Robbie Shilliam, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London will give the inaugural Public Lecture at BSIS on Wednesday 8 October at 14.00. The title of the lecture is Decolonising Academia: Lessons from a Nineteenth Century Pan-Africanist.
It is 1850 and Edward Blyden, Pan-Africanist, church minister and educator, sails from St Thomas in the Danish West Indies to Liberia, a state established by the privately run American Colonization Society. In Liberia African-Americans, who have sought to return as freed persons to the continent, make new lives as colonisers of the indigenous peoples of the territories that make up the republic. It is 1880 and Blyden becomes president of Liberia College. His commencement address grapples with many of the abiding issues currently debated by critical scholars regarding knowledge, power and coloniality. Blyden the Pan-Africanist discusses how to decolonise knowledge with colonial tools; how to relate the knowledge systems of an elite academy to the living knowledge traditions of the indigenous peoples; and how to build ethical and practical relationships between the academy and the communities that surround it. Blyden’s context and his concerns are in many ways a microcosm of the global challenges that face those of us who wish to decolonise the Western academy in the here and now. What can we learn from Blyden? And what has (fundamentally) changed?
Shilliam is co-convener of BISA’s Colonial/Postcolonial/Decolonial Working Group, co-editor of the book series Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions (Rowman & Littlefield International), a correspondent of the Transnational Decolonial Institute, and advisor to a number of Black community organisations. His latest book, The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press), will be published in early 2015.
Registration: All Public Lectures are free to attend but registration is requested. Please register by sending an email to kentpubliclecture@gmail.com, stating your name and affiliation.
Further information about the lecture series is available on the Facebook site at https://www.facebook.com/kentpubliclecture?fref=nf