4th December 2020
**Register via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sccjr-seminar-series-prof-biko-agozino-tickets-127485116415
Counter-Colonial Criminology: The Decolonization of Neo-Colonial Reason
Speaker: Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech.
Chaired by Dr Andy Aydin-Aitchison, University of Edinburgh
Please note that this seminar takes place at 2pm (GMT) 10am (EST)
Abstract: This seminar reflects on Professor Agozino’s text, Counter-Colonial Criminology, with the view to take the critique of conventional criminology beyond the imperialist reason of the original sub-title and focus the seminar on what Nkrumah called Neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism.
The puzzle is why African states have continued to embrace repressive fetishes that were imposed by European colonizers long after relative political decolonization and after the Europeans have relatively allowed many such repressive laws to wither away in their home jurisdictions.
Borrowing from Stuart Hall, the seminar challenges the African Left and their allies to take responsibility for the failure to organize a credible alternative to authoritarian populism. Revisiting the conclusion in Counter-Colonial Criminology, the papyrus suggests that since power is more of a cause of crime than poverty, activist intellectuals in Africa and worldwide should advance the struggles to deepen the decolonization of power relations in order to end the criminal abuse of power by the genocidal states imposed on Africa by European colonizers .
Bio: Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA. He is the author of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System and of Counter-Colonial Criminology , Editor-In-Chief of the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of Africana Sociologies.