Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies

Abstract

The concepts of the cognitive empire, coloniality of knowledge, the Africanist enterprise, and decolonial turns provide effective means of unmasking resilient and invisible intellectual imperialism in African studies. A close analysis of the major turns in African studies, ranging from the overarching Black radical turn to the African nationalist, Afro-Marxist political economy, postcolonial, gender/feminist and current resurgent decolonial interventions, reveals the complexities of tasks of decolonising knowledge in Africa. A hegemonic and well-funded Africanist enterprise in the service of the cognitive empire underpinned by uneven intellectual division of labour, intellectual extraversion, and academic dependence as leitmotifs of global political economy of knowledge impinges on African studies in various ways. This is why a resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century is continuing with the agenda of decrypting the coloniality of power and unmasking epicolonial dynamics within the field of African studies.

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