Decolonizing the Syllabus Bibliography

Abstract: “Through the vehicle of Nicolas Sarkozy’s so-called “Dakar Address,” we will analyze the West’s persisting lack of insight into the need for Western decolonization. We will attempt to identify the dangers that come from this refusal, such as the continued adherence to colonial patterns, the enduring self-understanding as being superior compared to Africa, and the persisting unwillingness to accept colonial guilt. Decolonization must be understood as a two-fold business. Decolonization means overcoming endured and perpetrated violence. It is not only important that the colonially oppressed regain strength, it is equally important that the perpetrators of colonial violence understand their excess of violence and work on rendering its return impossible. We explain how Western thinking remains dangerous and untrustworthy if it rejects its own decolonization. Finally, we will draw attention to a fundamental pattern of Western thought that clashes with the fundamental values of the West: contempt. In a final step, we suggest how this contempt can be overcome through desuperiorization and the establishment of elative ethics.”

From the abstract:. "We complement Maldonado-Torres’s account of the decolonial turn in philosophy, theory and critique by providing an analysis of the trajectories of academic philosophy and clarifying the relevance of decolonising philosophy and of the decolonial turn for current efforts in transforming philosophy in face of the challenges of social movements such as the Third World Liberation Front and Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and England."

From the abstract: "Mungwini underscores that philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work."

Abstract: “How do you respond when you read that the authors of the great philosophy books such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Marx you have studied for decades, and you want to teach to your students in the US or Africa regard you as pre-logical, irrational, or less than human just because of your race? What do you do when you discover that the very subject, philosophy, for which these white philosophers have been revered for centuries was basically developed by black philosophers of Ancient Egypt who shared their wisdom with their foreign students like Pythagoras and Socrates? Or what do you tell your students when you discover that the 1000s of ancient philosophical and scientific manuscripts associated with Aristotle’s name were “plundered” by Alexander the Great after he conquered ancient Egypt around 300 BC and given to his mentor, Aristotle, for his research and supervision in a library he founded for him at Alexandria, a city he named after himself still in Northern Egypt? What do you do when some of your own faculty and students suspect that as a black student or instructor you cannot study or teach philosophy? This chapter attempts to answer these and related questions by reflecting on the relevant philosophical and meta-philosophical literature in this domain and on the personal reflections of a black African student and (later) Professor named Kofi who has been studying, researching, and teaching in the US intermittently for almost three decades.”

Abstract: This article proposes that the study of non-Western philosophical traditions ought to include a critical awareness of the experience, impact, and legacy of colonialism. In this regard, Latin American philosophy offers us a key concept—the coloniality of power. It will be shown that coloniality enriches and complicates our understanding of both the history of Western and non-Western philosophies. More specifically, coloniality helps to clarify and answer the following questions: First, how was it that the discipline of philosophy came to be centrally understood as Western? And second, to what degree did the modern distinction between West and non-West affect our understanding and the formation of non-Western thought? Ultimately, the methodological upshot of coloniality for the study of non-Western philosophical traditions is that it focuses our attention on the epistemic violence that was part and parcel of colonialism and therefore it frames the study of non-Western philosophical thought within the practical project of decolonization.