Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds - Tapa dura

Highlights the need for syncretic knowledge systems which include knowledges, knowledge producers, and the intelligensia of the southern regions to be accepted as equals with those of the North. AFRICAN AFFAIRS

[This volume] should point the way for equity and inclusion in the context of seeing Africa-centered research and products on equal footing with Euro-centric and Afro-centric paradigms. AFRICAN & ASIAN STUDIES

The book thus contains a huge diversity of subject matter, which is drawn together by a common interrogation of dominant ways of knowing and a quest for holding open alternatives. . . . It is a book to be recommended to any reader interested in moving beyond the tired binaries of "western" versus "indigenous" knowledge. AFRICAN STUDIES QUARTERLY

Contains a rich assembly of ideas and observations. ANTIPODE

The book contains many valuable thoughts and quotable statements, including a note that Hegel believed that the great historical dialectic bypassed Africa altogether, as well as insights about the relation between epistemology and method, the freeing and inhibiting qualities of classification systems, and the potential danger of knowing. ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW DATABASE

highlights the need for syncretic knowledge systems which include knowledges, knowledge producers, and the intelligensia of the southern regions to be accepted as equals wiht those of the North. AFRICAN AFFAIRS

Knowledge production is a highly political and politicized practice. This book questions the way in which knowledge of and about Africa is produced and how this influences development policy and practice.
Rebutting both Euro- and Afrocentric production of knowledge, this collection proposes a multiple, global and dynamic Africa-centredness in which scholars use whatever concepts and research tools are most appropriate to the different African contexts in which they work. In the first part of the book key conceptual themes are raised and the epistemological foundations are laid through questions of gender, literature and popular music. Contributors in the second part apply and test these tools and concepts, examining the pressures on doctoral students in a South African university, the crisis in knowledge about declining marine fish populations, perplexities around why certain ICT provisions fail, or how some Zimbabwean students, despite being beset by poverty, succeed. The light thrown on the mechanics of how knowledge comes into being, and in whose interests, illuminates one of the key issues in African Studies.

Brenda Cooper is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She was for many years the Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the English department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor.
Robert Morrell is Coordinator of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity at the University of Cape Town.