Africa: Decolonizing Knowledge

The European colonization of Africa meant the plundering and destruction of its populations’ ways of life, but also a process of cultural dispossession and the imposition of ideas, categories and ways of knowing. In her studies, sociologist and activist Oyèrónké Oyewùmí highlights the privileged role that European conceptual frameworks continue to play in defining the world today and calls for the need to de-universalize knowledge and to explain Africa to the world from an African viewpoint, using its own categories and interpretations.

Using examples present today in African societies, Oyewùmí will analyse the links that exist between the categories of gender and race, coloniality and knowledge, to ask what Eurocentrism is, what role it plays in our way of understanding the world, and the challenges represented by the decolonization of knowledge.

The session will a pedagogical dossier (in Catalan) so that the students can work on the contents beforehand in the classroom and thus make the most out of the lecture.