Decolonizing African Studies

As we launch the third issue of volume 61 of the African Studies Review, the editorial leadership has turned its attention to the capacity of scholarly journals to make a meaningful contribution to debates about the decolonization of Africanist knowledge. As a group of likeminded and engaged scholars we are critically aware of the place of journals in cultivating new talent and showcasing emerging scholarship. The PEASS workshops [https://africanstudies.org/peass-workshops/], now in their fourth installment, are one earnest attempt to engage with these important but often marginalized members of our community of scholars. Indeed, the ASR has since its inception occupied a preeminent location in the celebration of African and Africanist achievement, and it is with these thoughts in mind that we have embarked on two important initiatives broadly situated within the emerging knowledge decolonization paradigm. The first is to transform access to the journal on the continent with the goal of increasing engagement, usage, citation, and circulation among Africa-based scholars. The second seeks to expand our reviewing framework and network, broadening the reach of the journal, expanding inclusivity, and renewing our commitment to the vast and diverse constituencies that comprise African studies and the membership of the African Studies Association and our sister and brother networks in Canada and Europe and on the continent.

Today, perhaps more than ever, decolonizing knowledge production is a persuasive and prescient rhetoric. Just as Budd L. Hall and Rajesh Tandon (2017:7) argue that the “knowledge in the universities of our world represents a very small proportion of the global treasury of knowledge,” so too the knowledge published within the pages of scholarly journals, such as the ASR, only represents a narrow selection of the vast new original research conducted about and on the African continent. As editors we seek to develop a deeper understanding of “other epistemologies and other ways of representing knowledge” (Hall & Tandon 2017:7) and to challenge ourselves to draw these knowledges into the purview of our readership. The questions and debates in which we are thus ensconced are many, overlapping, and profound; several loom large with respect to scholarly journals. As editors, we might ask who produces and transmits knowledge and understanding? How might institutions such as journals and professional societies challenge hegemonic knowledge and support the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge and understanding? What role do institutions play in the cultivation and validation of new, diverse, and critical knowledges? Or what capacity do journals and journal editorial teams have to challenge existing forms of cultural, social, philosophical, and politico-economic power relations?

Some scholars have surely challenged this outlook, observing that the Western European knowledge paradigm—with its universities, journals, and professional hierarchies—is itself a hybrid knowledge environment comprised of the legacies of centuries of cultural interplay across oceans and continents (e.g., Altbach 1998). Yet even so, as Francis Adyanga Akena (2012) observes, there is a powerful and persistent relationship between knowledge producers and the motives of the societies that they inhabit. Dominant groups produce subjective knowledge to instantiate and reinstantiate socioeconomic and political perspectives. Achille Mbembe (2015) cautioned us to be vigilant to the ways in which the corrosive “myth” and “entrapment” of whiteness shapes and distorts ways of knowing in post-apartheid South Africa; decolonizing knowledge for Mbembe requires explicitly “decommissioning” the “countless” vehicles of privilege that constitute the institutions of the academy, and changing the “iconography,” the symbolic economy, upon which scholarly knowledge was founded. It is with these questions and debates in mind that we have set upon several initiatives that we hope will spearhead the capacity of the ASR to contribute to the decolonization of Africanist knowledge production.

Access to the ASR on the African continent has been forefront in the minds of the editors for many years. Over the past decade or more, a number of initiatives—public, non-profit, and public/private partnerships—have sought to increase digital access, increase bandwidth, and sponsor digital journal licensing, with various degrees of success. While there are still a number of countries and tertiary institutions that suffer from poor, irregular, or nonexistent digital access to the ASR and other Africanist journals...