Decolonizing the Authority File

The file: agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy

This article develops an approach to contemporary governance as a communicative practice fundamentally organized by ‘‘graphic artifacts’’—materials such as files, maps, letters, reports, and office manuals. The empirical focus is the role of graphic artifacts in bureaucratic institutions in Islamabad, Pakistan. Departing from functionalist accounts of bureaucracy and from approaches to governme...

Decolonizing Bioethics in Africa

The global spread of bioethics from its North-American and European provenance to non-Western societies is currently raising some concerns. Part of the concern has to do with whether or not the exportation of bioethics in its full Western sense to developing non-Western states is an instance of ethical imperialism or bioethical neocolonialism. This paper attempts an exploration of this debate i...

Decolonizing German theory: an introduction

This special issue is concerned with German theory, which is to say, theory generated in German cultural and linguistic spaces, in the territories claimed by the various German states over time, and among German-speaking emigrants and refugees. ‘Theory’ is defined here to encompass the space shared by philosophy, social theory, and cultural theory*/the theory-space that is most relevant for the...

Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion

Indigenous Métissage: a decolonizing research sensibility