Theme: 8. Negotiating Margins: Power, Agencies, Representations, Resistances

Exportable Epistemologies?: Reconsidering colonial and postcolonial epistemes framing Africa and Asia as margins

Roundtable Convenor(s)

• AK

  Aditya Kiran Kakati

  International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Netherlands

Roundtable Discussant(s)

• LA

  Lloyd Amoah

  University of Ghana, Centre for Asian Studies, Ghana

Roundtable Participant(s)

• MV

  Meera Venkatachalam

  International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Netherlands
• LZ

  Ling Zhang

  International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Netherlands
• SS

  Shobana Shankar

  Stony Brook University, United States
• NB

  Ned Bertz

  University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States
• BB

  Beshouy Botros

  Yale University, United States

Asia and Africa share deeply intertwined colonial and postcolonial trajectories, shaped by anti-imperial struggles and historical moments of transnational solidarity. On the one hand, longstanding colonial-era legacies that enshrined modalities of governance, bordering, ethno-racial othering, violence, and resource extraction marked “exportable” modalities from one region to another. Knowledge production through African and Asian studies, anthropology, bureaucracy, and techno-cratic structures, among other modalities, enshrined paradigms and lifeworlds with continuing legacies that generate and perpetuate different forms of marginalization.

With these shared genealogies, both regions continue to contend with enduring forms of postcolonial “colonial” formations and new neo-liberal imperial projects — manifest among other ways in politicized identity constructions, ethno-national tensions, and uneven development and the politics of aid, diplomacy, and international finance. These conditions are further complicated by emerging South-South dynamics, notably the expanding economic and extractive footprints of India and China across the African continent—raising urgent questions about how extraction, profit, and development circulate within the Global South.

This panel invites engagement with the politics of knowledge production and the epistemological frameworks through which Asia and Africa are theorized beyond the dominant vantage point of the Global North. It seeks to foreground alternative Global Asian perspectives as critical sites for rethinking postcolonial entanglements while also interrogating the terms and locations from which knowledge is generated. Speakers will reflect on alternative (and often circulating) epistemologies and conceptual framings —such as race, religion, nationalism, diasporic connections, solidarity movements, Third Worldism, frontiers, extractive economies, and visual/popular culture—to interrogate how imperial logics continue to reverberate across postcolonial Asian and African contexts and entanglements. At the same time, it asks how circulatory, transregional, and otherwise marginalized epistemologies might unsettle the dominant binaries of North and South, and foreground alternative ways of theorizing, relating, and imagining solidarity across Global South spaces.

How can the legacies of framing Africa and Asia through colonial epistemologies be untethered —alongside alternative modes and terminologies of theorizing—for critical dialogue with African, Asian, and broader South-South connections?