My book Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility was published by Bristol University Press in March of 2023. I have written about the contents on the blog and elsewhere a couple of times. See, for example, here, and here and here and also here. This blog post contains reviews by other people. I will keep it updated as the reviews come in. Here are the reviews below.
But first, I was over the moon when the book was selected as the winner of the Society of Legal Scholars Margaret Brazier Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career Legal Scholarship, as you can see from the picture below!
“It is rarely the case that a legal book is published that becomes an instant classic. Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility is such a book. It is a landmark publication that deserves to be and no doubt will be widely read by all who come into contact with legal education. More than that, it is a book that will become well-known and well-cited for a group of ideas that should now enter the mainstream. It is hoped that the ideas and arguments in this book will be more than just cited, however. They need to be engaged with and implemented; Adebisi’s book needs to challenge, inspire, correct and reconstruct legal academia and how we think about and teach about law. This is a challenging, radical and inspiring monograph that re-sets the debate about decolonisation as well as about the purpose of legal education.”
Sandberg, Russell. (2024). Book Review: Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility. Social & Legal Studies, 33(3), 470-472.
The book, I believe, is about hope for producing flourishing, newer meaningful anticolonial worlds for all, beyond law schools and universities, and yields suggestions for their materialisation through decoloniality from within the neoliberal-ised law school. Decolonisation, thus, is neither to merely diversify the face of coercive power nor to become a new master. This book, which requires revisits, should be prescribed as an essential text for (legal and non-legal) students, teachers, and activists alike, to learn that to decolonise our legal knowledge and teaching/research, means acknowledgement and complete cessation of the colonial logics and praxes produced by and simultaneously producing the (Euro-modern) law, and to repair the colonial past.
Kumar, Shailesh. ‘How to Decolonise Legal Knowledge for All?’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (blog), 11 October 2023.
“To conceptualise decolonisation – a topic in such a high circulation in academic knowledge production – in the context of knowledge production in a discipline as rooted and guarded as law is an ambitious, courageous, and inspiring undertaking. Decolonisation and legal knowledge is a rich and strong contribution in this regard. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understating European legal knowledge production, its racial and colonial foundations but also possibilities of reimagining it otherwise.”
Parsa, Amin. Retfærd: Nordic Journal of Law and Justice.
“Adébísí’s book convincingly paves the way for a guided and comprehensive interrogation of colonialism within Euro-modern legal knowledge. One can certainly hope that European universities and legal scholars in the Global North pick up where Adébísí has left off and engage in the long-overdue decolonial work to create the potential for spaces with a pluriversity of knowledges.”
Dube, Nozizwe. “Folúkẹ́ Adébísí, Decolonisation and legal knowledge: reflections on power and possibility (Bristol University Press, 2023).” European Journal of Legal Studies 15 (2024): 213-223.
“The themes of hope and humanity thread the chapters together in beautifully written prose that often reads like poetry. While the grounded narrative makes the arguments digestible, the evocative language makes the book a meal demanding to be re-membered. In a field that constantly echoes the darkness of the power-hungry man and our deeply concerning social orders, Adébísí relentlessly and refreshingly reminds us to keep looking for light, urging us to dig up the torches buried in our classrooms.”
Billa, Bhumika. (2024), , Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility, Bristol, Bristol University Press, 2023, 204 pp, hb £85.99, pb £26.99. Mod Law Rev.
“Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge is a very stimulating read which raises important issues, not only for the discipline of law but also for our understanding of knowledge within the university. Knowledge always has a history, and it says something about the arrogance of disciplines that few undergraduate courses include a module exploring their particular discipline’s history. Adébísí has impressively detailed the history of law’s entanglement with power and, in particular, with colonialism/racism. It is a history that raises fundamental questions about legal knowledge and the dangers of just teaching it.”
Moore, J. M (2024) Review: Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility by Adébísí Folúké (2023) Justice, Power and Resistance 1-3
As the book ends, Adébísí draws upon August Wilson’s stage play, ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’ highlighting how our final scene must be “written, performed and narrated in a way that opens the door to possibility of a world where destruction is neither normalised nor inevitable” (Adébísí 2023, p. 156). These words helped to convey feelings of hope, and give a sense that there is yet still so much more progressive, decolonial work to do in areas of the law. For me, this book serves as an important contribution (and, for some, a starting point) to such discussions and provides a catalyst for future work on the decolonisation of legal knowledge that is yet to be written, performed and narrated.
Jemima Kimvula, Decolonial Dialogues. ‘Book Review. Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility, by Folúkẹ́ Adébísí. Bristol University Press, 2023, 204 Pp.’, 27 October 2024.
Power and Possibility closes with a call to action. Recognizing that ‘most of what we call decolonization in the academy merely acknowledges colonialism but does little to dismantle it,’ Adébísí calls on colleagues and other stakeholders in legal academy to contribute something ‘personal, practical, and provable’ to efforts at interrupting and ultimately dismantling our global continuing colonial present.
Ọláolúwa Òní, Nigeria’s Settler-Colonial Present: Review Essay of Folúkẹ́ Adébísí’s Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge TWAIL Review (no. 5, 2024)
And from the publisher’s website:
And from Amazon.
And Goodreads.
