Comment by Riaz Haq on October 19, 2017 at 10:49am

Post Colonial Conversation
By Aqsa Junejo
Web Stories
October 19, 2017
http://newslinemagazine.com/post-colonial-conversation/

The Postcolonial Higher Education Conference (PHEC) has been hosted for the third time by Habib University, Pakistan’s first liberal arts and Sciences University located in Karachi. The conference is one of the premier occasions to bring some of global academia’s most renowned speakers into discursive engagement with Karachi’s academia and interested public. In 2014,Dr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor of Columbia University was welcomed as the keynote speaker.

This year’s PHEC focused on the theme “Inheritance of Injustice” to highlight the results of historical injustices seen today in many facets across the world, from economic and ecological to geo-political. As the forms of knowledge inherited from colonialism further entrench this injustice, the PHEC seeks to fill the void by inviting scholars, thinkers, activists and writers to reflect on the lingering crisis. This year’s conference included top global academics from South Asia, Africa, the US and UK.


Economist Dr. Mwangi wa Githinji from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in his keynote speech addressed the question of a just postcolonial development. He explored the ways in which “inherited economic, social, language and ecological structures transmitted colonial injustice into the present.” He suggested that today, “Development still is understood in a deficit model based on dualities with the aim to move countries to be more like the ‘modern’ and ‘industrialized’ world” and called for education systems to also break out of their post-colonial inheritance to indigenizing systems in which “language is a library of ideas and telling a story allows us to create our own histories.”

Professor Githinji thoughtfully answered questions from the audience, and thoroughly endorsed “liberal arts and sciences education [that] allows us to become knowledge creators rather than just consumers. Part of this process requires a rethinking of our history, even before colonialization.Telling of a story is the creation of a memory.”


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In the first panel, Dr. Suren Pillay (right), University of the Western Cape, stressed that “intellectuals must struggle to decolonize knowledge, by not taking progress and civilization at face value, but by telling more multiple and messy stories that co-constitute the story of the modern state.” Professor Peter Hallward of Kingston University, London, explored the nature and value of popular sovereignty. They are pictured above in conversation with Dr. Nauman Naqvi (left) of Habib University.

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