Introduction to this Issue
The MISR Review 7 focuses mainly on Political Studies and has two parts. The first part contains selected essays produced by graduate students who participated in the 2024 Political Studies Institute organised under the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project titled Decolonisation, the Disciplines and the University. These papers were selected from a broader pool of students who participated to the 2023 Political Studies Workshop, together with post-doctoral fellows and faculty members. Participants to these events are affiliated with the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, and the Ifriqiyya Colloquium at Columbia University.
The Decolonisation, the Disciplines and the University project is organised around three broad disciplinary fields: Political Studies, Historical Studies, and Cultural Studies. The Political Studies section of the project reflected in this publication addresses questions of decolonisation of the political from various post-colonial locations that differ in cultural traditions of thought, but share the experience of colonialism’s afterlife. Chief among its tasks is the challenge to the (post)colonial understanding of the political, to how it is approached and from which cultural traditions, as well as the attempt to rethink it.
Ahana Chakrabarti’s paper entitled Examining the “Political”: Indian Citizenship and Colonialism draws from post-colonial political theory, especially Mahmood Mamdani’s work on the modern production of permanent majorities and minorities. Tracing the roots of contemporary Indian debates and practices about citizenship to the modernist logic of the nation-state that characterised British rule, her paper demonstrates the continuing theoretical and political significance of this legacy which weaponised religion as the basis of majority/minority divisions in South East Asia. Drawing from local sources during colonial times and after political independence through the lens of intellectual history, two other papers explore the decolonising potential of political proposals in Nigeria and Uganda, while keeping in focus the critique of inherited colonial models of political community and citizenship in post-colonial times.
Tosin Orimolade’s paper Taming Ethnicity: Azikiwe, Ironsi and the Prospects for a De-Ethnicized Nigerian Federation analyses the political proposals of Nnamdi Azikiwe in the 1940s and Aguiyi Ironsi in the 1960s that sought to respond to the colonial legacy of ethnicity and regionalism by articulating a residency-based alternative to an identity-based model of citizenship. The paper argues that, by remaining anchored to the logic of identity and fragmentation, these proposals failed to address the core problem of the colonial model they sought to challenge: the nation-state. As such, they missed an opportunity to develop a different understanding of the political based on the potential offered by alternative conceptualizations of membership.
In his Colonial Power and Nationalists’ Postcolonial Political Imagination in Uganda: I.K. Musazi, Eridadi Mulira and Abu Mayanja, Adventino Banjwa too highlights missed decolonising opportunities in post-colonial developments. Through a focus on nationalist political thought that characterised the intellectual landscape of pre-independence Uganda, his paper reflects on responses to the colonial legacy and the imagination of possible alternatives, particularly on the question of federalism. The argument put forward is that the general embracing of colonial categories informing post-colonial federalist models in nationalist thought was not inevitable and that alternative, and potentially decolonising, models of political community and citizenship were offered, especially in the work of Abu Mayanja.
Questioning the modernist framing of the political in post-colonial urban politics in Senegal, Aude Tourney’s Art, Public Space, and The Reshaping of Urban Politics in Dakar adopts Lefebvrian aesthetic and spatial lenses to reflect on the decolonising limits and possibilities of two artistic models and practices: Leopold Senghor’s Négritude and the situationist Laboratoire Agit’ Art collective. Through a critique of Négritude and a valuation of the Laboratoire, the paper highlights the important role that art plays and can play in constituting the political. By producing different perceptions of public space and of possible practices about inhabiting it from below, the Laboratoire, the paper argues, offered a model of participation and (re)definition of the political with a powerful decolonising potential.
The last paper by Umar Sheikh Tahir, entitled The Identity of Sub-Saharan Clerics in the Face of Postcolonial State Formation: Reclaiming Medieval Islamic Traditions, pursues the challenge of the colonial model of the political through an intellectual history of Arabic Archives in West Africa. Focusing on the work of pre-colonial Islamic African thinkers, the paper argues that paying close attention to the Arabic Archive of this region is essential to unearth the epistemic violence against Sub-Saharan Islamic traditions, a violence that was instrumental to post-colonial state and political identity formation. By exposing the structural exclusion of Islam from such a formation, the paper brings to light the anti-Muslim character of the colonial understanding of the political in West Africa.
The significance for debates on the decolonisation of political studies ensuing from these papers is both substantive and methodological. Substantively, all the papers identify the nation-state as the model political community that is at the core of the understanding of the political in need of decolonisation. One contribution also enlarges the understanding of what can go under the political, pointing beyond institutions and political identity and towards questions of public space and sensibilities. Methodologically, the papers mobilise critical approaches from political theory, intellectual history, art criticism and political geography that enrich and deepen the repertoire of relevant modes of polit-ical reflection, emphasising the importance of historical, cultural and aesthetic sensibilities as key to articulations of new political imaginaries.
They convincingly demonstrate that the decolonisation of political studies requires both critical and imaginative engagements that detect problematic continuities with the colonial legacy but also experiment with new forms of world making, by exploring unrealised possibilities, excluded traditions or interrupted paths. An important implication that ensues from some of the reflections offered is that doing decolonisation work from excluded pre-colonial traditions, and through the sensible register, might further contribute to de-authorise the epistemic grip of the colonial library, which still holds a normative function over many approaches from within the social sciences that, while critical of it, remain attached to its cognitive ways of theorizing.
The absence, in these papers, of gender-sensible lenses, of a more specific identification of historical subjects, and of critical stances toward the secular, and thus the culturally Christian substratum of the modern colonial understanding of the political, does not diminish their relevance to a thorough decolonisation of political studies.
The second part of the MISR Review 7 includes papers from faculty members who have participated in various disciplinary workshops organised under the Decolonisation, the Disciplines and the University project over the years 2019-2024.
Chika Mba's The Challenges of Decolonising Philosophy in Africa: Ibadan and Legon as Case Study offers an insightful exploration of the challenges of decolonising philosophy in Africa through an analysis of two case studies in Ghana and Nigeria. Raising important questions about what can go under the terms of African Philosophy and Philosophy in Africa, the paper shows that post-independence critiques of Eurocentrism and Africanisation of the curriculum have opened a space for a place-based philosophical inquiry. This inquiry, however, cannot be immediately equated with the decolonisation of the discipline, which is often adopted in its colonised form.
Cyrelene Amoah-Boampong’s Decolonization and the Discipline of History at the University of Ghana echoes this lack of decolonisation, yet within the discipline of history. By tracing how African History was progressively included in the history curriculum at the University of Ghana since 1960, her paper shows how the post-independence decolonization thrust in shifting the approach to History was eventually won over by neoliberal forces and corporate models of higher education. Similar ‘failures’ of decolonisation, this time within the discipline of political studies, are pointed out by the two remaining papers.
Maidul Islam’s Decolonization and Discipline: Contrasting Research Agenda of Political Scientists at Calcutta and Pune Universities, 1940s–1970s reflects on the decolonization potential of approaches in political science in India. The main argument put forward is that Indian political science’s epistemological dependence on Euro-American methodologies and assumptions impeded the development of critical approaches that could decolonise political studies in such context.
Reflecting on analogous limitations, Samson Bezabeh’s Decolonizing Ethiopian Studies: Political Transitions and Western Forms of Knowledge, carefully articulates four problems affecting dominant social sciences’ understandings of political transitions in Ethiopian political studies that are theoretically and methodologically grounded in Western secular epistemology. What emerges from his paper is that these problems negatively impact the decolonisation of Ethiopian political studies, a decolonisation that might not be possible from within approaches that exclude or do not take as relevant non-secular perspectives.
While painting a discomforting picture of recent and less recent decolonisation attempts in post-colonial philosophical, historical and political studies, these papers highlight important matters. First, decolonisation efforts occur under the same structures of power they seeks to dismantle and thus there are limits to their ability to break from them, institutionally and epistemically. Second, much of the language and frameworks of the social sciences, however critically used, remain confined to secular, disembodied, and not universally relevant models of knowledge that epistemically disqualify non-secular alternatives. As a result, there are serious limits regarding the extent to which decolonisation within universities can take seriously indigenous, religious and precolonial traditions in their own terms as sources of knowedge production, and not simply as objects of analyisis. Ultimately, the questions raised in these essays point to structural conditions of possibility of decolonisation struggles in higher education that strike at the very core of the nature of decolonisation, the disciplines and the university.
Andrea Cassatella | Partha Chatterjee | Mahmood Mamdani
May 2025