Minna Salami: Can Feminism Be African? | #45

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is Minna Salami.

Minna Salami is a Nigerian-Finnish and Swedish feminist author, social critic and currently Program Chair at

The New Institute

. She is the author of Can Feminism Be African? (Harper Collins) and Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone (Bloomsbury 2020) which has been translated into multiple languages. She has also co-authored children’s books and written content on feminism for numerous anthologies as well as educational textbooks.

A leading voice of contemporary feminism, she has drawn over a million readers to her multiple award-winning blog MsAfropolitan.com. Her writing can be found in the Guardian, Project Syndicate, Al Jazeera, and The Philosopher, and many others. She is a frequent speaker and lecturer including at some of the world’s most prominent institutions such as the UN, EU, Oxford Union, Cambridge Union, Yale University, and the Singularity University at NASA. She has worked as a Research Associate and Editor at Perspectiva, consulted governments on gender equality, written school curricula, and curated cultural events at The Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Can feminism be African? If you sit with that question for a minute, the complexities start to reveal themselves to you. As you emphasize different parts of the question, new subtexts and assumptions come into view. For Minna, the first such question is: can feminism be African already? She writes: “Nobody asks if a European or American feminist can be feminist because she is American. But if you’re African and feminist then you experience variations of that question all the time.”

She doesn’t leave it there, though. Through the course of the book—which draws from sources ranging from philosophy and postcolonial theory to African knowledge systems and personal anecdotes—she examines the prismatic aspect of that deceptively simple titular question.

Along the way, we learn about terms she has coined such as “europatriarchy,” “superiorism,” and “sensuous knowledge,” all of which help reveal and clarify the underlying structures of contemporary Modernity, and how our worldviews have been shaped by it (albeit differently depending on your position and circumstances).

At the same time, she evaluates Africa (as a place and concept) outside the projections of white coloniality. It’s hard to capture the reading experience of this poetic, resonant book, so I’m not going to say any more—I hope the conversation does that work, and most of all that it inspires you to go pick up a copy, which you can do right here.

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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Noelle Perdue: