The decolonial turn(s) in African studies: The challenges of rewriting Africa

In the midst of a long series of turns in the humanities and social sciences, this article focuses solely on those that have been colonial, nationalist, Marxist, or postcolonial, as these have directly affected and shaped African studies. More often than not, the lengthy decolonial turn has been able, across time, to subsist within and even trouble these other turns as it continues to animate and galvanize struggles to liberate African studies from colonial imbrications and global imperial designs, from the straitjacket of “area studies,” and from the current global economy of knowledge with its uneven intellectual division of labor. This focus enables the unmasking not only of invisible epicolonial dynamics in African studies, but also of internal tensions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions in the rewriting of Africa as a decolonial process. What is offered in this article is a decolonial framework informed by the resurgent and insurgent decolonization of the twenty-first century and predicated on rethinking thinking itself in African studies and in the broader decolonial agenda of the rewriting of Africa by Africans.