Ecologies of Knowledge in Global Africa
Inaugural IssueAbstract
De-colonial turn in the politics of knowledge production, and particularly the knowledge production in Africa, still begs for the re-examination of the discourses of power and sources of knowledge production. This article revisits the power-knowledge politics debate by elucidating how archives acquire power and the politics that are involved in knowledge production using the archive. It teases out the power and politics of the archive in the context of the quest of decolonisation of knowledge production and to ask whether it is possible to decolonise the archive. In that the article provides a critique of archive not only as a site of production of historical knowledge but also as a site of the production of power in what is termed as the ‘discourse of power’.
Introduction
The recent call to decolonize academia challenges existing parameters to gauge authenticity of knowledge, its producers and sources used in production which to a larger extent have pushed the Global South and Africa to the margins of knowledge1production in the world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020; 2018; Pillay 2024; Thondhlana & Garwe 2021). This article contributes to this unfolding debate by revisiting the knowledge power debate (Foucault 2000; 1980). In this it examines one source of knowledge production – the archive – by elucidating how archives acquire power and the politics that are involved in knowledge production using the archive (Derrida 1998; Pell 2015). The goal is to tease out the power and politics of the archive in the context of the quest of decolonisation of knowledge production and to ask whether it is possible to decolonise the archive. This is imperative since, Pell argues, “critical work emerging from archival and cultural studies has emphasized the archive’s social and political role in ordering knowledge, establishing criteria for credibility, and anchoring claims to authority and truth” (2015: 35).
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