Critical Analysis of Colonial and Post-Colonial Representations of Igbo in British Linguistic Scholarship: An Archaeology of Knowledge

This dissertation conducts a critical archaeology of knowledge of representations of the Igbo language in British linguistic scholarship from colonial encounter to the present day, examining how colonial power relations, racial epistemologies, and post-colonial knowledge politics have shaped the production, reception, and institutionalisation of knowledge about Igbo linguistics in British academic contexts. Scholarly knowledge production about African languages has been identified as a site of epistemological violence in postcolonial thought, yet the specific knowledge archaeology of Igbo linguistics in British scholarship has not been undertaken. Drawing on Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods, Said's Orientalism framework, and African decolonial knowledge theory, the study analyses a corpus of over three hundred British scholarly texts on Igbo language published from 1857 to 2024, including missionary linguistic works, colonial administrative linguistics reports, post-war academic grammars, and contemporary British Africanist linguistics publications. Discourse analysis maps the epistemic shifts, persistent tropes, and ideological formations that characterise British knowledge production about Igbo across historical periods. Findings reveal a persistent colonial infrastructure in contemporary British Igbo linguistics, manifesting in theoretical framework imposition, speaker community marginalisation from research design, and the continued citation economy that rewards British-authored work over Nigerian-authored scholarship disproportionately. The dissertation proposes an epistemic reparation agenda for British Igbo linguistic scholarship. Keywords: Igbo linguistics, colonial knowledge, archaeology, epistemological critique, decolonisation.