ABSTRACT
Part of being human is to be constituted in memory and knowledge ecologies. What happens to those racialised as black when both memory and knowledge ecologies are produced through the kernels of the ideology of European epistemicide? The corollary of epistemicide is to ask how Black Radical Thought challenges Kant’s racialised and racist categorical imperatives of knowledge hierarchies to achieve decolonisation in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter problematises contested ideas about decolonisation of the global social sciences and humanities for Africa’s thought liberation. I define decolonisation as a commitment to tap into the African intellectual archives located in the longer genealogy of agitations for Black freedom. In search of alternative knowledge ecologies, Black Radical theorists in the early and later 20th century provided counter-hegemonic discourses of Africa’s position in the knowledge ecology. Africa’s engagement with the world is not only defined by its encounter with European colonial modernity. Epistemicide was predicated on anti-black racism through the justification of trans-Atlantic slavery, social Darwinism, eugenics, and colonial cartography, whereby the African was mutilated in the ‘global knowledge ecology’. The chapter aims to recast the world of thought from the position of the subaltern through the dialectics of liberation while remaining cognizant of the contradictions that are present in the colonially informed global knowledge production regime. Three areas of inquiry are presented as critical paradigmatic interventions for decolonisation from the hegemony of Eurocentrism: philosophy, language, and literature.
