African Intellectuals and Decolonization takes on an enormous and important set of issues. Citing the work of Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong'o as inspiration, editor Nicholas Creary opens this book with an introduction that decries the state of current scholarship on Africa. He argues that long after achieving political independence, African people continue to be stereotyped and dehumanized in academic literature as well as popular representations more broadly. Accordingly, he asserts, a new movement to decolonize the production of knowledge about Africa is in order. This edited volume seeks to contribute to such an effort in two ways: first, by helping to erode negative portraits of African backwardness; and, second, by promoting the development of Afro-centric categories of analysis rooted in African rather than Western experiences. To this end, the book brings together nine chapters by American and Africa-based scholars in fields ranging from literature and media studies to art history and philosophy. These contributions are divided into three sections, which respectively deal with representations of African decolonization, struggles to decolonize African public spheres, and the challenges of decolonizing knowledge about Africa.
Unfortunately, African Intellectuals and Decolonization's overly expansive mission and uneven quality significantly compromise its ability to stage a meaningful intervention. One of the book's key problems begins with Creary's premise, also adopted by a number of the volume's contributors, that ‘the binary opposition of a primitive or traditional Africa to a modern or enlightened West’ (p. 2) is still a conspicuous feature of scholarship on Africa as a generalized whole. This position ignores decades of thoughtful, pioneering study by historians, anthropologists, literary theorists, and others who have directly challenged precisely such sorts of reductive assumptions through their research and writing. Certainly, lingering racism and unsupported insinuations of African inferiority continue to characterize a sizeable amount of academic literature. However, African Intellectuals and Decolonization often neglects to specify the precise ways in which these troubling tendencies are manifested or concealed. For these reasons, the introduction and many chapters run the risk of duplicating prior work and miss an opportunity to further their stated aims through careful engagement with recent literature in their respective areas of focus.
In some ways, African Intellectuals and Decolonization's shortcomings reflect the inherent limitations of the format of the edited volume itself. Though the book aspires to model novel, emancipatory analysis of African realities, each contributor has little space in which to accomplish such a goal. A propensity for treating ‘Africa’ as an undifferentiated monolith (and thereby reproducing the homogenizing Western gaze that is being condemned) compounds this problem in chapters on Malcolm X's conception of African liberation, Western media discourses about Africa, and contemporary African philosophy. By contrast, two chapters stand out for their more rigorous and illuminating consideration of distinct case studies. Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton examine recent debates about the role of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians in determining the terms and parameters of public deliberation in post-apartheid South Africa. They question the analytical utility of conventional concepts of democratic citizenship and the public sphere in this context, proposing a new category of the ‘orchestrated public’ that mediates between understandings of the public as an entity wholly independent of or entirely dependent on the media for its shape and existence. Oyérónké Oyĕwùmí, in turn, investigates the intertwined domains of motherhood and artistic production in precolonial Yoruba society. In a condensed version of the argument contained in her earlier published work, she contends that art historians have projected Western notions of gender onto Yoruba sculpture, whereas craftsmanship and reproduction were not explicitly gendered activities in Yoruba culture. These chapters constitute informed attempts at genuine theoretical innovation that come closest to realizing the lofty goals of the volume.
There is much room for reflexive critique within the field of African studies and African Intellectuals and Decolonization should be commended for frankly broaching – if not fully exploring – one topic particularly worthy of future study. This concerns the ongoing institutional and infrastructural conditions that amplify the voices of North American and European scholars while marginalizing the perspectives of scholars based on the African continent. The lack of funding for research in African universities and the insularity of the academic publishing industry are two obvious factors that account for this pronounced lopsidedness, yet few in the Western academy have taken up serious studies of these matters. If this edited volume helps to inspire such inquiry, it will have indirectly succeeded in making a valuable intellectual and political contribution.
