The politics of the genre of academic writing; or, Professor Curtin, Professor Clegg, and the African Studies network war

Abstract

What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been filtered through the colonial library, making it urgent to surface this template and its operationalizing networks of academic writers. The links between the language of academic writing, the colonial past, the field of African Studies, and networks of academics who appoint each other to posts and review each other’s submissions to journals, is usually silent. They became deafening in the aftermath of what became known as the Philip Curtin debacle. This article is situated at the 20-year anniversary of the notorious Philip Curtin intervention in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Curtin suggested that academic jobs were being reserved for African American or African candidates and that the teaching of African Studies disciplines was being “ghettoize”. It is an important moment to wonder whether, 20 years down the line, the issues his intervention brought to bear — of power, politics, networks, and colliding knowledge highways within African Studies broadly defined — are still relevant. Finally, alternative forms and styles of academic writing, which may be more fit for purpose, are proposed and I touch on some of these possibilities towards the end of this paper. They include the role of fiction in academic writing; the possibility of the inclusion of the world of the gods and spirits; an interrogation of linear time and the nature of experiential knowledge in relation to academic knowledge.