Power-with and Power-to and Building Asian Studies in Africa: Insights from the Field

Abstract

Taking seriously Chinweizu’s (2004) call for Asian Studies in Africa this article examines how African Asianist scholars with their partners elsewhere decided to take counterhegemonic action, and how their approach differs from the status quo as a prefigurative politics of power with society they seek. This work explores the establishment of Centres for Asian Studies in Africa as institutional actors in the counter-hegemonic project of decolonization. The processes that led to the setting up of the Centre for Asian Studies (the first in Black Africa except South Africa) at the University of Ghana serve as a case study. The article utilizes information gathered through the authors’ ongoing participation over the last eight years in the ideational, organizational, logistical, financial and institution-building moves that are aiding the establishment of an ultimately emancipatory Asian Studies in Africa research framework. To establish the contextual challenge, the article engages discursively with how hegemony (power-over) functions within Global North/Western/modern research agendas, funding, and institutions; and explains how and why its colonial project is most evident in Area Studies in particular. The work concludes with pointers on how these moves for building Centres for Asian studies in Africa may be useful for other institutional intellectual decolonial efforts.