HUMA African Epistemologies Advanced Seminar Series

Speaker: Prof. Suren Pillay, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town

Introduction: This paper reflects on an aspect of debates on the making of a postapartheid university. It outlines how universities are grappling on the one hand with a need to transform the racial character of the apartheid university, which is described as demographic justice, and on the other hand, the need to decolonize the knowledge, which is described as epistemic justice. Another way to put it would be to describe a tension between deracialization and decolonization as political objectives and the epistemic orientation of the university.  It explores the tension between these two objectives in relation to notions of justice and equality, and pan Africanism. It argues for universities being afforded a degree of autonomy to navigate the space between legal justice that addresses demographic inequities, and political justice which addresses epistemic inequalities, calibrated by the political objective of undoing Eurocentric legacies. To do so, the paper argues that the notion of historically disadvantaged individuals, which currently calibrates the grounds of justice claims,  be expanded in the university to incorporate epistemic justice.

About the speaker: Suren Pillay is the  A C Jordan Chair, Director of African Studies and Linguistics, and the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on political violence, citizenship and justice claims; and the politics of knowledge production, and intellectual history. His publications have been concerned with the political and intellectual legacies of colonialism in the present. He is the principal investigator of the Mellon-funded project, Other Universals: Thinking About Politics and Aesthetics from Postcolonial Locations. Before joining UCT in 2023 he was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, a DST-NRF flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities at the University of the Western Cape.  Pillay’s most recent edited volume is  On the Subject of Citizenship, Late Colonialism in the World Today (Bloomsbury Press: New York 2023). With Chandra Sriram, he is co-editor of the book,  Truth vs Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa (London: James Currey and Natal: UKZN Press 2011) He holds an  MPhil and a  PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York. He is a previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, and a current editor of the journals Transformation, and Postcolonial Studies.  He is a board member of the Program for African Social Research (PASR). He has held visiting fellowships and professorships at Columbia University, The Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, Makerere University, Uganda, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

 

Convenor: Dr. Sanya Osha

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