Utu-centric Philo-Praxis:

Engaging with our common futures beyond the Anthropocene

Abstract

In this text, Cheikh Thiam starts from the postulation that even though the history of pan-African engagement has always been conscious of the necessity of an epistemic stance that underscores the need to “delink” from the pervasiveness of coloniality, specialists of Africana studies have too often created an imagined idea of Africa framed around its difference (or similarities) with the idea of Europe while they conceive of the African subject as a Black-way-of-being-White. Building on the decolonial Africana tradition, Thiam argues that a careful exegesis of African ontologies, epistemologies, and socio-political organizations founded on utu-centric worldviews offers an epistemic option that creates the possibility to think outside of the limits of the modernity/coloniality dialectic by providing us with a radically decentered epistemic framework. Such an endogenous and decolonial framework offers the possibility to engage differently with the idea and allows, in turn, a way to engage differently with some of the most critical issues that our world faces today, namely, “White Supremacy and environmental inequity pointed out by the recent outcry that followed the murder of George Floyd and the current COVID 19 pandemic