Katherine Bruce-Lockhart & Jonathon L. Earle 
Decolonising State & Society in Uganda 
The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life

Key book on the debates surrounding the knowledge economy and decolonialization of African Studies, that brings the subject up to date for the 21st century.


Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #Rhodes Must Fall and #Black Lives Matter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

Tabla de materias

1. Introduction, by Edgar C. Taylor, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Jonathon L. Earle and Nakanyike Musisi

PART 1: FRAMING KNOWLEDGE

2. Decolonial Dilemmas and Burdened Epistemic Heritages in Names and Naming among the Bakiga, by Tushabe wa Tushabe

3. Poetic Violence? Intimate Understandings of Cattle Raiding in Karamoja, by David Eaton

4. Spirits of Difference: Religion, Healing, and Decolonisation in Acholi, by Letha Victor

5. Contested Freedoms: Human Rights, Decolonization, and Political Agency in Postcolonial Uganda, by Lydia Boyd

6. The First White Man to See the Nile: Decolonising History Education in Uganda, by Ashley L. Greene

PART 2: IMAGINING INSTITUTIONS

7. Militarism and the Dilemmas of Decolonising Knowledge in Uganda, by Moses Khisa

8. Institutional Knowledge and the Ugandan Public Service: From Colonialism and Neocolonialism to the New Public Service, by Genevieve Meyers

9. Local Knowledge and Knowledge of the ‘Locals’:The Political Ambivalence of Bureaucratic Knowledge in Uganda’s Villages, by Florence Brisset-Foucault

10. Coloniality and Power in Uganda’s Archives, by Riley Linebaugh and Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

11. Higher Art Education & New Initiatives in Kampala: Potentials and Problems of Decolonising Knowledge, by Margaret Nagawa and Fiona Siegenthaler

PART 3: MAKING PUBLICS

12. Repudiating a Liberal Framework for Political Accountability: The Politics of the Whole versus the Politics of the Party in Uganda in the 1940s, by Holly Hanson

13. Decolonising Citizenship and Identity Contestations: Revisiting the Historicity of the Indian Question in Uganda, by Asiimwe B. Godfrey

14. Liberation Ethnology: District Decolonialism, State Knowledge Production, and the Neoliberal Revolution in Uganda, by Adrian Browne

15. Finding Ourselves, Seeing Ourselves: Nationalism and Reclaiming Colonial Spaces in Uganda, by Daniel Kalinaki & Rebecca Rwakabukoza

16. Rudeness/Incivility as Political Strategy: The Poetics and Politics of Stella Nyanzi’s Facebook Work, by Danson Sylvester Kahyana

Sobre el autor

Danson Sylvester Kahyana is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at Makerere University. He edited Fire on the Mountain: Creative Work on the Obuhikira (2018) and co-edited As I Stood Dead Before the World: Creative Writing from Luzira (2018) and Discourse and Identities: Writing and Contemporary Eastern African Peripheral Subjectivities (2019).