1 Keynote Lecture Series International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany Racism’s Knowledge/Culture Is a Critical Decolonial Project Possible? André Keet Nelson Mandela University 2 June 2019 Colleagues and friends, 1. I am grateful for this invitation; to engage with you on some of my old and new ideas. A great thanks to Jens, Katrin, Encarna, and the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture for hosting me … thanks to you for attending. 2. As a precursory note, when I speak of the academy, I implicate myself … and read myself into it. I have always tried, as best as I could, to take responsibility for self-understanding and self- clarification: to try knowing oneself and working on the self. I acknowledge my role in legitimating practices that ensure the distribution of scholarly and other privileges. To make sense of this, I continuously reflect on my own making within the professoriate—not through self-indulgent reflections, soft biographical reinventions, or manufactured histories —but to make it more personal, through excavating the historical and political conditions of my own production. To disclose, to myself, the ‘social derivation of thought’ that I employ. 3. In short, I accuse myself … 4. About the academic elite—“Through their influential text and talk, they manufacture the consent needed for the legitimation of their own power in general, and for their leadership in maintaining the dominance of the white group in particular. Characteristic properties of such elite racism are its