Postcolonial Epistemology: African “Registers”

With global digitalization and the resulting intensification of communication processes, the accumulation and retransmission of ideas and their connotations have accelerated. The academic environment has changed in the course of updating the research field and building up a new picture of the world, complex and diversified. The accumulation of “critical mass” of talented intellectual scholars based both in Africa and within the African Diaspora, focused on “breakthrough” in philosophy and epistemology, was reflected in an attack on the theoretical principles of postmodernism and Postcolonialism and a dynamic transformation of the conceptual principles and content of African studies. Contrary to Eurocentrism, Africa has become an epistemological laboratory, where the developing theories claiming to become metanarratives, within which new metalexemes and metagenres are emerging. Postcolonial discourse contains elements of metascience, a universal system of knowledge production. The interrelation of facts and methodology in their framework fully corresponds to the trends of the time in the era of algorithms, and their choice both forms the mechanisms of scientific knowledge, but also ensures success in the fight against stereotypes, not only racial and ethnic. The theoretical and methodological significance of postcolonial studies refers to the actualization of the “crossroad” problems in the history of Africa and the Diaspora, such as colonialism and decolonization, ethnicity and identity, hybridity and otherness, essentialism and transcendence, exodus and exile. In the present article the authors focus on the results of the interaction of researchers of African descent with postcolonial theory, as well as on the ideas of postcoloniality and decoloniality, which to a certain extent oppose each other. Particular attention is paid to the development of an updated epistemology of knowledge in the process of the formation of the “postcolonial library,” which includes the works of many scholars from Franz Fanon and Leopold Senghor to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Achille Mbembe.