Type of Credit: Elective
Credit(s)
Number of Students
China, Africa, and their diasporas have similarities and differences, many of them the products of interconnections or overlapping experiences. Through the lenses of history, art, politics, and economics, this anthropology seminar compares these two cultures complexes and highlights the hybrid and creative results of their interaction, with the special goal of correcting existing misunderstandings and facilitating thoughtful cooperation in the future. While the professor will orient the discussion around current anthropological methods of critical analysis, the seminar format will require the professor and all of the students to build on and contribute to each other’s understanding of the topic.
能力項目說明
This course aims to guide students in critically comparing the cultural dynamics of China, Africa, and their diasporas through history, art, politics, and economics. Students will learn current anthropological methods to identify misunderstandings and hybrid outcomes, and collaboratively deepen their understanding of intercultural interaction and future cooperation through seminar-based discussion.
Requirements:
1) Weekly attendance and vocal participation in the seminar are mandatory, except in cases of illness or pre-authorization by the professor. Using your distinctive knowledge, experience, and perspective, teach the rest of us something, and listen well to others in the seminar so that we can build on each other’s understanding. During the first ten weeks of the semester, each student must make a 10-minute in-class oral presentation of his or her personal research—ideally including participant-observer research on a relevant population. Ideally, it should benefit from the relevant non-required readings in the Moodle system folder (see below). Please give special attention to the readings at the end of this syllabus, which are so useful that the professor would have required them in a 13-week class with weekly lectures, a course of the sort that he would teach on this topic at my home institution (20% of the final grade).
2) A one-page, double-spaced, 12-point-font reflection paper in English will be due every week, by 4 p.m. on the Monday before the lecture. It must be based upon a thorough reading of all of the required readings on the syllabus. All required readings are available in a Moodle system file to which all students in the class will have access. Please let the professor know if you are unable to locate the optional readings.
The reflection essay should begin with an epigraph—ideally the one- or two-sentence passage from the week’s readings that most unsettled your previous thinking about the topic of the week.
Your essay must demonstrate a careful reading of all of the required readings, as well as your own critical thinking and efforts to contextualize the readings in terms of the rest of the course and what you learn about the authors based upon online sources.
In the first two-thirds of the essay, critically summarize the argument of each required reading individually and then identify points of tension among the readings. In other words, how do the lessons or implications of each reading differ from the lessons and implications of the other readings. Each summary should begin with “[Author’s name] argues that….”
The final third of the essay should specify how the week’s readings have added to your understanding of the previous lectures and readings in this seminar. Please also feel free to record your remaining questions about the topic of the week’s readings and to address the relevance of the readings to the potential topic of your midterm essay. From the start of the course, you should be thinking about that topic.
For extra credit, you may submit, in an addendum, critical summaries of any optional readings. This addendum should not exceed a quarter of a page in English. Please let the professor know if you are unable to locate any of the optional readings that you would like to review.
No late reflection essays will be accepted for credit, but you will be excused for one non-submission. However, the professor recommends that you complete them all.
Please submit your essays as editable MS-Word attachments, not PDFs, Google docs, etc.
Please pay close attention to all of these instructions.
4) Familiarity with the “flipped” lecture notes. On each Monday evening of the semester, after you have submitted your weekly written reflection essays, I send you the “flipped” that will be the basis of my Wednesday lecture. Please preview them, open them at the start of class, ask for any necessary clarifications during class, and review them after class to make sure you have understood the contents and the goals of the lecture. My intention is for you not to read the flipped notes until after you have written your own reflection essays. This intention is one reason that no late reflection essays will be accepted for credit.
5) A written mid-term essay about an aspect of the historical, cultural, political, and economic relationship between China and Africa and between their diasporas. This examination must expressly demonstrate your mastery of the course readings, as well as your own synthetic and critical analysis of them. For further explanation, see Week 11 on this syllabus (40% of the final grade).
6) A written final examination (40% of the final grade).
Books from which the readings are drawn
(Students are not required to purchase these books. This list is provided in case students wish optionally to read the who book from which the required reading selection has been drawn.)
Bright, Rachel (2013). Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902-10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Césaire, Aimé. (2000[1950]). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Cheng, Yinghong (2019). Discourse of Race and Rising China. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chipanta, Mukuka (2016). A Casualty of Power. Zimbabwe: Weaver Press.
Fortes, Meyer, and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940[1970]). African Political Systems. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Francis, Elizabeth (2019). Making a Living: Changing Livelihoods in Rural Africa. London: Routledge.
Frazier, Robeson Taj (2015). The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press.
Li, Anshan/李安山 (2000). Feizhou huaqiao huaren shi 非洲华侨华人史 [A History of Chinese Overseas in Africa]. Beijing: Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe.
Olupona, Jacob. 2014. African Religions: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ossa, Luisa Marcela , and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, eds. 2018. Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. 2018. The World That Trade Created Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. New York: Routledge.
Rozelle, Scott, and Natalie Hell. 2020. Invisible China How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wyatt, Don J. (2010). The Blacks of Pre-Modern China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Xiao, Anna (2015). Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Yun, Lisa (2008). The Coolie Speaks. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Week 1: Introduction--The Scope of Our Study and Its Global Context
Wednesday, September 3rd
Week 2: Imperial History and A Hundred Years of Humiliation
Wednesday, September 10th
Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik (2018). The World That Trade Created Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. New York: Routledge. [Ch.3.6–3.9, 94–105; Ch.4.12, 143–146].
An accessible history of economic globalization and imperialism. Chapter 3.6 Sweet Revolutions focuses on sugar trade that connects Asian plant, European capital, African labor, and American soil. Chapter 3.7 How Opium Made the World Go ’Round focuses on Britain’s opium trade with China since the 18th century. Chapter 4.12 Cocoa and Coercion: Advances and Retreats for Free Labor in West African Agriculture focuses on post-abolition exploitation of African labor in cocoa agriculture.
Césaire, Aimé. (1950[2000]). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. [31–46, 74–78].
The selected pages of Discourse on Colonialism address the precedents of Nazism in Europe’s colonization of Africa and Asia and ends with an internationalist appeal. Césaire is a poet, philosopher, and politician from the French Caribbean département, or province, of Martinique. He is one of the leading philosophers of Négritude (see assignment, on next page).
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, September 8th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 3: China and Africa—An Overview
Wednesday, September 17th
Siu, Helen, and Mike McGovern (201)7. “China–Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46(1):337–55. LINK.
A historical analysis of interregional connection between China and Africa in ancient, socialist, and post-socialist contexts. In the project of studying relations between China and Africa, one must not assume that all Chinese actors are alike in character, motives, or resources. And one must not assume that all African actors are alike in character, motives, or resources.
Strauss, Julia (2009). “The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China’s Relations with Africa.” The China Quarterly, 199(September):777–95. LINK.
The rhetoric of China-Africa friendship is virtually the only legacy of the Mao era that is not been overturned or repudiated.
Optional:
Yan, Hairong, and Barry Sautman. 2012. “Chasing Ghosts: Rumours and Representations of the Export of Chinese Convict Labour to Developing Countries.” The China Quarterly 210(June):398–418. LINK.
Explores the claim that the Chinese government exports prison labor to developing countries and analyzes the mechanisms of and agendas behind its transmission.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2013. “Chinese Devils, the Global Market, and the Declining Power of Togo’s Nana-Benzes.” African Studies Review 56(1):65–80. LINK.
Focuses on the shifting representations of Chinese salesmen and their collaborators in Togo and how these representations can silence the role of Togolese women traders.
Wang, Yuan, and Uwe Wissenbach (2019). “Clientelism at Work? A Case Study of Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway Project.” Economic History of Developing Regions 34(3):1-20. LINK.
Examines the impact of clientelism on Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway project financed by China, argues that clientelism benefits the project management when local businesses are included in the network. Authors focus on African actors’ agency and how they participate in the clientelist network.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due, as an M-S Word attachment, by 4 p.m. on Monday, September 15th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 4: Africa’s Asian Diasporas
September 24th
Wyatt, Don J. (2010). The Blacks of Premodern China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Regarding China’s early contacts with and opinions of the Malay and East African populations described as Kunlun.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 22nd, at jm217@duke.edu
Optional:
Harris, Joseph (2003). “Expanding the Scope of African Diaspora Studies: The Middle East and India, a Research Agenda.” Radical History Review 2003(87):157–68. LINK.
A review of the literature on Africa’s ancient diaspora in Asia.
Li, Anshan. 李安山. 2000. Feizhou huaqiao huaren shi 非洲华侨华人史 [A History of Chinese Overseas in Africa]. Beijing: Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe. [Ch.1.1–1.4, 44–81].
A historical account of dynastic China’s understanding and interaction with Africa from Tang dynasty to late 20th century. Chapter 1.1 to 1.4 covers the Afro-Chinese direct and indirect contact from Tang to Ming Dynasty.
One-page, double-spaced written reflection essay due on by 4 p.m. on Monday, September 22nd, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 5: China’s Diasporas on the Western Sea
Wednesday, October 1st
Bright, Rachel (2013). Chinese Labour in South Africa, 1902-10: Race, Violence, and Global Spectacle. London: Palgrave Macmillan. LINK. [Introduction, 1–7; Ch.3, 38–69].
A historical focus on the racial exclusion and racial formation in the 20th century South Africa as a result of British Empire’s importation of Chinese indentured laborers in the country. Chapter 3 Greater Britain in South Africa: Colonial Nationalisms and Imperial Networks especially focuses on the Britain’s role in the importation.
Shih, Shu-mei (2011). “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA 126(3):709–18. LINK.
An argument for the concept of the “Sinophone,” or a de-centralized approach to the diverse languages and literary creativity in China and its diaspora.
Optional:
Huang, Mingwei (2024). Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
“Alternative African Geographies: Ocean Perimeters, Desert Perimeters, and the New Silk Road” (2024). Beijing Language and Culture University, 14 June 2024; Center for African Studies, Beijing University, 10 May 2024.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 29th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 6: Theoretical Models of Culture and Social Order in Pre-20th-Century Africa and China
Wednesday, October 8th
Fortes, Meyer, and Edward E. Evans-Pritchard (1970[1940]). African Political Systems. London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press. [Ch.1, 1–23].
An early anthropological account of African political systems (in relation to kinship).
Olupọna, Jacob (2014). African Religions: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. [Ch.3, 38–55].
A comprehensive introduction of African indigenous religions. Chapter 3 Sacred Authority: divine kinship, priests and diviners focus on the relation between religion, power and social structure.
Fei, Xiaotong (1992[1948]). From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. [Ch.1, 37–44; Ch. 8–11, 101–127].
A classic anthropological work on traditional Chinese social order. Chapter 1 is an overview of Special Characteristics of Rural Society. Chapter 8 focuses on rural ritual. Chapter 9 examines “law” in rural context. Chapter10 focuses on the inactive government. Chapter 11 focus on the aged-based social hierarchy.
Or
Fei, Xiaotong. 费孝通. (2006[1948]. Xiangtu zhongguo乡土中国 [From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society]. Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe. [same selections as above].
Matory, J. Lorand (2025, pending). “Chinese Philosophy and the Belt-and-Road Initiative in Africa.” Fourth Tsinghua Area Studies Forum, Institute for International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, 2-4 July. (See assignment on next page.)
Optional:
Ma, Guoqing (undated). “From Africa to East Asia: Comparative Study of Social Structure.” Unpublished.
Thompson, Robert Farris (1983). Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.
Mintz, Sidney, and Richard Price (1992[1976]). The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon.
Matory, J. Lorand (1999). “The English Professors of Brazil.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(1):72-103.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, October 6th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 7: The Country and the City in China and Africa
Wednesday, October 15th
Rozelle, Scott, and Natalie Hell (2020). Invisible China How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Ch.6, 102–125].
A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. Chapter 6 (“Invisible Barriers”) focuses on the three invisible barriers standing in front of the rural left-behind children.
Francis, Elizabeth (2019). Making a Living: Changing Livelihoods in Rural Africa. London: Routledge. [Ch.3 55–75]. LINK.
Making a Living uses case studies from commercial farming regions in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe to give a broad comparative study of rural livelihoods. Ch.3 (“Migrancy and Multiple Livelihoods”) focuses on the rural to urban labor migration.
Simone, AbdouMaliq (2004). For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press. [Chapter One, pp.21-62].
Multiple religious, economic, and political interest groups—most of them belonging to the so-called “informal sector”—clash, negotiate, cooperate, and make things work in a lively emerging suburb of Dakar, Senegal.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, October 13th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 8: Historical Encounters between African and Chinese Diasporas
Wednesday, October 22nd
Yun, Lisa (2008). The Coolie Speaks. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Ch.1, 1–35].
Examines testimonies from Chinese coolies in 19th-century Cuba and constructing a distinct Chinese coolie subjectivity in Cuba’s “hybrid slave system” where Chinese coolies worked alongside, rather substituting Afro-Cuban laborers. Chapter 1 articulates the historical context of coolie traffic to the Americas.
Yun, Lisa (2008). The Coolie Speaks. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. [Ch.5, 183–228].
Examines testimonies from Chinese coolies in 19th-century Cuba and constructing a distinct Chinese coolie subjectivity in Cuba’s “hybrid slave system” where Chinese coolies worked alongside, rather substituting Afro-Cuban laborers. Chapter 5 focuses on an Afro-Chinese author Antonio Chuffat Latour.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, October 20th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 9: Traveling Cultures-- Technology, Popular Culture, and Politics at the Intersection of the Diasporas of Africa and China
Wednesday, October 29th
Moriuchi, Mey-Yen (2018). “Locating Chinese Culture and Aesthetics in the Art of Wifredo Lam.” Pp. 27-60 in Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano. Lanham: Lexington Books.
The edited volume explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. This chapter focuses on the artwork of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam.
Goffe, Tao Leigh, and Deborah A. Thomas (2020). “Bigger than the Sound: The Jamaican Chinese Infrastructures of Reggae.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 24(3(63)):97–127. LINK.
Through study of the Afro-Asian intimacies and tensions embedded in the sound of pre-independence Jamaica, the essay traces the birth of the “sound-system” to the networks of local small-retail grocery shops, ubiquitous across Jamaica, that were owned and operated by Jamaican Chinese shopkeepers and examines how they formed material infrastructures.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, October 27th, at jm217@duke.edu
Optional:
Tsang, Martin. 2018. “La Mulata Achinada: Bodies, Gender, and Authority in Afro-Chinese Religion in Cuba.” In Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, 209–24. Lanham: Lexington Books.
The edited volume explores the connections between people of Asian and African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. This chapter focuses on gender and Afro-Chinese religion.
Tsang, Martin A. (2017). “The Power of Containing and the Containing of Power: Creating, Collecting, and Documenting an Afro-Cuban Lukumí Beaded Vessel.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 30 (March):125-47.
Tsang, Martin A. (2017). “Jubilant Coral and Jade: How Afro-Cuban Beaded Art Reflects, Religion, Heritage, and Anthropology.” Chiricú: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures 2(1, fall):143-52.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, October 27th, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 10: Maoism, the Cold War, and the Black USA
Wednesday, November 5th
Frazier, Robeson Taj P. (2015). The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press. [Introduction, 1–21].
Explores how African Americans used their experiences traveling in the anti-imperial nation to challenge the formulations of race and world affairs that motivated Cold War politics. Chapter 1 introduces the importance of media, transnational politics, and political imagining in black leftist radicals’ efforts to articulate and build solidarity with the socialist project being shaped in China and other communist Asian countries.
Li, Hongshan. 2018. “Building a Black Bridge: China’s Interaction with African-American Activists during the Cold War.” Journal of Cold War Studies 20(3):114–52. LINK.
The article shows that the construction of the new “black bridge” was made possible because of the PRC's determination to achieve its policy objectives, the African-American activists’ needs in fighting for racial equality, and the U.S. government's strict ban on travel to China.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 3rd, at jm217@duke.edu
Optional:
Frazier, Robeson Taj P. (2011). “Afro-Asia and Cold War Black Radicalism.”
Socialism and Democracy 25:1:257-265.
Frazier, Robeson Taj P. (2011). “Thunder in the East: China, Exiled Crusaders, and the Unevenness of Black Internationalism.” American Quarterly 63(4):929-53.
Johnson, Matthew (2013). “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979.” Past & Present 218(January):233–57.
Liu, Philip Hsiaopong (2013). “Petty Annoyances? Revisiting John Emmanuel Hevi’s An African Student in China after Fifty Years.” China: An International Journal 11(1):131-45. (In “Chinese-Africa Syllabus” file in the Baidu folder.)
Killens, John Oliver (1976). Black Man in New China. Los Angeles: US-China Peoples Friendship Association.
Based on his travels to China in 1973, this pamphlet by John Oliver Killens was a version of a piece originally published in Black World in November, 1975.
One-page, double-spaced reflection essay due by 4 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 3rd, at jm217@duke.edu
Week 11: MIDTERM ESSAY due on Monday, November 10th, at jm217@duke.edu, as well as a hard copy given to Mr. Sakue-Collins. Absolutely no longer than 8 double-spaced pages in 12-point font. Place any additional information in endnotes or appendices. This essay must be a terse, well-informed, original, and well-organized argument—that surprises a well-informed reader--about an aspect of the historical, cultural, political, and economic relationship between China and Africa and between their diasporas. This essay must reflect a thorough understanding of the course materials and analytical themes. Do not submit an essay that you could have written without ever having taken this class. Yet it should also reflect reading, archival research, and/or ethnographic research that expands on the course materials and adds to existing understandings of your chosen topic.
Section VI: Encounter and (Con)tentions
Lecture:
6.1 (Week 12, November 19): Contemporary Culture, Power, and Soft Hegemony
Li, Siyua (2022). A Foucauldian Power Analysis of China’s Confucius Institute in Africa: Power, Knowledge and the Institutionalisation of China’s Foreign Policy. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 58(8), 1465-1481. https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096221086546
Chiyemura, Frangton and Burgess, Meryl (2024). Politics of Knowledge Production around China-Africa Relations. China-Africa Economic Interactions: past, Present, and Future Conference 12-14 September, 2024. The Open University
6.2 (Week 13, November 26): China’s Geopolitics, Development Spectacle, and Infrastructure Aesthetics in Africa
Carmody, P, Taylor, I & Zajontz, T 2022, 'China’s spatial fix and ‘debt diplomacy’ in Africa: Constraining belt or road to economic transformation?', Canadian Journal of African Studies 56(1), 57-77
This paper explores the contradictions in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It traces the drivers of BRI to China’s attempt to address its internal contradictions, particularly the problem of chronic overaccumulation, and documents this “spatial fix” is creating debt crisis on the continent even as the economic viability of some of BRI’s projects remain questionable.
Sautman, B., & Hairong, Y. 2016. The discourse of racialisation of labour and Chinese enterprises in Africa. Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(12), 2149-2168
This paper examines ‘race’ and labour conjunction in China’s investment in Global South. It highlights the rhetorical racialisation of African employees by some Chinese employers to underscore how South-South racialisation markedly distinct from North-South racialisation.
Optional:
Frazier, R. T. 2015. The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press.
The written reflection essay on the readings in sections 6.1 and 6.2 are due by
Discussion:
Section VII: Present and Futures
7.1 (Week 14, December 3): Understanding Scientific Racism and its Contemporary Replications?
Ani, Marimba. (1994). Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour. New Jersey: Africa World Press Inc. Yurugu - Dr Marimba Ani. (start @19:20)
This seminal work provides an African-centered critique of the foundational values of racial theorisation. Marimba Ani introduces the concept of “asili” as the core (defining character) of Western culture, to argue that European culture is inherently dominated by “asili”. This cultural core (asili) is characterised by separation, control, and domination – traits that underlie imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and global white supremacy.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2013. “Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century.” PMLA 128 (1): 156–62.
This piece theorises the racial dynamics of China’s revolution with the help of a novel, Ferdinand Oyono’s Une vie de boy (1956). It argues that ‘Blackness’ is within China’s long twentieth-century history of revolution, sovereignty, and racial politics. While Chinese nationalism presents itself as a response to Western imperialist racism, the piece highlights that China has developed its own racialised nationalist ideologies. From the late Qing to the Maoist era, racial thinking – though often overshadowed by narratives of national victimhood – was central to China’s revolutionary and internationalist projects, including solidarity with formerly colonised peoples.
7.2 (Week 15, December 10): Decolonising Africa-China Cultural Futures
Grosfoguel, Ramon (2010). “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms”. In: Mignolo, Walter & Escobar, Arturo (eds.) Globalization and the Decolonial Option. (Ch. 4).
This collection discusses alternatives to globalization through decolonial perspectives. Specifically, Grosfoguel discusses how impossible it is to, speaking figuratively, use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house’, by highlighting how even acclaimed critical traditions sometimes fall into epistemic trap.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. (2018). “Seek ye epistemic freedom first”. In: Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. (ed) Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialisation and Decolonisation. London: Routledge. (Ch. 1).
The volume discusses recentering engagements of cultures and peoples by recognising multiple locales, not one, as essential to decolonising human interactions. Chapter 1 distinguishes between academic or intellectual freedom from epistemic freedom. The latter, for him, holds the key and marks the beginning rebuilding futures beyond hegemonic contraptions.
Optional:
The written reflection essay on the readings in sections 7.1 and 7.2 are due by
Discussion:
Week 16: Final Quiz
December 17th
class participation 20%
midterm essay 40%
final quiz 40%