Predicaments of Knowledge: Decolonisation and Deracialisation in Universities

Reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects that explore the pitfalls and possibilities that face South African universities and a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge.

Predicaments of Knowledge explores the difficult questions South African universities face after apartheid: Is there a difference between Africanising a university and decolonising a university? Or between deracialising and decolonising curricula taught at universities across disciplines? 

Through a range of reflections on race, language, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge projects this book clarifies the pitfalls and possibilities that face a post-apartheid generation inventing the future of knowledge. 

Current plans to ‘decolonise’ the university after apartheid often conflate three distinct but equally important imperatives: decolonisation, deracialisation and Africanisation. These distinction between decolonisation and deracialisation is sometimes conflated in the political demands put to universities as well. By parsing out the distinction between decolonisation, deracialisation and Africanisation Suren Pillay emphasises all three as important but distinct imperatives.  

Drawing on more than two and half decades of the author’s participation in these debates, the essays gathered here are to be read as ‘interventions’ in a larger living debate. They elucidate what our predicaments might be rather than foreclose debate or solutions and are dialogical in spirit even when occasionally polemical in tone. They self-consciously seek to be in conversation with prior continental African and Latin American experiences, as well as offer reflections on current South African debates.