Africa-centred knowledges: Crossing fields and worlds
这本编辑卷强调南方知识体系应与北方平等，通过理论介绍和案例（如1995年北京世妇会中非洲代表关于生殖健康与健康议题的争论被忽视）展示如何跨越学科与地域界限。
This edited volume highlights the need for syncretic knowledge systems which include knowledges, knowledge producers, and the intelligensia of the southern regions to be accepted as equals with those of the North. The text contains a foreword and introduction followed by twelve short chapters in two parts, ‘Epistemology: Struggles over meaning’ and ‘Policy and Practice: Applying the Knowledge’. Together, these introduce the theory of Africa-centred knowledges and several ways in which fields can and should be crossed. This remains a critical and indeed political issue. In chapter 3 (‘Battlefields of Knowledge: Conceptions of Gender in Development Discourse’), Arnfred demonstrates that concerns raised by African delegates at the 1995 UN Beijing Platform for Action (PfA) conference over the precedence of reproductive health issues rather than health itself were dismissed by northern feminists, and grassroots discourse which was adopted by the conference delegates and used in the ensuing literatures has been hardened into development jargon which continues to whitewash these knowledges. The first two chapters provide an overview of the Eurocentric construction of classification systems for the natural and social sciences and deconstruct the universalist tendencies to achieve a better ‘sociology of knowledge’ as Crain Soudien notes in the Foreword (p. xvi). They also comprise a most useful literature review. The editors’ dismissal of ‘Afrocentric’ knowledges in favour of ‘Africa-Centred’, because it ‘refuses both Afro-and Eurocentricity [and] opens up new forms of policy and practice’ (p. 5), deserves the same critical attention.