Prof Foluke Adebisi

Black/African Science Fiction begins from a recognition that colonialism, enslavement, racial capitalism, and law remain deeply entangled. Yet rather than accepting the futures these systems predict, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism ask us to imagine otherwise. I explore the convergences and tensions between these genres and argue that they do far more than imagine alternative futures. They challenge the colonial ordering of time, expose the limits of Euro-modern law, and create space to reimagine justice beyond racialised histories of violence. https://folukeafrica.com/afrofuturism-and-africanfuturism-duelling-and-dwelling-within-black-african-science-fiction/

I decided to do a video version of my text review of the documentary, "Soundtrack to a Couple d'etat". https://youtu.be/Lvq1A89uRdA?is=iVPHwQ4lKv7XOV6z

RE: https://c.im/@folukeifejola/117008959227394135 When people complain about Africans/Black people in period drama on stage, screen and page, it is as if they assume Black Africans blinked into human existence at the moment Europe entered into the picture. Main character energy much?

In this essay, I argue that contemporary uses of the term "decolonisation" (including its seemingly unalterable location in the granting of independence to former colonies) are much narrower than the radical histories and struggles from which it emerged. https://folukeafrica.com/the-trouble-with-defining-decolonisation-a-table-analogy-and-some-reading/

This #newblogpost is a reflection on the simple premise of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race & Empire Network: we need spaces to think together. To reverse "colonial disconnect", we need to intentionally create spaces to learn from one another, share resources, build relationships and imagine otherwise worlds. https://folukeafrica.com/reimagining-legal-education-building-a-global-community-for-critical-legal-pedagogies-on-race-and-empire/

Join us for the launch of the Critical Legal Pedagogies of Race and Empire Network on 14 Sept 2026 at the University of Bristol (hybrid event). We'll explore how legal education can engage with race, empire, colonialism, and global justice https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launching-the-critical-legal-pedagogies-of-race-and-empire-network-tickets-1993600465659?aff=oddtdtcreator

This #newblogpost explores how colonial ideas of race, property, and humanity have shaped and continue to shape international law, privileging capital over protecting human life. A reflection on law, power, decolonisation, and the possibility of anticolonial futures. "The logics that underwrote lawful colonial brutalities continue to violently disregard the integral value of human life as they are used to retain colonial gain and refuse justice for colonial violences." "Legal history should be compulsory. Legal scholars need to give better accounts of the legal histories of racial violence so we can engage with the ways history plays on the present, especially amnesia surrounding racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation, and their tangled afterlives." "So, rather than an invitation to decolonise the law school or the law curriculum or international law or any such thing, I pose a different question: What could it mean for you, the reader, to dream of and build new anticolonial life-making worlds from within the law school (or wherever you are)?" "I leave you with Bob Marley’s “Small Axe” as a commentary on international law and its differential outcomes. It is a reminder that the small axes have always found a way to chip at the big trees. The wretched of the earth have always learnt freedom through defiance and disobedience and hope." https://folukeafrica.com/international-law-vs-the-wretched-of-the-earth-a-tale-of-big-trees-and-small-axes/

This poem emerged from me in the middle of the night as I tried to make sense of a world marked by personal grief and collective violence. It is about mourning, memory, humanity, and the fragile act of continuing to live... somehow. I hope it helps you if you need it https://folukeafrica.com/to-those-who-have-gone-ahead-grieving-while-breathing/

Kofi Awoonor's "The Weaver Bird" captures the violence of dispossession, cultural domination, and the destruction of indigenous ways of being. The poem's closing lines invite us to answer the enduring question: How do we build "new homes" in the ruins of colonialism? https://folukeafrica.com/the-weaver-bird-by-kofi-awoonor-as-postcolonial-commentary-on-loss-of-home/

I wrote this poem in 2020, around the time the Colston statue was thrown into Bristol Harbour. It began as a meditation on our attachment to statues, monuments, symbols... the strange contradictions in how we judge them. Whose idols actually survive "enlightenment"? https://folukeafrica.com/idols/

On Lumumba's birthday, through this review, I reflect on the key players in Lumumba's assassination, the meanings of modernity & decolonisation, the denial of time & humanity, the politicisation of memory, the disUnited Nations and why we must tell our own stories. https://folukeafrica.com/soundtrack-to-the-continuing-coup-detat-re-remembering-lumumba/

Patrice Émery Lumumba was born on the 2nd of July 1925. He is widely remembered as a symbol of anti‑colonial struggle and a martyr for the pan‑African cause. He is commemorated in street names, in song, and in stone and human statues. Through our memories Lumumba lives. https://folukeafrica.com/patrice-lumumba-may-africa-breathe-the-air-of-freedom/

One of the reasons I started writing a blog was to address my deep dissatisfaction with the way Africa is studied or talked about outside the continent, especially. This is mostly marked by absence. But when it is not, most interlocutors ignore the impact of external interference.
https://folukeafrica.com/how-we-study-africa/

I remember a professor who read some of my writing on West Africa was quite shocked to discover that Timbuktu exists...
Sankoré, the famous mediaeval mosque-university at Timbuktu (in present-day Mali), was set up around the twelfth century.

https://folukeafrica.com/timbuktu-site-of-1st-african-university/

Here I ask whether the tools we currently have in legal knowledge are sufficient to achieve racial and environmental justice in the present? What does the Zong case (in its non-identification of harm and uncritical use of language—care and slave) tell us about this question? https://folukeafrica.com/relegislating-the-zong-from-the-perspective-of-the-sea-what-does-it-mean-to-live-in-the-devastation-of-time/