On the hegemony of International Knowledge in Tier 1 high-impact literature: A meta-study of citations in Indilinga (2008-2017)

Résumé 0

In this article we problematize the hegemony of what we are choosing to call International Knowledge, as opposed to (South) African Knowledge, as it appears in articles and essays by International1 authors in high-impact journals. We eschew the term Global North in the light of rising debates about decolonisation and forms of cognitive colonisation. Knowledge is foregrounded in our focus on academic publishing and curriculum. We seek to explore the extent to which articles published in Indilinga: African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems have referenced (South) African scholars. We go on to provide some explanation of why there is still a dominant reliance on International Knowledge for the scholarship published in this journal. We employed a realist interpretivist meta-study design and we selected a sample of 246 articles published in Indilinga between 2008 and 2017. We analysed the reference lists of these articles to determine the ratio between South African, African,2 and International authors cited, and we determined the institutional affiliation of the authors as part of this study. We also analysed keywords that featured predominantly and that were aligned to the title of the journal. It was clear that International authors were cited most frequently in Indilinga.