Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper contributes to discussions on academic freedom by bringing in Afro-Asia conversations that stem from efforts to address issues of imperial knowledge system structuring the sense that ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ are separate regions/categories/units and distant from one another.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to discussions on academic freedom in Africa and African studies by bringing in Afro-Asia conversations that stem from efforts to address issues of imperial knowledge system structuring the sense that ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ are separate regions/categories/units and distant from one another. Afro-Asian conversations help reframe the questions posed by the panel convenors in explicitly political terms, i.e. as questions of suppressed liberation and right to self-determination. Drawing from two recent Afro-Asia conversations I have been part of, one with a group of feminist Asian and Asian American studies scholars on the question of deimperialising knowledge system, and the other in the UN human rights space for Asia-Pacific as part of the UN International Decade for People of African Descent, I argue Afro-Asia conversations help make visible how deadly domination (that justifies or sustains power asymmetries) is thoroughly naturalised. I ask, what does it take to exercise freedom, to think, to learn sovereignly and to act as a critical voice in societies when academic practices, language and structure are themselves what compose the western imperial knowledge system that is a condition both in Asia and the Pacific as well as in Africa? What does it mean when we say independent thought is imperative when this independence is already a lost memory for each generation of new university entrants even prior to their entry when their genealogies of birth are tied to out- and in-group oppressions due to their status as ‘the weak’?