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

To think that African contexts can teach us [in the West] anything is provocative on many levels.

∼ Joëlle M. Cruz, “African Feminist and Queer Coalitions”¹

In her introduction to the first forum of its kind in communication studies, “African Feminist and Queer Coalitions,” featured in the journal Women’s Studies in Communication, Joëlle M. Cruz decried the absence of scholarship on African contexts in the field. She noted that such absence perpetuates the unfounded notion that Africa is a “theoretical vacuum.”² This award-winning forum responded to such absences by providing a space for collaborative scholarly conversations between African feminists and queer African approaches to the study of coalition building in African contexts.³ The forum also provided pertinent answers to unfolding global crises. At a time when many in the United States were reeling from the unprecedented election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of overt racism and scornful xenophobia, globally white nationalism was also on the rise. This crisis was not only embodied and felt in national discourses, but also reached a tipping point in the fields of communication and rhetoric themselves. Hashtags such as #CommunicationSoWhite, #RhetoricSoWhite, and #ToneUpOrgComm sought to challenge the often taken for granted presence of whiteness in the disciplines.⁴ At the same time, there have been struggles against militarized policing from #BlackLivesMatter to #EndSARS. Queer and genderqueer folks, particularly those of color, have faced and fought against continued violence throughout the world. Particularly, queer Africans are resisting their (re)criminalization through bills that seek to ban their nonheteronormative existences altogether. Finally, there is an ongoing environmental crisis that, if not addressed swiftly, could make the planet inhospitable in the near future. While crises have a way of bringing communities together to forge probable solutions and imagine futures, knowledges from a cross section of the Global South remain largely invisible in scholarly discussions about critical and sustainable responses to the crises of whiteness, colonialism, globalization, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and environmental degradation. In this introductory essay to the themed double issue, “(Re)Theorizing Communication Studies from African Perspectives,” we pose the question: What can African contexts teach us about these unfolding and ongoing crises?

African knowledge systems always have something to teach, regardless of whether the West is listening. As Wole Soyinka reminds us, Africa has always been a part of the intellectual world.⁵ Irrespective of its consistent marginality, Africa has always been a part of scholarly discourse, both symbolically and materially. And yet, in the discipline of communication studies, the vast continent and its knowledge systems barely hold a presence. Rhetorical theories continually return to Plato and Aristotle, without acknowledgement that their philosophical and communicative forbears hailed from Egypt.⁶ Organizational principles assumed to be universal have little bearing on day-to-day African organizing and life.⁷ Interpersonal and family theories hold no trace of female husbands, male daughters, boy-wives, or woman–woman marriages.⁸ In media studies, not only is the study of media usage on the African continent marginalized, but it is also often performed with little regard for Indigenous epistemologies of media technology and usage.⁹ Even the work that resuscitates historical African philosophies of communication is rarely taken up substantively by the central white scholarship in the field.¹⁰ Lurking at the periphery of intellectual pursuit as a spectre of the premodern, the traditional, or of people constrained by “culture,” Africa is predominantly utilized as an exemplar of where humans were (or will be) without the Western discourse of modernity.¹¹ The invisibility of African knowledge in our field does not signify absence: It marks the relational situatedness promoted by the West.

Knowledge from African contexts has always been here, and yet communication studies obscures and ignores it as a legitimate source of knowledge that can provide valuable input to contemporary crises. This is a problem. However, it is not to be answered with “an army of well-meaning European and US researchers descend[ing] on Africa with notebooks and digital recorders to capture the belated entry of Africans” into Western communication scholarship.¹² Such a response would simply serve to reinforce the epistemological hegemony of the West that results in erasure of African knowledge in the first place. That is,

African scholars have largely functioned as “hunter-gatherers” of raw data as well as “native informants.” Europe and North America have remained sites of processing raw data into concepts and theories. These concepts and theories are then consumed in Africa. Africa remains a large laboratory for testing of concepts and theories.¹³

As Africa has always been here, Western scholars and traditions have always mined it for knowledge while simultaneously denying Africans credit, agency, or their own interpretative logics. If African knowledge is underrepresented in communication studies, then the answer is certainly not for white, Western communication studies to mine Africa for “exotic” exemplars or new “twists” on established theories.¹⁴ African forms of knowing exist. It is time for the discipline to acknowledge them, study them as legitimate sources of knowledge, and reflect intensely on how African knowledges require new ways of experiencing, understanding, being human, and enacting communication.

In part, this is because even the ability to recognize African knowledges as such requires a postcolonial, decolonial, and antiracist project. African knowledge systems are easily denied because of the ways neocolonialism, coloniality, and global anti-Blackness structure Western ontologies and epistemologies. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano defines coloniality as “a constitutive feature of Western modernity that structures exclusionary modes of power, knowledge, and being—it is the dark underside of modernity, which influences both first and third world people.”¹⁵ One influence of coloniality is the erasure of Africans as human within Western modernity. This is entangled with a similar erasure of Black humanity through the discourse that Sylvia Wynter terms “Man.”¹⁶ The erasure of African beingness is woven through with anti-Blackness, but cannot be equated with it, as not all Africans are dark-skinned, nor do they necessarily hail from south of the Sahara. However, anti-Blackness can be seen in the ways that such distinctions are used to divide Africa and Africans. As Frantz Fanon describes:

Africa is divided into a white region and a black region. The substitute names of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa are unable to mask this latent racism. In some places you hear that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture, that it is Mediterranean, an extension of Europe and is part of Greco–Roman civilization. Black Africa is looked upon as a wild, savage, uncivilized, and lifeless region.¹⁷

Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa are racialized categories undergirded by anti-Blackness that, to Fanon, also hold a political weight: they are part of the West’s desire to thwart pan-African resistance.¹⁸

Notably, erasure of African being leads to erasure of African knowledge systems as legitimate sources of understanding that can inform contemporary social issues. To combat such discourses requires a decolonial project. As Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues: “Denial of being automatically denies epistemic virtue. This is simply because non-humans do not produce knowledge. They might have instincts but not knowledge. Thus, the struggle for re-humanizing has to entail epistemological decolonization.”¹⁹ What kind of epistemological decolonization is required in communication studies for the discipline to take African knowledge systems seriously?

This themed double issue seeks to answer that question. The brilliant essays collected here begin the important project of rethinking key communication theories and constructs from a perspective based in African thought—a perspective that requires a decolonial attitude of questioning accepted universals and rituals in the field.²⁰ In this Introduction, we create a groundwork for their interventions by examining the array of work that has already been done in service of the decolonial African communication studies project. Some of the work may not be called “communication studies,” nor recognized by the field. As we know, research that does not fit the norm is often excluded from recognition.²¹ First, we focus on key essays and research that have set the foundations for current work in African communication studies. We then offer possible trajectories for the future of African communication studies. Finally, we discuss how the essays collected in this themed issue begin to actualize this project.

Key works in African communication studies

Even though African perspectives are marginalized in communication studies, several scholars and studies have made pertinent contributions to its unwavering growth over the years. We acknowledge that African communication studies is a distinct field of study with multifarious subareas and divisions. As such, although we claim “African communication studies” as a distinct geospatial location of study, we simultaneously resist any attempt at homogenizing the concerns and political impulses of African communication studies. Ranging from North to South and East to West Africa, the concerns of the scholars who make up African communication studies vary greatly, largely depending on their country of origin, location, and motivation for research. However, they are driven by an interventionist, activist, and political impulse to centralize the traditions, concerns, and perspectives of African lived experiences in communication studies. Even as we foreground these key works, we must acknowledge that this list is not exhaustive; there are several other significant works that we could not acknowledge here.

As such, in exploring previous studies that foreground and set the stage for this themed issue, we attempt to show how African communication studies has pushed against the normative understandings of communication as a Eurocentric and U.S. Western academic discipline. Furthermore, to resist any teleological reading of time and progress (i.e., African communication as progressing or moving “forward”), we categorize the areas topically instead of historically. In this way, the studies we draw on in each topic area bounce between the past and present as a way to interrupt any dominant reading that assumes this themed double issue is an overcoming of previous exclusions and normative invisibility. Below, we explore four subdivisions of communication studies where research that grounds African perspectives have made significant inroads: African rhetoric and communication theory; critical intercultural communication; media and journalism; and communication and development.

African rhetoric and communication theory

Several scholars have noted that the classical and contemporary scholarly works grounded as origins and early histories of rhetoric and communication studies overlook the contributions of Black and African forms of rhetoric. This claim is illuminated by Ronald L. Jackson II and Elaine B. Richardson who write that, “The Roman classic rhetorical paradigms can no longer occupy a restrictive space of anteriority since there are clearly civilizations, cultures, and traditions that existed before the Greeks and the Romans.”²² Godfried Agyeman Asante notes the consequences of such omissions by saying that scholarly works in rhetoric textbooks marked as origins and early histories that exclude a majority of the world population not only “exclude,” but also “conceal a relationality steeped in coloniality and difference.”²³ Evidence for these observations can be seen in the insignificant number of African scholars and scholarship that appear in journals such as Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communication Theory, and others. Although rhetorical and communication theory have been mired by the historical exclusion of Black/African knowledge systems, African scholars have made significant contributions to (re)theorizing rhetorical studies by largely moving away from the orthodoxy of metaphysical thought to grounding rhetorical and communication theory development within its contingent production and connections to embodied difference.

In Groundwork on the Practice of the Good Life, Omedi Ochieng argues that in order to make sense of both the “good life” and “Africa” apart from prevailing misunderstandings, we must rethink intellectual work as contingent rather than canonical.²⁴ Importantly, Ochieng argues for a shift from existing polarities that position the West and Africa in a telos of development and underdevelopment that diametrically locks both geographical spaces into a never-ending cycle of superiority and inferiority. To make his point, Ochieng takes the “good life” as a rhetorically constructed phenomenon that emerges from pertinent conditions in particular contexts. In this way, the conditions that produce a good society emerge from an analysis of the “interanimation of historiography.” Here, the political is the valorization of lived experiences over the transcendentalist and metaphysically imbued political theory that implicitly disseminates Eurocentric knowledge systems as unwittingly universal.

Jenna N. Hanchey makes a similar case for situating rhetorical theories within a particular context of its production.²⁵ However, rather than situate theories in a “politics of neutrality,” she advocates for a “politics of relation” that names and produces theory from underrepresented groups. She notes that it is important to situate bodies and differences as relevant features in our theorizing. In this way, refusing to follow given relational lines that have been structured in dominance holds potential for creating worlds and futures that do not succumb to racist and colonial logics.

As another example, Kundai Chirindo points to a wealth of cultural legacy in Wangari Maathai’s environmental and peacebuilding rhetoric. Focusing on ubuntu cosmology, Chirindo explores Maathai’s rhetoric through ukama (relatedness) and mariika (generations). However, he examines them not as stable categories that animate Maathai’s rhetoric, but as “a crucial cultural subtext of her rhetoric that is rendered discernable once one calls to mind the language and culture in which Maathai was first socialized.”²⁶ Although Chirindo hardly asserts the immutability of ubuntu cosmology, it offers a crucial lens to understand Maathai’s oppositional rhetoric against the remnants of colonial systems and postcolonial oppressive conditions facing Kenyan people and nature. In this vein, African perspectives embedded in the intersections of globalization and local power struggles deepen our knowledge of the workings of power while offering alternative conceptualizations of activism and of being human.

By shifting to the concrete and particular, and by naming the geopolitical and historical relations in which the theory is constituted and produced, scholars can develop knowledge from African perspectives that disturbs the Eurocentric construction of the “political” in African societies. For Ochieng, notions of the good life are rhetorical and cannot be imbued with transcendence. On the other hand, Hanchey pushes us away from the dialectics of immanence and transcendence in representation to a politics of relationality. These two are not the only ways to approach the contextualization of knowledge from African perspectives. Nonetheless, they provide a roadmap to think with and about contextualizing African knowledge systems.

Molefi Kete Asante asserts that there are differing communication dynamics within the Black community and beyond.²⁷ In crafting Afrocentricity, he aimed to centralize the lives and communication patterns of people of African descent. Across Africa, communication dynamics emerge in specific cultural contexts that have been shaped by histories of European colonization, Christian, Muslim, and traditional African religious beliefs, and dire economic conditions from failed neoliberal economic policies. We are aware that any attempt to recuperate a pristine “African culture” or “African theory” is an impractical decolonial endeavor. African identities and African cultural systems have been adapted to meet the demands and concerns of contemporary social problems. In this vein, (re)examining communication theory through African lived experiences and material conditions speaks to the contextual and contingent communicative patterns that emerge out of necessity and survival to resist neocolonial and postcolonial systems of power. Such perspectives go beyond the anthropological search for a unique “African communication cultural pattern” to one where the theorizing of communication is dynamic, shifting and adapting within particular circumstances.

African health communication

Health communication research in African contexts has produced unique insights and perspectives into interpersonal communication, cyber culture and e-health, doctor–patient communication, health discourses, and the influence of culture on the meanings of health and diseases. In their analysis of research about Africa and by African scholars in 18 major communication-related journals, Ann Neville Miller et al. found that “Africa is currently on the radar of communication scholars in one major topic area: health communication.”²⁸ Over half of the articles published about Africa in the 18 journals they coded were about health. Only one essay focused on the environment, even though environmental risks continue to be a challenging issue in several African countries. It is not entirely surprising that the majority of the research about Africa is related to health communication—particularly HIV/AIDS, STIs, and pandemic-inducing diseases. While these studies have produced important findings, they also highlight a problematic gaze toward African contexts wherein the continent is frequently approached as a problem to be fixed.

Transnational health communication scholars have questioned the universal narratives of healthcare embedded within the biomedical model.²⁹ Mohan Dutta-Bergman argues that the biomedical model elides the impact of culture, globalization, and neoliberalism on global health.³⁰ Sylvia Tamale has argued that the proliferation of policies focusing on HIV/AIDS, national frameworks and advocacy programs in connection with the World Health Organization, civil societies, bilateral partners, pharmaceutical corporations, and Western medical and health professionals have been advanced using quantitative biomedical tools that “[ignore] the qualitative socio-economic aspects of the epidemic.”³¹ Consequently, research that centers queer pleasure, desire, and sexual agency is deprioritized. As such, sex is approached only as a problem to be fixed, which ultimately reinforces colonial-era myths and stereotypes of a specific “African sexuality” that is deviant, insatiable, morally corrupt, and dangerous.

Essential interventions into HIV/AIDS prevention in African contexts have been led by renowned communication scholars such as Everette Rogers et al.³² However, as James Olumide Olufowote stipulates, such studies relied on Western theories that mostly focused on cognitive- and individual-level variables that ignored the cultural context of HIV/AIDS in Africa.³³ With the exception of diffusion of innovations theory, several studies in the 1980s and 1990s reflected the cultural tendency toward individualism and personal responsibility in healthcare. Consequently, culture (largely interpreted as behaviors, gender inequality, and myths) is mostly treated as a barrier to health.

Even “Africa” itself often appears in health communication research as a problem to be fixed. For instance, even though Miller et al.’s crucial work has shown, with empirical evidence, the absence of African communication in communication studies, the reasons they give for centering Africa focus solely on what is purportedly wrong with the continent, rather than what it has to offer. For example, they note:

Family and couple communication, keys to HIV/AIDS prevention and care, to poverty alleviation, and a host of other issues, were nowhere evident in journals in our field. No research examined the political speech of African dictators, the interpersonal mechanisms of bribery and corruption, argumentation and negotiation in peace and reconciliation efforts in Burundi and other war-torn African nations, or the significance to ethnic identity of the upsurge of vernacular radio stations in African nations.³⁴

Although Miller et al.’s findings are important, their framing reinforces the colonial ideology of Africa as deficient. In contrast, we point to the need to shift general attention from Africa-as-deficient frameworks to the recognition of African agency. “Africa” could be a place of aggravating poverty, dictators, and HIV/AIDS and a place of joy, wealth, and pleasure. These topics are not diametrically opposed and deserve equal treatment in academic research.

African perspectives to health are embedded in colonial historical contexts, neocolonial entanglements with aid, and contemporary postcolonial realities. As such, health interventions deserve complex, multilayered, and intersectional approaches. Placing individual health behaviors at the intersection of global and local forces enables us to confront unequal geopolitical positionings and carve out spaces to recenter and engage with the cultures of postcolonial contexts such as nations in Africa.³⁵ One way to center the voices and perspectives of Africans in health interventions and campaigns is to employ a culture-centered approach to health communication. Olufowote and Dutta-Bergman have both argued that it is imperative to centralize cultural context, family systems, and the structural factors in the study of health behaviors and to integrate the voices of marginalized cultural members in the development of interventions.³⁶

African intercultural communication

The majority of essays examining identity negotiation processes from African perspectives have been published in intercultural communication journals. Generally, some of these essays focus on the intersections of nationality, race, gender, and sexuality as complex sites for identity negotiation processes. Some of the essays discuss identities as historical constructions—fluid, malleable, and contingent. Research emphasizing African perspectives has also expanded our views of racism, racialization, self-reflexivity, cultural humility, whiteness, and processes of decolonization. What emerges as a major theme across these essays is the centrality of storytelling as a key methodological tool for illuminating the complexity of postcolonial subjectivity in Africa.

Using autoethnography to unveil the particulars of her life, Gloria Nziba Pindi challenges normative ideas about cultural hybridity. She explicates the multilevel complexities of how her hybrid identity as a Black Congolese woman, a mixed tribal woman, a nonnative English speaker, and an immigrant intersects to produce her particular experience of Africanness. Resisting any attempt to produce her identity as monolithic, she notes that stories are self-reflective accounts of lived experiences and are useful for “fill[ing] the gap in scholarship on African culture.”³⁷ Similarly, Eddah M. Mutua uses autobiographical vignettes to explore her movement through spaces of post/colonial encounters. She reflects on her complicated racial, gendered, and postcolonial subjectivity as she moves between Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, noting that such movements have provided her an “insider-outsider/outsider-within” positionality that emerges as an epistemological blueprint for self-decolonization and education.³⁸ She states:

I go back and forth recalling, connecting, and disconnecting what I have come to learn, relearn, and unlearn from my experiences in diverse locations. These experiences define my journey to self-discovery and the reasons that impel me to yearn for more than having my body bound by history, geography, and birthplace.³⁹

Ultimately Pindi and Mutua’s autoethnographic essays suggest the theorization of culture as an itinerary—that is, culture as a meaning-making system that shifts and adapts within constraints not of one’s own making. In this vein, “African culture” emerges a site of struggle and not as a collectively shared phenomenon.

African postcolonial identities are ongoing formations shaped by histories of European colonial conquest, diverse religious beliefs, U.S. American imperialism, neocolonialism, and parochial visions of African citizenship that exclude women and nonheteronormative individuals. Importantly, studies that emphasize queer African subjects and how they negotiate their queer identities have made tremendous contributions to intercultural communication research. For instance, Godfried Asante has argued for what he calls queerly ambivalent identifications as transgressive moments that enable some queer Africans to navigate what continues to be a hostile environment toward LGBTQI+ individuals and rights. Asante notes that Western conceptualizations of sexuality that call for strict binary categorization may limit queer African possibilities that work with and against power structures and thus make queerness ambiguous to heteronormativity.⁴⁰ Dustin Bradley Goltz, Jason Zingsheim, Teresa Mastin, and Alexandra G. Murphy note that in order to avoid applying a Western lens to African contexts when doing sexuality-based research, scholars should seek to embody cultural humility, self-reflexivity, and conceptual hesitation.⁴¹ Engaging with these concepts works against complicity in Western ways of engaging and seeing the world that stifle a more complex view.

African cultural and media studies

African cultural and media scholars have made significant contributions to media studies and cultural studies in general.⁴² However, their contributions tend to be barely acknowledged or seen as not having much theoretical value beyond their situated African context. Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed asserts that African media studies has received lukewarm attention in the West. Additionally, stories from the African continent have largely been written by white scholars, who sometimes have little knowledge of the cultural communities they write about. Problematically, many studies that focus on African Indigenous knowledge are published in journals with paywalls, which makes African Indigenous knowledge systems inaccessible to the people from whom such knowledge is extracted. The result is that representations of African Indigenous knowledge, popular performance, and cultural resistance strategies are often misrepresented, misunderstood, and marginalized in cultural and media studies research.

African cultural and media studies often deal with the materiality of resistance, popular empowerment, and democratization in Africa through cultural studies frames. In such productions, hidden transcripts of the immaterial, the cosmologies, the paranormal, and superstition are frequently embedded in the ways that Africans make sense of the world. For instance, religion, the spiritual, and the paranormal are everyday phenomena found in films, TV shows, plays, African art, and practices. Nonetheless, Keyan G. Tomaselli notes that “while cultural studies does not necessarily exclude the immaterial, the scientifically unexplainable and unthinkable, and the things that exist independently of human senses, it does not explicitly include them either.”⁴³ Here, it seems the scientifically inexplicable—or what is generally categorized as magic, fiction, and/or superstition—is excluded from the majority of Western positivist and historic material analyses of African cultural texts.

Black cultural productions in the United States may also contribute to such mischaracterization of African cultural forms. On the one hand, Afrofuturist texts provide a platform to showcase Africa and African traditions and customs. On the other hand, the primacy of media portrayals of science and technology divorced from African Indigenous ways of knowing can create sites of erasure. For instance, Godfried A. Asante and Pindi argue that by “prioritizing science, Black Panther effectively challenges the West’s ideological construction of scientific and technological ineptitude within Black cultures. Yet, when this same storytelling device is considered in relation to African knowledge systems, it functions as a site of erasure”⁴⁴ To centralize Africa and Africans in science fiction and fantasy texts, Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism to describe science fiction and fantasy texts that blend African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative. Burgeoning scholarship in communication studies takes Africanfuturism as a departure point for imagining Africancentric futures and futurities.⁴⁵

Mohammed asserts that African Indigenous knowledge and cultural productions have the capacity to decenter Western- and U.S.-centered approaches to cultural and media studies.⁴⁶ Relatedly, Tomaselli notes that “Cultural Studies from the South are indeed area studies, but they should not be ring-fenced as such because their analytical frameworks can, indeed, be transnational and transcultural when applied with due contextual sensitivity.”⁴⁷ African media and cultural work engenders critical insights into decolonial possibilities, which can in turn inform media and cultural studies praxes.

African feminist organizational communication

African feminist scholars in organizational communication have decried the lack of attention to organizing strategies used by marginal actors who are often at the interstices of ongoing political, economic, and social threats. To address the theoretical omission, Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke draw on the concept of liquidities as an umbrella term for describing how the tensions and “struggles between marginal organizational actors and external constituencies—government, transnational agencies, non-governmental organizations—are manifested through motion, solvency, and permeability.”⁴⁸ By situating marginality as a site of theorization, Cruz and Sodeke argue that they hope to create spaces for “theorizing, naming, and writing marginality into [their] theoretical explanations” of organizing.⁴⁹ They focus on market women and street hawkers in Nigeria and Liberia to elide the reproduction of dominant knowledge of liquidities that favor elite forms of mobility wherein the Western subject is “framed as apolitical and ahistorical.”⁵⁰ By examining how structural and historical factors shape the lives of market women and street hawkers, they demonstrate how theory can take forms that may not be immediately obvious to organizational communication scholars.

Liquidities also offers an especially crucial modality to consider how African feminist groups create resilient organizations in precarious and sometimes stifling economic and sociopolitical contexts; such organizations blur the boundaries between visibilities and invisibilities. In earlier research, Cruz examined susu groups (grassroots rotating credit organizations) in Liberia and argued that such groups “reframe invisibility/visibility as a situationally negotiated process.”⁵¹ Instead of framing invisible organizations as failed and unsuccessful, Cruz cogently argues for a normative evaluation of invisible organizations as an effective way to counter the bias toward visibility, which is used as a benchmark for organizational success. Further research should endeavor to explore the implications of liquidities for LGBTQI+ organizational communication in Africa. Next, we explore the possibilities that lie ahead for African communication studies.

Future possibilities for African communication studies

The only limit to the future of African communication studies is what we can imagine. That is not inconsequential. As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explains, there is a “discord in the collective imagination” that produces an imaginative weight falling on those who have been written as the antithesis of the presumed heroic, as the “darkness” that must be eradicated for “good” to triumph.⁵² Under the intellectual strictures of coloniality and white supremacy, it is difficult to imagine futures with Africanness and Blackness at the center because they have long been marked as what must be eradicated in order for the future to take hold. Kodwo Eshun reminds us that domination desires the erasure of African futures and their possibilities.⁵³ In order to instantiate African communication studies in the larger discipline, communication scholars must not let such attempts at erasure condition our imaginations. On the contrary, we must not only work to unlearn what has already been wrought, but also produce the foundations for new futures in which Africanness and Blackness thrive.

In this section, we turn to the possibilities that African communication studies heralds, and what naming such a subdiscipline writes into being. By denying ontologies and epistemologies based in African erasure, African communication studies makes the impossible possible—or at least, what is considered impossible according to stunted Western imaginations.⁵⁴ Here, we examine three ways African communication studies sets future trajectories for communication studies writ large. First, African communication studies provides a means of liberating personhood from the Western imaginary of Man.⁵⁵ Second, African communication studies presents ways of conceptualizing relations that refuse binaries and expand the understanding and potential of context. Third, African communication studies opens paths to futures that the West would dismiss as impossible. We argue that these aspects of African communication studies challenge the discipline to rethink its theory, methodology, and praxis, respectively.

Liberating personhood

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes colonization as a process of dismemberment for Africans. Dismemberment was economic and cultural, a process of stealing resources, destroying social infrastructures, and replacing African names with colonial designations. But perhaps most importantly, dismemberment attacked African subjectivity:

Dismembered from the land, from labor, from power, and from memory, the result is destruction of the base from which people launch themselves into the world. . . . And with this base destroyed, the wholeness of the African subject, the subject in active engagement with his environment, is fragmented.⁵⁶

One way to conceptualize how African dismemberment happens subjectively is through Wynter’s figure of “Man,” which she defines as “the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass” that “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”⁵⁷ In overrepresenting itself as if it were equivalent to humanity, Man requires the use of African subjects as a foil, defining them as inhuman, as object, such that “the Black body [becomes] the tool utilized in the service of Western self-conceptions.”⁵⁸

However, “the Black world and Black consciousness can and do exist outside of the colonizing gaze of whiteness and coloniality.”⁵⁹ Similarly, African personhood can and does exist outside the colonizing gaze of whiteness and coloniality. Its recognition simply requires different ways of thinking and organizing the world, as the organizing processes of coloniality have constituted recognition as violence in Western ways of knowing.⁶⁰ We use “personhood” rather than “subjectivity” or “humanity” because colonial epistemologies and ontologies have often rendered subjectivity and humanity inaccessible for Black and African peoples.⁶¹ Personhood provides a means of conceptualizing Africans apart from ontologies and epistemologies that desire their erasure.

African communication studies offers the potential to liberate African personhood from Man by examining African being through situated contexts and collective relations. Context has everything to do with the ways Africans navigate communicative circumstances, whether through claiming or refusing to claim identities. On the one hand, as O. M. Olaniyan describes, “strategic essentialism may empower the marginalized to become visible,” able to make claims about their own life-worlds otherwise restricted by colonial mappings of time and space.⁶² On the other hand, work such as Godfried Asante’s demonstrates there is power in the ambivalent refusal to explicitly claim an identity, allowing gendered and sexually minoritized Africans to navigate threats of violence while still expressing themselves.⁶³ Both of these means of conceptualizing African personhood require deeply situated understandings and analyses.

In part, this is because “in most African philosophies on personhood, a person becomes human only amid others.”⁶⁴ For example, Kwame Gyekye argues that personhood in Akan thought is fundamentally “amphibious”: both individualistic and communal in a way that subverts Western binary assumptions of the tensions and contradictions between the two. That is, African personhood as reflected in the Akan conceptual scheme “therefore rejects the notion that claims of the individual and society are antithetical, while attempting to integrate individual desires and social ideals.”⁶⁵ Personhood here is fundamentally different from Western liberal assumptions of individuality, separability, and collectivity as arising from groups of autonomous subjects. Rather, in this version of African philosophy, the individual is based in collectivity in a way that does not allow for subjectivity external to the community.

However, deep contextualization of African thought does not necessarily make it intelligible to scholars in the West. When Western theoretical constructs are inherently based in anti-Blackness and coloniality, which erase African being and knowledge, simply contextualizing and explaining African thought is not enough to make it comprehensible. As Keguro Macharia asks in relation to African queer studies:

And if, North American queer theory and queer studies has been an exercise in Africans learning about North American fluencies and legibilities and illegibilities, is it possible that African queer theory and queer studies also demands that non-Africans learn our fluencies and legibilities and illegibilities and opacities?⁶⁶

Is it possible for African communication studies to demand that non-African communication scholars learn African fluencies and legibilities, illegibilities and opacities, and struggle with the epistemic discomfort that accompanies such learning? Will non-African communication scholars commit to looking at the ways Western fluencies and legibilities have already shaped communicative thought and assumptions?

That is, if African communication studies is to liberate African personhood from Man, it requires an overhaul of communication theory. As Last Moyo writes, “the influence of theory is. . . subtle and far reaching, going as far as determining what methods and pedagogies are appropriate to use in a discipline. In essence, theory maps the discipline and through myth, enjoys a revealing or concealing status.”⁶⁷ African communication studies necessitates rethinking communication theory in two primary ways: (1) toward contextualized notions of self and other; and (2) against citizenship- and rights-based frameworks.

First, African communication studies radically contextualizes notions of self and other. For communication theory, this means questioning the very terms upon which the field has based humanity and subjectivity. As Armond R. Towns writes, if we do not interrogate past approaches “to the self/Other, communication and critical/cultural studies scholars may run the risk of taking for granted the terms of humanness provided by the colonizer—terms that may be positioned as neutral modes of describing our life-worlds.”⁶⁸ This is one reason African scholars in communication often use autoethnography in their work—it is a means of establishing personhood by eschewing the field’s theoretical constructs that attempt to write them out of it. As Pindi describes:

The paradigmatic shift to the body as a site of knowledge. . . is a monumental step that subverts the Eurocentric Cartesian mind/body split philosophical framework and thereby opens doors for the decolonization of the communication discipline. . . my transnational body on stage is a political tool of decolonization that takes up, resists, defers, and challenges the ongoing systemic oppressions.⁶⁹

For Pindi, the situatedness of personhood within the body creates new theoretical pathways for decolonization.

Second, African communication studies calls us to move beyond frameworks centering citizenship and rights. Citizenship, particularly as inculcated in rhetoric, is “so ubiquitous as to be taken for granted.”⁷⁰ However, citizenship promotes a narrative of inclusion within nation-states that is problematic for African personhood, as the type of inclusion bestowed upon Black and African peoples is often violent, and nation-states do not confer the same subjective status within African contexts as they are assumed to confer in the United States.⁷¹ Similarly, rights-based frameworks often bolster Western imperialism through single-issue advocacy at the expense of more complex perspectives. As we have written elsewhere, “Gay rights is often levied as a reason for violences against nonwhite and non-Western others who are typically portrayed as the ones threatening gay survival in as much as they are also rendered queer—sexually and culturally dissolute.”⁷² Moving beyond theories grounded in citizenship and rights removes the limits set on notions of African personhood by liberal individualism and coloniality.

Expanding relations

African communication studies also calls for expanding understandings of context and relations, if we are to radically situate notions of personhood within them. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o puts it, “Local knowledge is not an island upon itself; it is part of the main, part of the sea. Its limits lie in the boundless universality of our creative potentiality as human beings.”⁷³ His metaphor calls attention to three important aspects of attending to relations for African communication studies: boundless possibilities, liquid relationalities, and refusal to oppose the local and the global.

Coloniality has delimited the types of relations that are considered salient for academic work in ways that obscure factors often relevant to African life. Communication scholarship must expand its notions of relations in many ways if it is to take seriously African ways of being and knowing. For instance, dyads and nuclear family relationships condition interpersonal research, which has a difficult time when interpreting communal and intergenerational norms of African life. Similarly, Western logocentrism undermines the importance of spirituality, folklore, and magical realism to African communication practices. Human–environment relations in Western scholarship are undergirded with a feeling of distance that does not line up with African experience. In part, this derives from Western insulated and locked-door houses, which promote very different relations than many African styles of living. Further, when personhood is fundamentally connected to the spark of life in all things, the environment becomes an extension of the self in African contexts—this is illegible to Western knowledge.

For African communication studies, the contributions of relations to communicative thought and action must be rethought to better capture how human action is innately conditioned by its contexts. Cruz writes that “cultural norms are constitutive of temporal, structural, and relational dimensions,”⁷⁴ meaning that culture is constantly producing and reproducing the way we understand and relate to time, systems, and our connections with people, places, living things, and objects. In order to take this seriously, communication scholars must unbound our understandings of context. What happens if we consider relations to be limitless, a sea of “boundless universality”?⁷⁵

Cruz and Sodeke offer one way of shifting our understanding of context through their lens of liquidity and fluidity.⁷⁶ They examine how African organizing processes rely on motion, solvency, and permeability. However, their training in Western knowledge systems did not prepare them to notice or study these aspects of relations, instead inculcating assumptions of solidity, permanence, and impenetrability into the study of organizing and organizations. Cruz and Sodeke offer the field a way of diversifying the types of relations that communication scholars can study.

Additionally, communication scholars must complexify scales of relation. For instance, rhetoric often positions itself as dealing with relations on the scale of the nation-state. Yet, as Chirindo asks,

But what if the nation and nationalist ideology are not germane to the everyday and workaday lives of vast swaths of people in a society? What if, according to the lived experiences of a significant portion of people, the nation is a distant abstraction rather than a permanent materiality as the Westphalian model suggests?⁷⁷

African communication studies pushes communication scholars to think beyond perfunctory scales of relation in a given subdiscipline. For instance, although the West can in large part ignore or erase the continuing global imperial relations that allow for its existence—resource extraction, textile production, manufacturing, etc.—centralizing Africa brings such relations to light.⁷⁸ In their analysis of the television show An African City, Francesca Sobande and Krys Osei describe the ways the show implicates the imperialistic trade underlying African fashion.⁷⁹ Similarly, Eric Karikari’s study of neoliberalism demonstrates how the construct’s contradictions and colonial bases were quite clear in a Ghanaian managerial context.⁸⁰ For Africans, global imperialism affects everyday life in more notable ways than the nation-state. The infiltration of global imperialism into multiple aspects of life requires attention both in studies of African contexts and those regarding the rest of the world.

African contexts are inescapably entwined with the West. As such, African knowledge does not rely on the binary oppositions of the West and the Rest, Black and white, etc. Rather, binaries are a primary means of erasing African personhood, being, and knowledge within coloniality. To reckon with the world from African perspectives, communication scholars must embrace an expanded notion of context that does not reduce complex circumstances to binary oppositions. As we have written elsewhere, Africans “exist within a postcolonial cultural milieu that cannot be fully separated from Western influences. Postcolonial African subjects live within contexts. . . inescapably shaped by colonial structures that Africans cannot ignore.”⁸¹ African contexts are conditioned by coloniality in complicated ways, requiring intricate methodological approaches to understand such multifaceted implications.⁸²

If African communication studies is to expand current conceptualizations of relations in both form and scope, it necessitates rethinking communication methodologies. Sodeke writes in her fieldnotes regarding her use of Western research methods to interview Nigerian subjects, “I was confronted with the inadequacy of my methodology and the limitations of how I had learned ‘research.’”⁸³ African communication studies necessitates rethinking communication methodologies in two primary ways: (1) toward liquid and fluid understandings of relations; and (2) using autoethnography and personal narrative to situate understandings.

First, African communication studies makes methodologies more fluid.⁸⁴ Cruz and Sodeke demonstrate the need for fluidity in relation to research subjects in particular. When life does not operate along the rigid boundaries and categorizations assumed by the West, things such as participant interviews and workplace locations take on a liquid quality that makes them difficult to separate from the surrounding time and context. Fluidity applies both to the research subjects in African communication studies and to the researchers. There is an importance in African rhetoric to having what Olaniyan calls “eternally (dis)placeable” concepts:

(Dis)placing. . . focuses on the worldmaking agency of naming the groundings of an historical place and the authoritative possibility to unsettle it. When essentialism is conditionally used to make place-based arguments, anti-colonial rhetors should perform the designation of place as a conditional effect that may be unfixed if necessary.⁸⁵

Cruz and Sodeke’s responses to unforeseen complications in their research could be thought of as displacing research methods that no longer worked in favor of emplacing others, operating in a fluid manner in their own research, as well as recognizing it in their participants.

Second, African communication studies turns to autoethnography and personal narration to claim personhood through deep contextualization.⁸⁶ The personal narrative form allows researchers to bypass Western binary oppositions of objectivity/subjectivity, mind/body by demonstrating their inseparability. Pindi writes that through autoethnography, “[she] was able to make sense of how [her] selfhood is constantly shaped at the nexus of forces often-times unseen, but not unfelt, such as tribalism, colonialism, racism, and so forth.”⁸⁷ Autoethnography thus provides a methodology for African communication studies that not only highlights African personhood, but also deconstructs logics of coloniality that impede recognition of African scholarship as such.

Opening impossible futures

Finally, African communication studies opens up futures beyond neoliberal capitalistic visions of global development—futures that Western knowledge systems undermine by declaring them impossible.⁸⁸ Communication scholars, then, must examine to what extent their knee-jerk responses to the possibility, efficacy, or actionability of African scholarship and its claims are predetermined by anti-Blackness and coloniality. To do so, we must rethink temporalities and search for opportunities to collaborate across difference.

In part, African communication studies requires reconceptualizing temporality because Africa is frozen by the West in an inaccessible past that casts the continent as backward, savage, and constantly behind in colonially determined developmental trajectories.⁸⁹ As Moyo explains:

The Global South is framed as locked in a time warp of tradition and superstition. The task of Southern theory then is to decolonize not just the interdiscipline, but also time since time determines the relevance of our theories, worldviews, media forms, and culture.⁹⁰

Specifically, Western temporalities “can be stretched and deployed to dispossess others by keeping them in the past (Africans) while harnessing the future becomes a tool of empowerment for (Western) others.”⁹¹ For African knowledge to be taken seriously, communication studies must decolonize its temporalities, which requires recognizing how time operates in nonlinear, cyclical, and palimpsestic fashions.⁹² As Sofia Samatar argues, time travel is a form of resistance for Africans. We must “proceed not like a development theorist, but like a data thief,” a “time-traveling trickster. . . seeking signs of collective memory.”⁹³

In seeking signs of collective memory, African communication studies opens up opportunities for collaboration across difference. Africans are practiced in such collaborations, as the divide-and-conquer logistics of colonization require pan-African collectivities—across national, tribal, linguistic, cultural, geographic, and other boundaries—to resist. Importantly, collaboration across difference serves to open possibilities for alternative futures. Aimee Carrillo Rowe writes that “our capacity to forge connections across power lines creates conditions of possibility,” rewriting the world to make the impossible possible. That is, “alliances across power lines enable. . . transformations to become possible.”⁹⁴ Collaborations across difference can “produce new conditions of belonging,”⁹⁵ and thereby new future possibilities.

The “African Feminist and Queer Coalitions” forum published in Women’s Studies in Communication is one example of how collaborations across difference are important to African communication studies. Limning coalitional possibilities at once challenges problematic assumptions about the continent and provides unique theoretical tools. On the one hand, the forum challenges assumptions that “feminism is ‘alien’ to African culture,”⁹⁶ or that celebrations of African queerness are part of an “erasure of ‘African culture,’”⁹⁷ by instead highlighting how Africans relate to these concepts in unique ways, opening opportunities for unforeseen connections and collaborations. For example, C. Nthemba Mutua-Mambo creates ground for Kenyan feminist and queer activists to band together in ways that make their resistance in the real world more powerful and difficult to dismiss.⁹⁸ Godfried Asante similarly demonstrates how the erotic provides a means of interpersonal connection between women and queer folks that can combat structural forces.⁹⁹ Importantly, by demonstrating the ways that unlikely coalitions create new conceptual ground, these essays redesign future possibilities. As Hanchey writes, “Those who tell the future are creating it.”¹⁰⁰

By telling coalitional futures, African communication studies participates in bringing them into being. This is not only an academic exercise. African communication studies lends weight and importance to praxis, as the futures that it helps bring into being hold material stakes for people’s livelihoods,¹⁰¹ or even life and death.¹⁰² The way that communication scholarship recognizes, examines, and describes African life can affect African survival, both present and future. As African communication scholars, and communication scholars more broadly, we must write the futures in which we wish to take part.

(Re)theorizing communication studies from African perspectives: issue one

This first issue of “(Re)Theorizing Communication Studies from African Perspectives” brings together four remarkable essays that take up the task of reconceptualizing the theory, method, and praxis of the field through their examinations of African personhood, relations, and action. In the lead essay, “Unpacking African Epistemological Violence,” Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui proposes a framework of critical Africanness that institutes “Africanness” as a continual question, something that must be iteratively (re)established and interrogated in order for Africanness to be an ongoing decolonial project. She offers four modes of critical Africanness: Afro-Epistemilibre, Afrorelationality, Afrosubjectivity, and Afrotransnationality. These four modes point to the persistent action to create alternative spaces, networks, and ways of knowing that go beyond neocolonial and neoliberal ways of knowing and being.

In “The Grammar and Rhetoric of African Subjectivity,” Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi makes an important intervention in decolonizing philosophy and theory regarding African subjectivity. Specifically, he unpacks the ways that Africans are erased through colonial systems of ethics, visuality, and language, and advocates for an “unreasonable” rhetoric that can reaffirm African humanity. Rhetoric that recognizes African humanity can only be unreasonable under Western philosophical systems, which are otherwise based in African nonbeing. Ogunfeyimi develops two important facets of this rhetoric: ­onto-logical ethics and decolonial visuality.

In “Promoting African Knowledge in Communication Studies,” Gloria Nziba Pindi extends the project of decolonizing communication scholarship by examining the ways that feminist scholarship in the discipline is still based in problematic theory and method that often ignores African feminisms and their contributions to knowledge production. Integrating theoretical and personal examples, Pindi offers a decolonial feminist agenda with five main branches: decolonizing portrayals of African women, decolonizing African sexuality, decolonizing the research process, decolonizing the homogenization of Blackness, and decolonizing ways of knowing.

In the concluding essay for this issue, “Communication Theory from Améfrica Ladina,” Bryce Henson examines what happens when African thought extends into Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean (LASC), focusing on the radical potential of Lélia Gonzalez’s theory, amefricanidade, for combatting the anti-Blackness and coloniality of communication studies. Henson outlines a Black decolonial communicative project centered on LASC and drawing from African ways of knowing as they have been reshaped and reformed through the unique contexts of Brazil in particular, and LASC more broadly. Henson’s work demonstrates the transnational and global potential of rethinking communication studies from an African perspective that centers Blackness and decoloniality.

We frame this Introduction as a provocation and invitation, because the work of African communication studies does not end here. Rather, we hope that you will join us in the continuing project of unearthing the racial and colonial foundations of communication studies, and transforming our theories, methods, and practice to better account for ways of knowing that challenge and extend beyond Western epistemological systems. As Pindi writes in this issue,

This intellectual endeavor and labor is not solely the responsibility of Africans. On the contrary, this is a call to all communication scholars to embrace a politics of decoloniality that deconstructs the hegemony of Western knowledge in favor of a recognition of African epistemologies. . . . My hope is that we can all contribute to this endeavor.

Echoing Pindi, our hope is that we all contribute to the endeavor of (re)theorizing communication studies from African perspectives, thereby making the discipline a more welcoming home for African thought—and for us all.

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.”