As part of our Fall 2025 Seminar Series, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host Majid Hannoum, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies (GSU) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, presenting, “Decolonizing Ibn Khaldûn: Towards an Epistemic Rupture”.
Join us for this engaging and thought-provoking lecture on Thursday, September 11, 2025, from 12:30 to 2:30 PM in The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
Few thinkers from the premodern world have had a more paradoxical afterlife than Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406). Celebrated as a “forerunner of sociology,” a “philosopher of history,” and even a precursor to modern economics and political science, he has been repeatedly appropriated, reframed, and celebrated through lenses not of his own making. From Orientalist philology in 19th-century Europe to nationalist invocations in the Arab and Islamic world, Ibn Khaldûn has often been made to speak in voices that serve colonial and postcolonial projects of knowledge rather than his own historical context.
This lecture proposes to decolonize Ibn Khaldûn, not merely by “reclaiming” him for the Global South, but by pursuing an epistemic rupture with the frameworks that have long contained him. Decolonizing here means questioning the ways Ibn Khaldûn has been folded into Eurocentric categories such as “civilization,” “tribe,” and “race,” and rethinking how his work might open alternative pathways for understanding history, society, and political authority.
The lecture intends to interrogate how we come to know figures like Ibn Khaldûn, how we interpret and use their work, and by extension, how knowledge about the non-West is validated or delegitimized in global academia.
Majid Hannoum, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute (GSU) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, is the author of The Invention of the Maghreb (2021) and Living Tangier (2020). His research examines colonial histories, postcolonial memory, migration, race, and the politics of secularism in North Africa. Read full profile.
Emery Kalema, Assistant Professor of History at The Africa Institute (GSU), won the 2021 CASA Essay Prize and is completing his book Violence and Memory: The Mulele ‘Rebellion’ in Postcolonial Congo. His research centers on power, politics, violence, trauma, memory, and embodiment in Central Africa. Read full profile.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
As part of our Fall 2025 Seminar Series, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host Majid Hannoum, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies (GSU) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, presenting, “Decolonizing Ibn Khaldûn: Towards an Epistemic Rupture”.
As part of our Fall 2025 Seminar Series, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, is pleased to host Majid Hannoum, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies (GSU) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, presenting, “Decolonizing Ibn Khaldûn: Towards an Epistemic Rupture”.
Join us for this engaging and thought-provoking lecture on Thursday, September 11, 2025, from 12:30 to 2:30 PM in The Africa Institute Auditorium (location map).
The session is free and open to the public. Register to attend.
Few thinkers from the premodern world have had a more paradoxical afterlife than Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406). Celebrated as a “forerunner of sociology,” a “philosopher of history,” and even a precursor to modern economics and political science, he has been repeatedly appropriated, reframed, and celebrated through lenses not of his own making. From Orientalist philology in 19th-century Europe to nationalist invocations in the Arab and Islamic world, Ibn Khaldûn has often been made to speak in voices that serve colonial and postcolonial projects of knowledge rather than his own historical context.
This lecture proposes to decolonize Ibn Khaldûn, not merely by “reclaiming” him for the Global South, but by pursuing an epistemic rupture with the frameworks that have long contained him. Decolonizing here means questioning the ways Ibn Khaldûn has been folded into Eurocentric categories such as “civilization,” “tribe,” and “race,” and rethinking how his work might open alternative pathways for understanding history, society, and political authority.
The lecture intends to interrogate how we come to know figures like Ibn Khaldûn, how we interpret and use their work, and by extension, how knowledge about the non-West is validated or delegitimized in global academia.
Majid Hannoum, Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute (GSU) and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, is the author of The Invention of the Maghreb (2021) and Living Tangier (2020). His research examines colonial histories, postcolonial memory, migration, race, and the politics of secularism in North Africa. Read full profile.
Emery Kalema, Assistant Professor of History at The Africa Institute (GSU), won the 2021 CASA Essay Prize and is completing his book Violence and Memory: The Mulele ‘Rebellion’ in Postcolonial Congo. His research centers on power, politics, violence, trauma, memory, and embodiment in Central Africa. Read full profile.
Through these lectures and workshops, The Africa Institute (GSU) reaffirms its mission as a center for African and diaspora studies, committed to training a new generation of critical thinkers.
The seminar will be in English.
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