and constant support throughout the process of putting these themed issues together. In particular, we are so grateful for Kathleen’s recognition of the importance and underrepresentation of African scholarship in the discipline, and her decision to allow us space to publish across two issues rather than one. These themed issues could not happen without the generosity of the many people who took time to review; we are grateful for your care and attention. Finally, we would like to thank the authors featured in these themed issues for entrusting us with their work. We are honored to be a part of putting these knowledges, arguments, and experiences into the world.

Notes

1 Joëlle M. Cruz, “Introduction: African Feminist and Queer Coalitions,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 102.

2 Ibid., 101.

3 The forum received the 2021 National Communication Association Feminist and Gender Studies Division Outstanding Article Award.

4 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465–76; #ToneUpOrgComm Collective, “#ToneUpOrgComm: A Manifestx,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 9, no. 2 (2020): 152–54.

5 Wole Soyinka, Of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 27.

6 Kehbuma Langmia, “Theorizing beyond the West Special Edition: Subaltern Authors Gird Their Loins,” Howard Journal of Commuications 32, no. 2 (2021): 107. Even the Greek word philosophos is thought to stem from the Ancient Egyptian word mer-rekh, meaning “the one who loves knowledge” (Dag Herbjørnsrud, “The Radical Philosophy of Egypt: Forget God and Family, Write!” Blog of the APA, December 17, 2018, https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/12/17/the-radical-philosophy-of-egypt-forget-god-and-family-write/). Importantly, as Godfried Agyeman Asante writes, the near total erasure of Africans and people of color from rhetoric “point[s] to the presence of an ‘epistemic deficit’” (“#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 [2019]): 485).

7 Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts,” Communication Theory 31, no. 3 (2021): 528–48.

8 See, for instance: Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 2015); Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, eds., Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, “Homing with My Mother / How Women in My Family Married Women,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 17, no. 2 (2018): 401–14.

9 Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies,” Howard Journal of Communications 32, no. 2 (2021): 123–38.

10 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, rev. ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988).

11 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

12 Keguro Macharia, “On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 185.

13 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (London: Routledge, 2018), 7–8.

14 As Mohammed writes, “It is time for White scholars to not only write op-eds or preach about stepping aside and centering Africans in the field but actually do the action of stepping aside so that Africans can lead the way in decolonizing the discipline” (“Decolonizing African Media Studies,” 136).

15 Darrel Allan Wanzer, “Delinking Rhetoric, or Revisiting McGee’s Fragmentation Thesis through Decoloniality,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 2 (2012): 647–58.

16 Sylvia Wynter, “Usettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. See also Armond R. Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 349–58.

17 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 108.

18 Ibid., 110.

19 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, 80.

20 Ibid., 78.

21 Jenna N. Hanchey, “Beyond Race Scholarship as Groundbreaking/Irrelevant,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 9, no. 2 (2020): 122–23.

22 Ronald L. Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson, “Introduction,” in Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (London: Routledge, 2014), xv.

23 Godfried Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered,” 487.

24 Omedi Ochieng, Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2016).

25 Jenna N. Hanchey, “Toward a Relational Politics of Representation,” Review of Communication 18, no. 4 (2018): 265–83.

26 Kundai Chirindo, “Bantu Sociolinguistics in Wangari Maathai’s Peacebuilding Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (2016): 445.

27 Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity.

28 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): 328.

29 For example, see Collins O. Airhihenbuwa, Health and Culture: Beyond the Western Paradigm (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).

30 Mohan Dutta-Bergman, “The Unheard Voices of Santalis: Communicating about Health from the Margins of India,” Communication Theory 14, no. 3 (2004): 237–63.

31 Sylvia Tamale, ed., “Introduction,” in African Sexualities: A Reader (Nairobi, Kenya: Pambazuka Press, 2011), 7.

32 Everette Rogers et al., “Effects of an Entertainment-Education Radio Soap Opera on Family Planning Behavior in Tanzania,” Studies in Family Planning 30, no. 3 (1999): 193–211.

33 James Olumide Olufowote, “Taking Culture and Context Seriously: Advancing Health Communication Research on HIV/AIDS Prevention in Tanzania with the PEN-3 Cultural Model,” Howard Journal of Communications 32, no. 4 (2021): 394–412.

34 Miller et al., “Still the Dark Continent,” 328.

35 Ibid.

36 Olufowote, “Taking Culture and Context Seriously”; Dutta-Bergman, “The Unheard Voices of Santalis.”

37 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 (2018): 30.

38 Eddah M. Mutua, “How I Came to Know: Moving through Spaces of Post/Colonial Encounters,” in Globalizing Intercultural Communication: A Reader, ed. Kathryn Sorrells and Sachi Sekimoto (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2016), 96.

39 Ibid., 95–96.

40 Godfried Asante, “‘Queerly Ambivalent’: Navigating Global and Local Normativities in Postcolonial Ghana,” in Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and across Differences, ed. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 157–78.

41 Dustin Bradley Goltz, Jason Zingsheim, Teresa Mastin, and Alexandra G. Murphy, “Discursive Negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI Identities: Cautions in Cultural Humility,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 2 (2016): 104–21.

42 Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies.”

43 Keyan G. Tomaselli, “Cultural Studies and the African Global South,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2019): 262.

44 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): 226.

45 Jenna N. Hanchey and Godfried Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Aliens, yet Keep Their Infrastructure’: Repurposing the ‘Master’s House’ in The Wormwood Trilogy,” Feminist Africa (forthcoming); Jenna N. Hanchey, “Desire and the Politics of Africanfuturism,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 119–24.

46 Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies.”

47 Tomaselli, “Cultural Studies and the African Global South,” 265.

48 Cruz and Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory,” 530.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 542.

51 Joëlle M. Cruz, “Invisibility and Visibility in Alternative Organizing: A Communicative and Cultural Model,” Management Communication Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2017): 616.

52 Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 4.

53 Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287–302.

54 Jenna N. Hanchey, “Reframing the Present: Mock Aid Videos and the Foreclosure of African Epistemologies,” Women & Language 42, no. 2 (2019): 317–46; O. M. Olaniyan, “Know Your History: Toward an Eternally Displaceable Strategic Essentialism,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 14, no. 4 (2021): 305–19.

55 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”; Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives.”

56 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 28–29.

57 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 262, 260.

58 Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” 354.

59 Asante and Pindi, “(Re)imagining African Futures,” 221.

60 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa; Armond R. Towns, “A Fanonian Philosophy of Race,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, December 20, 2018: doi https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.572.

61 Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives,” 356.

62 Olaniyan, “Know Your History,” 12.

63 Godfried Asante, “Queerly Ambivalent.”

64 Asante and Pindi, “(Re)imagining African Futures,” 225.

65 Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 161.

66 Keguro Macharia, “Africa: Queer: Anthropology,” The New Inquiry, July 28, 2018, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/africa-queer-anthropology/.

67 Last Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 19.

68 Armond R. Towns, “‘What Do We Wanna Be?’: Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 77.

69 Gloria Nziba Pindi, “Speaking Back to Academic Colonial Gatekeeping: The Significance of Intercultural Performance Studies Works in Promoting Marginalized Knowledges and Identities,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 49, no. 5 (2020): 449.

70 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 163.

71 On the violence of inclusion, see Towns, “Black ‘Matter’ Lives”; “A Fanonian Philosophy of Race”; Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion,” 163; Lisa B. Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, “Here Is Something You Can’t Understand: The Suffocating Whiteness of Communication Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2020): 202–209. On nation-states, see Kundai Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” Women’s Studies in Communication 41, no. 4 (2018): 383–93.

72 Godfried Asante and Jenna N. Hanchey, “Decolonizing Queer Modernities: The Case for Queer (Post)colonial Studies in Critical/Cultural Communication,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2021): 215.

73 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), 29.

74 Cruz, “Invisibility and Visibility in Alternative Organizing,” 632.

75 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, 29.

76 Cruz and Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory.”

77 Chirindo, “Micronations and Postnational Rhetorics,” 384.

78 As Moyo writes, “The South as the borderland is fundamentally a place that is exploited for its land, its resources, and its culture, but yet presented in the global discourses of Western modernity as a barren, impotent, and burdensome space” (The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, 23).

79 Francesca Sobande and Krys Osei, “An African City: Black Women’s Creativity, Pleasure, Diasporic (Dis)Connections and Resistance through Aesthetic and Media Practices and Scholarship,” Communication, Culture & Critique 13, no. 2 (2020): 206.

80 Eric Karikari, “Drawing the Contours of Organizational Culture through Neoliberal and Colonial Discourses,” Management Communication Quarterly (2021): doi https://doi.org/10.1177%2F08933189211033986.

81 Hanchey and Asante, “‘How to Save the World from Aliens, yet Keep Their Infrastructure.’”

82 See Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context.”

83 Cruz and Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory,” 541.

84 Cruz and Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory”; Jenna N. Hanchey, The Center Cannot Hold: Haunted Reflexivity and Liquid Agency in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

85 Olaniyan, “Know Your History,” 7.

86 For example, see: Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, “Morocco from a Colonial to a Postcolonial Era: The Sociopolitical Environment through a Grandmother’s Autoethnography,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 13, no. 3 (2020): 276–99; Joëlle M. Cruz, “Brown Body of Knowledge: A Tale of Erasure,” Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies 18, no. 5 (2018): 363–65; “Object: Letter of Disapplication,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 9, no. 1 (2020): 126–32; Cruz and Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory”; Shinsuke Eguchi and Godfried Asante, “Disidentifications Revisited: Queer(y)ing Intercultural Communication Theory,” Communication Theory 26, no. 2 (2016): 171–89; Nancy Maingi, “Culturally Responsive Graduate Teaching Instructors: Lessons on Facilitating Classroom Dialogues on Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Injustices,” Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research 16, no. 3 (2017): 19–41; Mohammed, “Decolonizing African Media Studies”; Mutua, “How I Came to Know”; Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context.”

87 Pindi, “Hybridity and Identity Performance in Diasporic Context,” 26.

88 Eshun, “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”; Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Hanchey, “Reframing the Present”; “Desire and the Politics of Africanfuturism.”

89 Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa.

90 Moyo, The Decolonial Turn in Media Studies in Africa and the Global South, 22.

91 Asante and Pindi, “(Re)imagining African Futures,” 222.

92 Hanchey, “Reframing the Present”; Keguro Macharia, “5 Reflections on Trans* & Taxonomy (with Neo Musangi),” Critical Arts 30, no. 4 (2016): 495–506; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, 43; Towns, “A Fanonian Philosophy of Race.”

93 Sofia Samatar, “Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism,” Research in African Literatures 48, no. 4 (2017): 176.

94 Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 11, 43.

95 Olaniyan, “Know Your History,” 7.

96 Gloria Nziba Pindi, “Beyond Labels: Envisioning an Alliance between African Feminism and Queer Theory for the Empowerment of African Sexual Minorities within and beyond Africa,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 107.

97 Godfried Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic: Building Alliances of (Queer) African Eros,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 113.

98 C. Nthemba Mutua-Mambo, “Living in a Liminal Space: Feminist and LGBT Alliances in Kenya,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 2 (2020): 126–27.

99 Asante, “Decolonizing the Erotic.”

100 Hanchey, “Desire and the Politics of Africanfuturism,” 120.

101 Karikari, “Drawing the Contours of Organizational Culture through Neoliberal and Colonial Discourses.”

102 Mutua-Mambo, “Living in a Liminal Space.”