George Hull: The road to epistemic unfreedom

HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: George Hull (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 

Introduction: In a series of influential books, Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has advocated decoloniality as a means of achieving epistemic freedom in Africa. Decoloniality is a distinctive theoretical approach to intellectual decolonisation. It combines a structural account of global power relations with an ascription of relative truth to discrete, possibly incommensurable, geographically labelled ‘knowledge systems’. Compared with other approaches to intellectual decolonisation, decoloniality has marked weaknesses: it deploys simultaneously two irreconcilable forms of standpoint epistemology, and it renders itself unable to condemn abhorrent colonial-era beliefs as false – classing them instead as ‘true in parenthesis’. I argue that Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s version of decoloniality does not advance justice or freedom for people considered in their capacity as knowers. Quite the reverse. By tying ‘knowledges’ so tightly to regional group identities, Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s theory normalises stereotype-based epistemic wrongs and tends to undermine thinkers’ freedom to draw on as wide a range of conceptual and theoretical resources as they see fit. Rather than being liberatory, I propose that a theory of this kind plays a legitimising role in the trend towards civilisational populism in global politics.

About the speaker: George Hull is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. He has taught widely in the areas of the philosophy of race, political philosophy, ethics and German idealism. With a significant interest in public policy, Dr Hull is a researcher for the UCT Poverty and Inequality Initiative. He also holds a Y1 rating from South Africa's National Research Foundation (NRF). In 2019, Dr Hull was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Fellowship. Dr Hull has edited a number of books, including Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy (Routledge, 2019) and The Equal Society (Lexington Books, 2015). Some of his more recent academic publications include Some of the Pitfalls of Decoloniality Theory, Race, Racialisation and Colour-Caste: Neville Alexander’s Contribution to the Philosophy of Race, and The Thinker: A Pan-African Quarterly for Thought Leaders.