Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies

Description

Addressing the consequences of European slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism on African history, knowledge and its institutions, this innovative book applies autoethnography to the understanding of African knowledge systems. Considering the 'Self' and Yoruba Being (the individual and the collective) in the context of the African decolonial project, Falola strips away Eurocentric influences and interruptions from African epistemology. Avoiding colonial archival sources, it grounds itself in alternative archives created by memory, spoken words, images and photographs to look at the themes of politics, culture, nation, ethnicity, satire, poetics, magic, myth, metaphor, sculpture, textiles, hair and gender. Vividly illustrated in colour, it uses diverse and novel methods to access an African way of knowing. Exploring the different ways that a society understands and presents itself, this book highlights convergence, enmeshing private and public data to provide a comprehensive understanding of society, public consciousness, and cultural identity. * Adopts an interdisciplinary approach to offer readers a rich and nuanced overview of African knowledge systems * Demonstrates how the use of personal archives can broaden our scholarly ambitions and forges a new path for conceptualizing African epistemologies * Heavily illustrated with colour images to enhance and provide context to the written material for students and scholars Toyin Omoyeni Falola is a Nigerian historian and professor of African Studies. He is currently the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Falola earned his B.A. and Ph.D. (1981) in History at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), in Nigeria. He is a Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Falola is author and editor of more than one hundred books, and he is the general editor of the Cambria African Studies Series (Cambria Press), Falola served as the president of the African Studies Association in 2014 and 2015. Decolonizing African Knowledge Contents List of Figures Notes on Language and Orthography Preface Acknowledgments PART I Introduction 1 Prologue: My Archive 2 Autoethnography and Epistemic Liberation PART II History, Fictions, and Factions 3 Narrative Politics and Cultural Ideologies 4 Memory, Magic, Myth, and Metaphor 5 A Poetological Narration of the Nation 6 A Poetological Narrative of the Self 7 Satire and Society 8 Narrative Politics and the Politics of Narrative PART III Visual Cultures 9 Sculpture as Archive 10 Textiles as Texts 11 Canvas and the Archiving of Ethnic Reality 12 Yorùbá Hair Art and the Agency of Women 13 Photography and Ethnography PART IV Conclusion 14 Self, Collective, and Collection Bibliography Index