Decolonizing the University

Suren Pillay, Africa is a Country

This text is a transcription of a talk given at Azania House, Bremner Building, University of Cape Town, April 2015.

I want to thank you all for this wonderful invitation to be a part of the conversations you have been having here at UCT, and at Azania House. We, those outside your university, and at other universities, down the road and across the country, are watching with great enthusiasm and inspired by the courage and thoughtfulness with which you are conducting this moment of subversion. I have to say that I am in particular very encouraged by the connections you have made between subjections of different kinds, particularly two very neglected forms of subjection — in the sphere of knowledge production, and in the sphere of gender and sexuality. These are remarkable connections and the kind of leadership that is visible to those of us on the outside, shows a genuine effort to unsettle imperial hubris, but also patriarchal power relations.

Suren Pillay: Campaigning & Mobilising

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus

The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Dissensus by TigersEye99

Recolonising The Humanities?

Too many elite groups would have us stifle debate about academic freedom in the country

John Higgins, The Mail & Guardian

Academic debates can often be confusing for the general reader, and this is the case with some the arguments around academic freedom taken up in Suren Pillay’s recent Mail & Guardian article: “Decolonising the humanities” (Getting Ahead, April 5).

Decolonising the humanities

by Suren Pillay, Mail & Guardian

What does it mean to pursue critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in a settler colonial society trying to move beyond the category "settler" and "native" towards becoming the citizenry bequeathed to us by our political settlement?

This is the question all South African universities share, however differently they were marked by apartheid. Its urgency is fuelled partly by the daunting demographic anxiety the humanities and social sciences face because of declining enrolment and the very worrying reality that we do not produce enough graduate students, particularly black South African PhD graduates.

Marikana: The politics of law and order in post-apartheid South Africa

Suren Pillay

By Suren Pillay, Al Jazeera

With their pangas and machetes mixed with ethnic regalia, the striking mine workers at Marikana have become spectacularised. It is a stark reminder that the mine worker, a modern subject of capitalism, in these parts of the world is also the product of a colonial encounter. 

Many of us are trying to make sense of the massacre at Marikana through the obvious dire economic conditions, wage rates and inequality that these workers face. We must however also try to make sense of it through the lineages of law, order and the new configurations of politics emerging in post-apartheid South Africa. 

Humanitarianism and its Pitfalls

by Suren Pillay, Africa is a Country, September 2010

The World Cup had just ended, and there were stories in the newspapers, telling us that foreign nationals were going to be killed  as soon as the event was over. These stories immediately mobilized many of us in civil society, and it even mobilized the state into action. The army was deployed as a visible deterrent to prevent future attacks.

Thinking Africa from the Cape

by Suren Pillay, Thought Leader, 2011

Growing up in the Cape, we were taught that we were “Western”. How do we explain and undo this colonial sensibility? From my location at a university, there are two realisations from which to proceed. Firstly, the history of knowledge production, and the history of the organisation of knowledge — the ways we organise disciplines in this country — has a colonial and apartheid genealogy, and is dominated by Enlightenment thinking. We share this with the postcolonial world in the Middle East, in Asia and in Latin America. It is the post-independence inheritance of most of the formerly colonised world.