Amrita Pande, Ruchi Chaturvedi, and Shari Daya, eds. Epistemic Justice and the Post-Colonial University. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2023. 264 pp. ZAR 370.00. ISBN: 9781776147847.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: At the height of the ongoing debate across the Global South on decoloniality, two fundamental conceptual and methodological questions are raised: (1) How has the enduring legacy of colonialism shaped knowledge production processes within the University of Cape Town (UCT); and (2) How can the postcolonial UCT be decolonized?One caters for the past and the other for the future.In response, a book titled Epistemic Justice and the Post-Colonial University that brings together a plurality of scholarly contributions, compelling insights, historical experiences, and decolonial perspectives from alumni and established scholars based at the institution is born.Anchored in interdisciplinary approaches combining history, arts, political science, gender, geography, and philosophy, the nexus between power and knowledge within the institution is historicized, conceptualized, problematized, and interrogated.Collectively identified by the authors as epistemic violence, the book sets off to rescue UCT from the shackles of coloniality by contextualizing and aligning the discussions within the liberation lens of decoloniality.It critiques how African local and indigenous knowledge has been systematically marginalized, dismissed, or misrepresented at the institution.In ten chapters, the authors surgically examine and navigate the historical conception and institutionalization of racial inequality, epistemological violence, and prejudice over time, and how this has since entrenched and perpetuated epistemic injustice in postcolonial UCT.Authors are preoccupied with the critical issue of how to write "our selves" back into history as they wrestle and tackle head-on the significant problem of decolonizing knowledge at UCT amidst the prevailing power contestations and historical epistemic injustice.The first part ("Aesthetics, Politics and Language") constitutes four chapters, which form the conceptual and methodological framing of the book.This part de-reifies the university environment as a small silo incapable of producing a plurality of lived experiences.Part Two ("Justice, Curriculum and the Classroom") delves into the theoretical limitations of the Eurocentric lens in explaining and understanding the South African context and experience (and the African continent in general).Drawing on theories from the disciplines of psychology, law, and the conventional set-up of the classroom, the authors expose the glaring difference between theory and practice intrinsic to the curricula offered at UCT.Part Three ("Contested Histories and Ethical Spaces") provides us with a vivid image of deep-rooted and institutionalized racism, power contestations/dynamics and
Source: African Studies Review
DOI: 10.1017/asr.2024.203
Author: Robert Birungi
Institution: Makerere University
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404867379