Learning Disobedience: a conversation with Patricia Daley & Amber Murrey-Ndewa

Note: Following an introductory post introducing the main themes for this forum, “Reckoning with Empire,” T.D. Harper-Shipman brings us a conversation between herself and Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey-Ndewa about the latter two scholars’ new book, Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (London: Pluto Press, 2023). Throughout this forum—much as in this post—Harper-Shipman will be interviewing “academics and activists who are thinking actively with and against empire from different vantage points.”

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Why did it feel important for you to use Africa as the particular site for charting decolonial cartographies of resistance?

Amber Murrey-Ndewa: A big part of writing this book collaboratively is that we wanted to be really clear about our specific locations and what our locations mean for the different knowledge and activist projects that we engage in. For us thinking and teaching critically involves constantly interrogating our particular situatedness at an institution—University of Oxford—and within the school of geography. Patricia and I are both thinking about our teaching and our different projects as being accountable to the communities where we do our research. So that's an opportunity for us to push back against so many tendencies in the dominant international development curricula. There's kind of a formula to how courses are put together to teach undergraduate students about what international development is. And that formula has actively silenced possibilities that have emerged from African societies.

Patricia Daley: I think for me there were two things. Location was really important, but also, the discipline of geography. A geography scholar named Clive Barnett did research around the origin of our discipline and the way in which the exploration of Africa was central to the institutionalization of geography as a discipline within British universities. Right? So the foundation of the discipline was based on the study of Africa, and yet within our discipline and within contemporary geography Africa was marginalized. It was marginalized as area studies, which obviously fell out of favor after the 1960s, because it was seen to be a-theoretical and just focused on empirics. There was an assumption, which goes back to the colonial era, that there was very little that could be learned from Africa that could be applied elsewhere. Therefore, many contemporary geographers ignore research that's being done in and on Africa, because they think there are no lessons they can learn from there.

A classic example for me is what they call austerity in the UK, which is like structural adjustment. If you really want to understand austerity, you need to look at structural adjustment in Latin America and in Africa, and yet UK scholars of austerity never draw the links. I always think relationally.  I wanted to look at those connections and to inform my students in the UK that Africa doesn't exist independent of our institutions, our way of life, and our economies.

The other reason was the decolonial project. There are all sorts of assumptions that the decolonial project started in Latin America. But, they forget that Africans have been using the  language of decoloniality. It’s a global South project, really.  African scholars, such as  Cheikh Anta Diop, Claude Ake, and Wamba dia Wamba, who's actually not given much credit but was a philosopher of great importance, have been doing decolonial work. I wanted to highlight their contributions and to show that Africans have been thinking about these things for some time; therefore,  the decolonial project isn't just something that's being imposed on Africans. So, I wanted to show that in our teaching and in our engagement with African scholars.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: Although you are both in Geography, the book exemplifies how learning disobedience also means rejecting what Lewis Gordon calls "disciplinary decadence". You draw on a breadth of scholarship from many disciplines, intellectual enterprises, and forms of knowledge production. How does reading across disciplines allow you to see the collated and insidious facets of coloniality as it manifests in development studies and practice?

Amber Murrey-Ndewa: I think this is such an exciting question. And I think it's one of the most significant questions that practitioners and scholar activists should be grappling with in our aspiration to contribute meaningfully and generatively to projects, to “decolonize knowledge.” And it is incredibly difficult to disentangle all of the nuances of how we think in certain ways from our disciplinary training. And I certainly include myself in that analysis. You’re citing Lewis Gordon, who, of course, has identified this tendency for us to think in ways—even critically—that merely reproduce our pre-existing categories and disciplinary patterns of thinking. And Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in Decolonizing Methodologies described the relationship between colonization and the disciplines: we have colonized the disciplines, and we have disciplined the colonized. We know this in the social sciences. So many of our disciplines emerged in tandem with projects of empire. Patricia mentioned the imperial origins of geography already, for example the violent exploratory projects of Halford Mackinder, upon which basis he founded the School of Geography at Oxford. His articulation of the discipline was precisely as a mode of knowledge extraction and accumulation intended to be in the service of the British Empire. Fast forward to the contemporary moment, when it's been truly fascinating to see all sorts of projects to decolonize knowledge—but so many of them remain within disciplines. So we have decolonizing anthropology, decolonizing feminist thought, and so forth, but what can piecemeal movements do but reiterate limited decolonization and change? That kind of transformation is incredibly difficult. We tried to contribute to these conversations in teaching and in writing this book, drawing from a plethora of different forms of knowledge and embracing forms of epistemic “disobedience.” But it might very likely all also be one of the limitations that our colleagues will level against us--that it is too capacious, that we have drawn too broadly, that perhaps we haven't been distinctive enough in terms of what is happening in geography. The implications of the continued disciplinary insistence in our frames of thinking have incredible significance for how larger struggles to decolonize knowledge will play out within and beyond the university.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: I appreciate the point you raise about the "white streaming" and misappropriation of decolonization, referring to it as an industry that traffics in DEI rhetoric under the guise of decolonization. Your version of decolonial theory departs from the DEI and decolonial industry in that it is situated in an abolitionist tradition. You call for the abolition of coloniality as it manifests within academic institutions and the development industry. How does this departure inform the pluriversal decolonial alternatives that you highlight in the book?

Patricia Daley: DEI or EDI [Equality, Diversity and Inclusion], as it is called in the UK, is a real problem. I think it is a necessary step, but it's not the solution to decolonizing the universities. It's necessary in that a diversity of faces are needed within the Academy. Many architects of EDI are happy to have a diversity of faces, but they don't want to have diversity of thought. They talk about giving space to local voices. But actually, those local voices are just faces repeating Eurocentric stuff. So for me, that is really problematic, because you can give local peoples their voices, but if they can only repeat what you want to say, how is that empowering? How is that decolonizing? How is that critiquing? How is that actually thinking? African scholars used to talk about forcing African realities through Western theoretical lens. And you see that all the time. And that's what happens in many African institutions. Even with the attempts to diversify, we don't get any change and that's why it's important to adopt an abolitionist platform and to think differently.

Amber Murrey-Ndewa: “White streaming” is a term that, to my knowledge, was first used by Sandy Grande, and in the context of the feminist movement that prioritize the positionalities and the interests of white middle-class women. There are incredibly important differences in the diversity, equity and inclusion and abolitionist traditions, and the key term for me is inclusion, which signals that this is not a transformative project. This is a project of expanding spaces, but the people who are included in those spaces are those who will not fundamentally upset the status quo. Or, that their cumulative presence will not fundamentally challenge the status quo. Sarah Ahmed's work on the brick wall of diversity and inclusion—in fact, so much important scholarship from feminists of color—has shown us that these projects are more about the maintenance of systems of power and further entrenching neoliberal and capitalist hegemonies in the name of allowing in a couple of new members. You can have individuals who press here and there, but the system itself remains intact. The Abolitionist tradition is a rejection of that model because it is a project of dismantling death-making structures. Abolition is a refusal to participate in those death-making structures, even in the name of inclusion. It’s therefore a life making project, a life-affirming project because we free up our labor, our energy, and our resources to give that attention to all of the alternatives. The abolition tradition is something that we try to emphasize with our students—the dual movement of critique and creation—and these have to be done in tandem.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: I am taken with your definition of the nation-state! On page 176, you write, " We here define the nation-state as a territorially 'imagined community' devised by elites to counter the potentially destabilizing effects of the inequalities generated by capitalist social relations". It was in-line with conceptualization of the nation-state that scholars like Dionne Brand, M. Jacqui Alexander, and David Theo Golberg (to name a few) offer that bind the formation and consolidation of the nation-state to the maturation and maintenance of capitalism. This is in contrast to many liberal (and sometimes radical) lamentations of neoliberalism's rolling back of the state and advocating for more state expansion as a solution to various social and economic crises. Can you say more about why you conceptualized the state in this way and its implications for where we turn for decolonial options and alliances?

Patricia Daley: It was really important for us to think about the State differently. Because the European nation-state model has been promoted globally – in Africa. We know it's problematic. And yet people continue to subscribe to it because they can't think of any alternatives. There’s been a critique of the nation State by African scholars, such as Patricia McFadden, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni, Francis Nymanjoh, and Mahmoud Mamdani.

When we were writing, we were trying to think about how to present the State differently. We wanted to expose its weaknesses, and also to think of an alternative. For us, then, a state is a political community, and here we draw on [Walter] Rodney’s work on social formations. People will decide on the form of self-governance that they want. They will decide on the appropriate form of political community and governance that suits their needs. When we started this chapter, we went back and read some of the work by African scholars on the State. We read all the literature on pre-colonial state formation, how people governed themselves in different ways, and what happened to the African state with the arrival of the slave trade and with colonialism.

We wanted to think about a definition of the State that didn't necessarily reflect the European model. The nation state is virtually a racist state. It's built on racial capitalism. I mean, that's not a new argument. So we need to think about another way of organizing politically and other forms of political community that take us away from the nation State. Listening to a talk by Mamdani when his book Neither Settler Nor Native was published, he was asked, “Well, how do you want us to think about the State beyond the Nation State?” And he said, “It's not for me to provide a solution. You guys can.” And we thought, how could we imagine a state beyond the nation state? Amber and I discussed this whilst considering various social formations - autonomous communities like maroonage, for example. People have been building autonomous communities independent of the State, even in Africa. Recently, I was just watching a video about a man-made island in the middle of Lake Victoria,  between Uganda and Kenya, where people have their own rules. They even have their own police station. They're much more equitable. And they're not racially stratified. If you tell people about communalism or caring for each other, they'll say, “Oh, that's Socialism”, or “that's Communism” – and  that's bad because those models have failed. We wanted to get people to think about a form of the State that has those basic African principles of communalism, of community care. They're documented historically everywhere across the continent., so we don't necessarily have to use the term Socialism and communism - something that is different based on Ubuntu principles.  We can imagine a state formation that involves looking after each other, careful caring for each other within a territory. It doesn't have to be bounded. It doesn't have to be huge.

So, what I am trying to say is that political communities have existed prior to the imposition of the colonial state and the idea of the nation state, making it possible to imagine alternative forms of the state.  Scholars like Samir Amin and others have discussed this. We don't need to be competitive. In the same way, we can prioritize the well-being of African citizens as opposed to prioritizing the well-being of the market and growth. So that's the sort/form of the state we are thinking about rather than abolishing the State per se. I don't think it's realistic nowadays to abandon the state, but we can think of a different form of the State.

Amber Murrey-Ndewa: Part of the potential of decolonial thought is to embolden ourselves to be transgressive with these taken for granted concepts that developed often in contexts of heteropatriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—and we do it with the nation state. We excavate the embedded forms of structural and militaristic violence that were the product of the post-colonial State in so many African societies, but then that has to be balanced with not a recovery, but a recognition of so many of the other different forms of relationship making and community building that already existed, but which development studies has just overlooked, or which are not even intelligible by their frames of analysis. These kinds of community and relation making are just systematically invisiblized. Pushing against that old refrain that we can't imagine outside of our systems; we can't imagine a world outside of capitalism, we can only imagine the end of the world. I think the State is really one of those epistemic domains that imaginatively traps us, as well. And, likely because, as Patricia said, this is because it has been so integral to racial capitalism. It is so challenging for our students, even for us, to imagine outside of its parameters. This book is an invitation to the readers to be intentionally disobedient to those forms of thinking.

Takiyah Harper-Shipman: There are many overlapping points of interest and reinforcement between your book and my own work. Understanding development as violent, imperialist, racists, heteronormative, and patriarchal feels both intuitive and imperative for those of us studying and writing about international development. What also feels urgent is unsettling the U.S. and Western countries as "developed" within our own scholarship. I think about Walter Rodney writing that “If ‘underdevelopment’ were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the U.S.A, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality” (1979, 14). In my current book project, looking at what I call colonial reproductive regimes and decolonial reproductive politics, I made an epistemological and methodological choice to include the U.S. alongside Senegal to dislodge the U.S. from its vaunted position as "developed". You make an important connection between trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism as twin racializing and dispossessing processes that constitute the material bases of coloniality. How does learning disobedience help us denounce U.S. and Western exceptionalism and the requisite binaries (traditional/modern; underdeveloped/developed; civilized;uncivilized) that sustain development and coloniality?

Patricia Daley: We have published a paper in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography called “Defiant Scholarship in Africa,” and one of the things we focused on was the need to promote more collaboration between what we see as an emerging body of scholarship in North America called black geographies and African geographies, because a part of the imperial project is to separate the two. Socially there's so much connection between people in the two spaces. What we wanted to do was to show the connections between our histories of race and histories of racism. They operate only slightly differently in Africa. The terms that were used to define enforced labour in Africa were very different.  Even if we were to just look at economic grounds, we can see that there are people in the U.S.A. who are far more impoverished than people in Africa. In many African countries people can rely on land. That's why land is so important. And that's why Liberal economists want to privatize land in Africa the same way that people were thrown off the land in Europe, in Britain during the enclosure movement. I think there's an attempt to do that as a way of supposedly igniting capitalism in Africa. And if we look at the economic insecurities in the nineteen eighties and nineties in Africa, people survived because they were able to grow food. They were able to do urban agriculture. They returned to their villages and got land and grew food. That is not always the case in North America, where you have real impoverishment and land dispossession.

In some instances, people in Africa are better off than the very poor in the US. But that's not seen. We’re interested in looking at the ways in which development operates, whereby slum housing in Africa is a real problem. It must be addressed through interventionist measures by the State and by a range of development actors. But homelessness in North America isn't treated in the same way. I want to always, you know, throw up those contradictions to say you can't be racist in the States and not be racist in Africa. In the U.S. you can be a racist, but when you go to Africa, you just become a development actor.

Amber Murrey-Ndewa: A chapter of the book looks at the relationship between capitalism and international development because international development oftentimes operates in such a way as to preserve and to stabilize a global capitalist system, often by presuming to address precisely inequality and impoverishment. This international development paradigm has been dominant, you know, for 65, 70 years now, and yet we haven't—by almost all measurements—seen greater global economic equality. We see that these economic inequalities have been exacerbated, both pockets of inequality and global levels of inequality during this period. How does this kind of world making continue to maintain its dominance even in the face of such astounding failures?

And it's through all sorts of processes of constantly reworking the various kinds of bits that go into the recipe--okay, now, we're going to attend to the grassroots. Okay, now we're going to add in, you know, women. Now we’re going to foster partnerships and diversify ownership—you know, Takiyah, how you show in your own book on Burkina. And then, now it's oh, we're going to not just add in women we're gonna zoom into, the girl child specifically. All of these are examples of how hegemonic developmentalist actors absorb the language and projects of their critics but within a slightly revised but lasting colonial and racist founding mythology. In their global circulation and implementation, each of these so-called ‘turns’ become prevailing forms of authoritFwd: MISS Interview Questionsative developmentalism. So many scholars—Arturo Escobar, Issa Shivji, Uma Kothari, Rosalba Icaza—talk about it as a seductive ideology.  Developmentalism seduces the people who believe in it much like a religious orientation. That's why the classroom is a battleground for really changing the world.

Bios:

 T.D. Haper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa, was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and Africa is a Country. During the 2023-2023 academic year, Harper-Shipman is a Fulbright Scholar in Senegal working on a project titled “Suturing Reproduction and the Nation: the politics of family planning in West Africa.” 

Patricia Daley is Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. Patricia’s research interests focus on forced migration and political violence in Eastern and Central Africa. She co-edited, with Elena  Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,  The Routledge Handbook on South-South Relations, and her most recent publication is co-authored with Amber Murrey (2023) and is entitled Learning Disobedience, Decolonizing Development Studies (Pluto Press).

 Amber Murrey-Ndewa is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and Associate Editor of the African Geographical Review. Her award-winning scholarship on political ecologies in Cameroon focuses on forms of what she calls ‘slow dissent’: community struggle and resistance amidst intergenerational and extractive violence. Amber is the co-author of Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies (2023) and editor of A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara (2018). She has held academic appointments at Jimma University in Ethiopia, the American University in Cairo, as well as Clark University and Boston College in the US. She is currently on a British Academy Wolfson Fellowship and living in Yaoundé, Cameroon for a project that looks at practices of anti-extractive scholarship, decolonial reciprocity, and understanding the varied roles of social scientists in natural resource extraction.