St Lucia's Monroe College kicks off annual distinguished lecture series
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| Published on Monday, November 17, 2008 |
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CASTRIES, St Lucia:Dr Biko Agozino, an internationally recognized expert on the African Diaspora in the Caribbean, who is also a professor of criminology at UWI, will be the first speaker to present the Monroe College Annual Disguished Lecture in St Lucia.
Agozino will speak on 'The African Diaspora: Crime and African Traditional Cultural, Remedies to the Current Crises" at Spinners, Union, November 17, 2008.
The First Annual Distinguished Lecture will coincide with the first official visit of the President of Monroe College, Stephen Jerome, who arrives from New York this weekend.
“This is an important event for the College, our students, and the St. Lucian community”, noted Ramesh Sinanan, Dean of Monroe College-St. Lucia. “We are facing an unprecedented crisis with crime in the Caribbean and we need innovative solutions. Obviously what has been tried in the past has not solved a worsening situation, so Dr Aqozino’s presentation can not only be relevant timely, but his perspectives are different and controversial and questions what has become traditional wisdom,” Sinanan added.
In his book: “Counter Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason”, Agozino looks at how the history of colonialism has shaped the definition of crime and justice systems in former colonies. He argues that the colonial experience has been instrumental in shaping modern criminology in colonial powers. Agozino strongly believes that “democracy, law and order are in actual fact, ‘organized violence.’” He points out instances of ‘executive lawlessness,’ perpetrated with impunity, while criminologists focus on lower class crimes.I
In Agozino’s view, criminology was developed primarily as a tool for imperialist domination and it continues to operate largely as a repressive technology’. Included in this technology, he says, are the police, prisons, army and so on, which neo-colonial states have adopted hook, line and sinker.
Agozino in his writings takes African and Caribbean criminologists to tasks and says they have pre-occupied themselves with wholesale consumption of out-dated texts from the western world, uncritically teaching generations of students imperial theories and contributing little or nothing to their discipline.
In his lecture, Agozino will present alternatives to this thinking. A question and answer period will follow Agozino’s lecture. | | | | Reads : 525 |
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