The Decolonial Mandela

A significant contribution to the emerging literature on decolonial studies, this concise and forcefully argued volume lays out a groundbreaking interpretation of the “Mandela phenomenon.” Contrary to a neoliberal social model that privileges adversarial criminal justice and a rationalistic approach to war making, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni identifies transformative political justice and a reimagined social order as key features of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Mandela is understood here as an exemplar of decolonial humanism, one who embodied the idea of survivor’s justice and held up reconciliation and racial harmony as essential for transcending colonial modes of thought.

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Tapping into the deep and expansive legacy of Madiba's life of struggle, Busani Ngcaweni and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni's book, through an impressive and careful assemblage of a mixture of academics, activists and those who worked closely with him, skilfully and empirically demonstrate how Mandela embodied a rare type of leadership that is current missing in many parts of the world. The book displays a deep longing for ethical, committed, humanistic, decolonial and innovative, original and responsive leadership that Mandela's life of struggle and presidency represented.

The Routledge Handbook on Africana Criminologies plugs a gaping hole in criminological literature, which remains dominated by work on Europe and settler-colonial locations at the expense of neocolonial locations and at a huge cost to the discipline that remains relatively underdeveloped. It is well known that criminology is thriving in Europe and settler-colonial locations while people of African descent remain marginalized in the discipline. This handbook therefore defines and explores this field within criminology, moving away from the colonialist approach of offering administrative criminology about policing, courts, and prisons and making a case for decolonizing the wider discipline. Arranged in five parts, it outlines Africana criminologies, maps its emergence, and addresses key themes such as slavery, colonialism, and apartheid as crimes against humanity; critiques of imperialist reason; Africana cultural criminology; and theories of law enforcement and Africana people. Coalescing a diverse range of voices from Africa and the diaspora, the handbook explores outside Eurocentric canons in order to learn from the experiences, struggles, and contributions of people of African descent. Offering innovative ways of theorizing and explaining the criminological crises that face Africa and the entire world with the view of contributing to a more humane world, this groundbreaking handbook is essential reading for criminologists and sociologists worldwide, as well as scholars of Africana studies and African studies.

Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa’s subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author’s sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

For too long feminism and multiculturalism have been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. However, in this manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be handmaidens of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism and fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women's bodies.Attuned to the temporalities of contemporary struggles, the book incorporates issues such as Eurocentrism, whiteness, power, inclusion and exclusion, within feminist discourse. Throughout we touch upon feminist and anti-racist histories, as well as assessing contemporary activism, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike.Centring colonialism and imperialism within intersectional Marxism, this is an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa’s struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation? This edited volume brings together the best minds in curriculum theory to address this important question. In the process, several critical questions are raised: Is decolonisation simply a slogan for addressing other pressing concerns on campuses and in society? What is the colonial legacy with respect to curriculum and can it be undone? How is the project of curriculum decolonisation similar to or different from the quest for postcolonial knowledge, indigenous knowledge or a critical theory of knowledge? What does decolonisation mean in a digital age where relationships between knowledge and power are shifting? The book combines strong conceptual analyses with novel case studies of attempts to ‘do decolonisation’ in settings as diverse as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Mauritius. Such a comparative perspective enables reasonable judgements to be made about the prospects for institutional take-up within the curriculum of century-old universities.

In this book the author examines the current state of postcolonial Africa with a focus on the "liberation predicament" and the crisis of epistemological, cultural, economic, and political dependence created by colonialism and coloniality.

DIVAn analysis of Western attitudes toward war from a subaltern perspective that brings new insights into Western philosophical paradigms. /div

No longer content to fade away into comfortable retirement, a growing number of former political leaders have pursued diplomatic afterlives. From Nelson Mandela to Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, to Tony Blair and Mikhail Gorbachev, this set of highly-empowered individuals increasingly try to make a difference on the global stage by capitalizing on their free-lance celebrity status while at the same time building on their embedded ?club? attributes and connections. In this fascinating book, Andrew F. Cooper provides the first in-depth study of the motivations, methods, and contributions made by these former leaders as they take on new responsibilities beyond service to their national states. While this growing trend may be open to accusations of mixing public goods with private material gain, or personal quests to rehabilitate political image, it must ? he argues ? be taken seriously as a compelling indication of the political climate, in which powerful individuals can operate outside of established state structures. As Cooper ably shows, there are benefits to be reaped from this new normative entrepreneurism, but its range and impact nonetheless raise legitimate concerns about the privileging of unaccountable authority. Mixing big picture context and illustrative snapshots, Diplomatic Afterlives offers an illuminating analysis of the influence and the pitfalls of this highly visible but under-scrutinized phenomenon in world politics.