Paper short abstract:

Building on 'defiant scholarship in Africa', we reflect on the potentials and ambiguities of collaborative decolonial solidarity praxis in fostering intellectual work that does not seek validation or legitimacy through capitalist and colonial epistemes in African and European universities.

Paper long abstract:

As a critical concept, ‘defiant scholarship in Africa’ (Daley and Murrey 2022) brings attention to the determined body of intellectual work that has long called out, deciphered, and rendered legible shifting and discordant colonial logics and articulated alternative approaches to knowledge creation founded upon anti-colonial solidarity (Beti 1972), decolonial feminism (Dieng 2021; Vergès 2021), rebellion (McKittrick 2021), indigenous worldmaking and the sacred (Nkwi 2017), conviviality and incompleteness (Nyamnjoh 2015b, 2021; Fokwang 2021), humility, ‘companionable connection’ (Gibson-Graham 2006), and more. We reflect on a three day writing workshop in Yaoundé, Cameroon inspired by 'Defiant Scholarship in Africa' during which a collective of scholars sought to think through and implement practices of decolonial solidarity against dominant writing and publishing formulas. Importantly, our collective began with a refusal of prevailing models of North/South writing workshops that too often commence from unspoken assumptions that there is a dearth of publishing know-how or skill in African settings that requires ‘correcting’. We rejected as untenable the neoliberal and corporate models of scholarly publication in Western universities. This includes the implicit or explicit ‘publish or perish’ approaches and their manifestations in African universities as ‘publish and perish’ (Nyamnjoh 2004: 331-335). Such approaches to hiring and retaining academic labour have resulted in excessive competition, exhaustion, desperation, plagiarism, and the theft of ideas—all of which are often unevenly racialised and gendered. We reflect on our ambitions to do more than replicate existing models for knowledge creation and offer reflections on our ongoing work to centre the plurality of projects breaking or delinking from established canons and orders of knowledge to open up possibilities for self-determination, liveable futures, and worldmaking otherwise.