This essay explores the extent to which comparative philosophy can assist decolonial struggle. In order to accomplish this task, I offer not only a description of philosophy's colonization but also an account of how this discipline remains subject to the coloniality of knowledge. In short, insofar as race, gender, class, and sexuality are considered irrelevant or accidental to the production of philosophical knowledge, professional philosophy replicates, if not continues, what Rajeev Bhargava terms the epistemic injustice of colonialism. One (...) response to the colonization of philosophy is “diversification” by means of putting into conversation philosophers, systems, and ideas from differing cultures or regions throughout the world. While a step forward, insofar as philosophical comparisons occur primarily on an East–West axis, philosophers are not necessarily addressing the biases, prejudices, racism, and exceptionalism endemic to their discipline. In fact, such a directionality typically reinforces the sense of historical development that undergirds Western philosophy's self‐understanding. This essay, therefore, offers a series of recommendations for how to radicalize comparative philosophical efforts so as to address global epistemic injustice and aid in the process of decolonization. (shrink)

Whereas the most visible forms of political colonialism have for the most part disappeared from the planet by the end of the millennium, several of its consequences remain with us. Criticism of colonialism, accordingly, has shifted its focus to its more subtle and lasting manifestations. Prominent among these are the varieties of what came to be known as the ‘colonization of the mind’. This is one of the forms of ‘epistemic violence’ that it is certainly the task of (...) philosophers to contribute to identify and struggle against. ‘Postcolonial’ thinkers have undertaken not only to analyze this phenomenon, but also to devise strategies for effectively combating and hopefully eradicating colonialism’s most damaging aspect – the taking possession and control of its victims’ minds. My purpose in this paper is to contribute, qua philosopher, to both of these undertakings. I begin by trying to clarify the nature of the colonization of the mind and its epistemic underpinnings and the typical reactions to it. Next, I examine examples of these reactions with their corresponding analyses and strategies. The assumptions underlying them reveal certain inherent paradoxes, which call into question the possibility of a full decolonization of mind. I conclude by suggesting an alternative strategy and a series of means to implement it. (shrink)

Epistemic decolonization, in its various conceptual formulations and presentations, could be taken to hold promise for either the completion of the anti-colonial struggle or the self-re-discovery of the formerly colonized and oppressed. In Africa this project has had a long history as both a counter to hegemonic histories of claimed Western epistemological superiority as well as theories of racism and racist practices against black people of African descent. What is not entirely clear are the precise achievements of decolonial thought (...) and practice. I interrogate the relevance, use and continuation of decoloniality as a genre of thought and practice on the African continent against the background of the perennial problems of material underdevelopment and stifled political spaces that render the supposed beneficiaries of decolonization hopeless subjects who continue to be disempowered and oppressed in their own home. This interrogation is to be carried alongside another inquiry aimed at evaluating the achievements of African philosophy as a form of epistemic decolonization. If African philosophy is a form of decolonization, as it should be, it should be able to clearly demonstrate its achievements and how they have had an effect on broader goals of decolonizing and empowering inhabitants of the African continent. (shrink)

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives (...) matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century. The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms. This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies. (shrink)

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

This paper examines an application of epistemic injustice not fully explored in the literature. How does epistemic injustice function in broader contexts of relationships within countries between colonizers and colonized? More specifically, what can be learned about the ongoing structural aspects of hermeneutical injustice in Canada’s settler history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and the resultant erasing and marginalizing of Indigenous histories, languages, laws, traditions, and practices? In this paper, I use insights from Canada’s Truth and (...) Reconciliation Commission report to challenge dominant understandings of reconciliation, reciprocity, respect for agency, and the rule of law in settler nations. In its retrieval of the richness and diversity of Indigenous collective interpretive resources, both past and present, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission draws on a broad and full account of relationships that have shaped Indigenous lives and communities, non-Indigenous lives and communities, the interactions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples and communities, and the relationships of all of these to and through the state. (shrink)

This paper posits the concept of cognitive confinement as a useful tool for understanding the idea of decolonization of knowledge and the opposite notion of epistemic colonization. For the sake of...

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these principles (...) saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power. (shrink)

Abstract:This article posits Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) as a vital tool for bridging postcolonial and decolonial thought. First, FSTS forms a bridge by providing tools for reading epistemic imperialism and scientific racism as shared conditions of possibility for disparate colonizations. Second, by foregrounding the necessary links between epistemic and material violence, FSTS helps undo the theory/praxis binary that sometimes undergirds their analytic opposition. The authors argue that the careful study of science as a set of ideas, (...) practices, and attendant institutions is vital in order to better recognize and intervene in shifting modes of colonial conquest and governance. (shrink)

I use the concept of epistemic injustice to think through the practice and methodology of comparative, or “fusion,” philosophy. I make two related claims: 1) the philosophical ethnocentrism displayed by academic departments in the U.S. is a case of epistemic injustice, primarily willful ignorance, that ought to be rectified; 2) the corrective to this problem, namely, fusion philosophy, is itself epistemically problematic in its tendency toward ontological expansiveness, that is, an unjustified claim to all traditions as one’s own. (...) In the end, I hope to show how a robust practice of self-reflexivity can counter this potentially colonizing tendency of fusion philosophizing. (shrink)

This essay explores some conceptual and diagnostic frameworks to advance epistemic decolonization in the US philosophical profession. A central focus is the distinction between those philosophies of formerly colonized peoples that are culturally alterior or, simply, alterior and those that are analectical in the Dusselian sense of emerging from a subordinated political position. The paper begins by reflecting upon connections between coloniality, the alterior, and the analectical to frame the discussion of epistemic decolonization in the philosophy profession. It (...) then considers a knower's core theoretic reconstruction in the task of epistemic decolonization and identifies some ambiguities in reconciling alterior traditions with analectical theoretical reconstruction. The work of Charles Mills and Enrique Dussel are considered as case studies. The paper concludes with critical reflections on the institutional network of canon, curriculum, and other conceptual and credentialization structures that constitute institutional Eurocentrism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss accounts of agency, participation, and self-determination by David Crocker and Stacy Kosko because they acknowledge that relationships of power can determine who gets to participate and when. Kosko usefully applies the concept of agency vulnerability to the case of the self-determination of indigenous peoples. I examine the specific context of Canada’s history as a settler nation, a history that reflects attempts to denigrate, dismiss and erase Indigenous laws, practices, languages, and traditions. I argue that this (...) history displays epistemic injustice in that the dominant collective interpretative resources of non-Indigenous Canadians have allowed the dismissal of the collective interpretative resources of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. This gap in collective interpretative resources can explain that Canada’s constitution, institutions, laws, and structures reflect the dominant collective interpretative resources of a colonizing nation, ones that have delineated and restricted the agency, participation, and self-determination of Indigenous Canadians. One important outcome of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and of its National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls is bringing the rich history of Indigenous collective interpretative resources and the networks of relationships shaped by them to light. By discussing examples from these reports, I give substance to the argument that foundational and structural injustices in settler nations are at bottom epistemic injustices, ones that have implications for accounts of agency, participation, and self-determination. (shrink)

This paper sets out to accomplish two goals. First, drawing on the Irish perspective, it reconceptualises one of the enduring legacy-based harms of epistemic colonisation, in this case, ‘linguicism’, in terms of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Second, it argues that otherwise well-meaning attempts to combat epistemic colonisation through the inclusion of marginalised testimony can, in certain circumstances, lead to cases of ‘epistemic exploitation’, which, in turn, can result in ‘ontic burnout’. Both linguicism and epistemic exploitation, this paper theorizes, (...) have the potential to bring about ontic burnout. Here is the plan: to set the scene, section I briefly surveys some key arguments supporting the call for higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage in epistemic decolonising, focusing on the importance of striking a balance between two extremes: (i) abandoning all forms of Eurocentric/colonial knowledge through the elimination of inherited thinking and conceptual schemes which result from colonization, in particular, those which remain in our thinking “owing to inertia rather than to our own reflective choices” (Wiredu 2002, p.56); (ii) the other—pursuing a more positive project where we seek to, “exploit as much as is judicious the resources of indigenous conceptual schemes” (Wiredu 1996: p.136). From here, it moves to consider harms associated with a subset of ‘epistemicide’, that is, ‘linguicism’—a phenomenon where the language and culture of the colonizer become part of the ‘civilising project’ and, in more extreme cases of linguicide, forcibly replaces indigenous languages. Section II then explores the subtleties of harmful by-products deriving from ‘inclusion’, namely that which scholars refer to as ‘epistemic exploitation’. Situations where marginalised scholars are finally ‘at the table but still on the menu’ arise when privileged persons, compel marginalised knowers to educate them [and others] about the nature of their oppression (Berenstain, 2016). Habitual requests to turn themselves inside out for emancipatory principles give rise to a phenomenon known as ontic burnout (Dunne and Kotsonis, 2022, p.9)—“a form of dissociative explanatory fatigue culminating in oppressed persons engaging in a conscious or unconscious decoupling from their socially constructed identity, from the burdens and injustices associated with being a member of a certain social kind”. This harm is, I argue, rarely discussed in the literature and worthy of further analysis. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as an always (...) already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I (re)interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

The episteme on which the scientific knowledge of the world was built was based on social, technological and historical processes by means of which the supremacy of an experimental type of practices was consecrated, excluding any other way of knowing, condemning these to oblivion, to contempt and submission. Over time, the need to recover these marginalized and colonized knowledge has been raised so that we can have a more complete and panoramic view of the world. The objective of the present (...) study is to examine new paths for interculturality, which facilitates the building a system of rights for the “good living” citizen in diversity and harmony with nature. (shrink)

The Philippine educational system and its core curriculum is oriented toward the formation of the modern, autonomous, rational subject, particularly one that will fit into the contemporary global market and production system. Through this system, Filipinos are deepening the colonization of their rationalities and subjectivities by imposing a system that shapes a subject who exists to serve the global market by being a fit worker, consumer, entrepreneur, and producer of knowledge. However useful this educational system may be, it does (...) not consider the ‘Filipino’ subjectivity’s need for formation as a loob who is a kapwa. The Filipino subjectivity which is grounded on the experience of a loob filled with liwanag opening to the world, needs an education in its own capacity for knowing and realizing its well-being. The conception of the subject in relation to the world calls for a different kind of education, particularly in the development of indigenous skills in humanistic research. This paper will argue that as a Filipino student is subjected to the imposition of the dominant Western educational system, they should also equally be given an education in their own rationality rooted in their own native subjectivity. A people must have the opportunity to be trained in their own rationality rooted in their own subjectivity in order to evaluate its value for human flourishing. (shrink)

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial (...) problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part 1), and its content (Part 2). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I callceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial (...) problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part One), and its content (Part Two). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I call ceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Critiques leveled at epistemic decolonization call for a reorientation in theories of colonialism. The colonial imagination, a rhetorical tool that normalizes a sensible order of dispossession and appropriation, can be a reoriented site of contestation. By imagining an identity whose only means of relating is through opposition, the colonial imagination renders identities that inhabit a state of solitude. Two letters from Hernán Cortés to King Carlos V of Spain show how this colonial imagining aims to normalize dispossession and (...) appropriation of the relations Originary peoples have with lands, waters, airs, and other-than-human relatives. Considering this argument, rhetorical studies needs to readjust its analytical timeframe beyond the times of settler-colonial nation-states and colonization. (shrink)

This paper aims to introduce, in the context of Latin America, the theoretical epistemic discussion regarding the theme of the ‘common’ as a political principle which substantiates instituting and autonomous processes of government, control and community regulation. The work seeks to relate a democratic scenario of the ‘common’ with the discourses of pluralist and decolonial normativity, in a way that would guarantee not only horizontal communal self-management, but also a legitimate ordering of forms of life, founded on common interest, (...) social relations and interconnected structures. For this purpose the instrument of critical-socio-legal analysis is applied at the intersections with the ‘participative-communitary’ type of legal pluralism. Our proposal is to combine the contemporary meaning of the ‘common’, its relation to the Latin American principles of ‘buen vivir’ (living well) and ‘interculturalidade’ (interculturality), as well as the instituting practice of the ‘common’, that engenders a normativity built ‘from below’, which is in opposition to the traditional positivist and state legal system imposed through colonization in Latin America. Such achievements that, although formalized, are not being successful against institutional ruptures, have ‘cloistered’ the practices of the ‘common’ and made the existence of legal pluralism invisible. (shrink)

In 2016, when #NODAPL first appeared in the mainstream media, many nonnative people approached me about how to support the water protectors. This question can be answered in a couple of ways: first, I might address the specific issue, or second, I might respond more generally about how to be an ally to native people. The two responses highlight a current issue in Indian Country: should nonnatives serve as active bystanders—or should they be allies to native peoples? Being an ally (...) has come under scrutiny, especially given its propensity for epistemic injustice. Some philosophers—such as Rachel McKinnon—argue for dismissing the concept altogether, requiring that individuals serve as active bystanders. Although this may be necessary to support individuals in the transgender community, it lacks the resources to fully address the needs of colonized peoples. In this article, I argue for the operationalization of “ally” in Indian Country insofar as it is subject to decolonizing treatment. Although there is a need for both bystanders and allies in Indian Country, the Indigenous people must define the concepts that are intended to serve them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage (...) in interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 152–154 Levi R. Bryant. The Democracy of Objects . Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. 2011. 316 pp. | ISBN 9781607852049. | $23.99 For two decades post-anarchism has adopted an epistemological point of departure for its critique of the representative ontologies of classical anarchism. This critique focused on the classical anarchist conceptualization of power as a unitary phenomenon that operated unidirectionally to repress an otherwise creative and benign human essence. Andrew Koch may have inaugurated this trend in (...) 1993 when he wrote his influential paper entitled “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism.” Koch’s paper certainly laid some of the important groundwork for post-anarchism’s continual subsumption of ontology beneath the a priori of an epistemological orientation, and his work continues to be cited as an early and important venture into post-anarchist philosophy. The problem is that Koch could not conceive of an anti-essentialist and autonomous ontological system, one not subject to regulation or representation by the human mind. Consequently, he was forced to assert a subjectivist claims-making ego as the foundation of a post-structuralist anarchist politics. Saul Newman was indebted to this heritage insofar as he also posited the ego (extrapolated from the writings of Max Stirner) and the subject (extrapolated from Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre ) as the paradoxical ‘outside’ to power and representation. Todd May fell into a similar trap in his book The Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarchism when he wrote that “[m]etaphysics [...] partakes of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that provides its foundations.” 1 Whereas Newman’s approach did not necessarily foreclose the possibility of metaphysics—at least to the extent that he began with the subject of the Lacanian tradition (wherein the subject is believed to be radically split between thinking and being)—May completely foreclosed the possibility of any escape from the reign of the epistemological. There laid the impasse of yesterday’s post-anarchism. This impasse at the heart of the project of post-anarchism has forced Koch, Newman, May, and many others, to come to similar conclusions about the place of ontology in post-anarchist scholarship. The post-anarchists have all formulated a response strikingly similar to Koch’s argument that any representative ontology ought to be dismantled and dethroned in favour of “a conceptualization of knowledge that is contingent on a plurality of internally consistent episteme .” 2 By dismissing all ontologies as suspiciously representative and as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the privilege that they have placed on the human subject, language, and discourse, at the expense of the democracy that the human subject shares with other animals, objects, and beings in the world. This epistemological characterization of post-anarchism has held sway for far too long. It is not by chance that post-anarchism, as a concept, was first formulated by Hakim Bey as an “ontological anarchism,” 3 and subsequently repressed by the canon of post-anarchist authors. Perhaps Bey’s ontological anarchism also lacked the ‘rigour’ required of today’s scholarly audience and for these two reasons (at least) he has received very little credit for his inaugurating efforts into post-anarchism. In any case, I want to challenge this reluctance and revive the roots of post-anarchism. Levi Bryant gives us a reason to believe that we can achieve the promise of Bey’s ontological anarchism without sacrificing the scholarly standard of rigour. Levi Bryant’s newest open-access book, The Democracy of Objects , is a tour de force . His book challenges post-anarchists to take their radical critique of representation a step further by questioning the “hegemony that epistemology currently enjoys in philosophy.” Bryant maintains that post-structuralism, and radical anti-humanisms, only appear to reject the subject as the locus of political agency. Their rejection is actually more of a disavowal, a replacement of the human subject with the equally human order of language or discourse. What post-structuralism attempts to elucidate is the manner in which the subject is colonized by the Other of language, discourse and social relations. What here appears as a movement away from the determining subject of humanism and existentialism is only replaced with the determining apparatuses of structures as they are conceived by astute analysts of political culture. Post-structuralism thus re-enters the anthropocentric discourse to the extent that the cultural analyst believes himself capable of conceiving the determinative structures of society. In contradistinction to the claims of post-structuralism and post-anarchism, the role of the ontologist is not to suture the gap between epistemology and the real but to de-suture it, as Bryant puts it: “[o]ntology does not tell us what objects exist, but that objects exist, that they are generative mechanisms.” Above all else, the role of ontology, for post-anarchists, ought to be a real de-centering of the subject in relation to other objects in the non-human world such that the subject becomes conceived as one object among others within a living democracy of equality. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that objects exist whether or not the subject or analyst is there to represent them: they represent themselves and are autonomous from our dictation, just as each object finds its autonomy in relation to other objects. Ontology must now be distinguished from representation. We must shift the terms of the debate and interrogate the hegemony that epistemology has been afforded within post-anarchist philosophy. At least two possibilities are now permitted. On the one hand, one could intervene into the reigning mode of philosophy, namely epistemology, by latching onto concepts from meta-ethical philosophy. Meta-ethics allows one to easily separate the ontological from the epistemological and to answer very particular questions about each in order to formulate an overarching meta-ethical position. 4 Post-anarchism is particularly adept at this task because of its resounding ability to frame itself as an ethical political philosophy in relation to the strategic political philosophy of classical Marxism. On the other hand, Bryant argues that “[p]erhaps the best way to defeat [the privilege currently held by epistemology] is to shift the terms of debate.” Shifting the terms of debate is also something that post-anarchists have been very good at doing. Thus, instead of asking the question ‘how do representative ontological systems harbour concealed epistemological orientations toward the political?’ one might ask ‘ do epistemological orientations toward the political always harbour representative and subject-centred ontological systems?” The genius of Bryant’s book rests in its ability to convincingly argue for the radical autonomy of being and of objects. This claim speaks to some of the most compelling theories of the political in anarchist and marxist political philosophy (for instance, hegemony, representation, democracy, and so on) and it re-stages the political drama of our times across a much wider terrain. The fallacy of strategic political philosophy in the Marxist tradition, as Todd May quite correctly points out, is that it remains committed to a concept of power that is unitary in its analysis, unidirectional in its influence, and utterly repressive in its effect. Similarly, Bryant’s ontology allows one to argue that there is a fallacy that occurs “whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explains all other entities.” Whereas May’s post-structuralist anarchism moved away from the fallacy of the unitary analysis of power, whereby subjects are constituted by the influence of a single site of power, it nonetheless remained committed to a tactical political philosophy which is monarchical in the final analysis . It remains monarchical to the extent that the human world, the world of epistemology, is treated as the yardstick of democracy. Bryant’s argument is quite instructive: “[w]hat we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing [...] but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings.” The real fallacy is thus not against strategic political philosophy but philosophy itself and the way it has played out over so many centuries. “The epistemic fallacy,” writes Bryant, “consists in the thesis that proper ontological questions can be fully transposed into epistemological questions.” The point that Bryant is making relates to the way ontology is today always reduced to an epistemology and thereby loses its significance as a philosophical question. This book should be applauded for its novelty and its thesis ought to be taken seriously by post-anarchists today. Because of this book, and the attendant post-continental movement that is being called ‘speculative realism,’ we can now distinguish three stages in the life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what Süreyya Evren has described as its ‘introductory period.’ The introductory period of post-anarchism is defined by its inability to side-step the ontological problem in the literature of classical anarchism. During this period, post-anarchism needed to distinguish itself from classical anarchism while nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical project. The second period overcomes the problem of the separation of post-anarchism from classical anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques of post-anarchism—especially that from Cohn & Wilbur 5 —are included into this period insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always already anarchism. Whereas the first and second phases have included only explicitly anarchist literature under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the third period this no longer holds true. To be certain, the second period permitted the incorporation of post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist discussions (but always with a certain amount of reservation). This third period, the one that is to come—the one that is already here if only we would heed its call—will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. Indeed, post-anarchism is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered. Levi Bryant teaches us that the third period is already here: and yet where is it? NOTES 1) Todd May. The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. 2. 2) Andrew Koch. “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism” [1993] in Post-Anarchism: A Reader . Eds. Duane Rousselle & Sureyyya Evren. London: Pluto Press. 2011. pp. 23-40. 3) Bey, Hakim. “ Post-Anarchism Anarchy .” 1987. 4) I have attempted to do this in my paper on Bataille’s post-anarchism; see Duane Rousselle. “Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism.” Journal of Political Ideologies . 17(3): in press. 5) Jesse Cohn & Shawn Wilbur. “ What’s Wrong with Post-anarchism? ” 2010. (shrink)

Decolonization is synonymous with liberation. It is invoked in multiple overlapping geopolitical projects that demand both the undoing of imperial-colonial structures and the amelioration of their effects. In his essay “Decolonizing Western Epistemology/ Building Decolonial Options,” Walter Mignolo describes decoloniality as a double-faced concept. Decolonization is a geopolitical project while decoloniality is an epistemological, political, and ethical process that enables decolonial futures (Mignolo 2011, 20). In this way, decoloniality is an analytical that critiques coloniality but also a generative utopian project (...) that relies on decolonial epistemologies to materialize these futures. Like settler colonialism, coloniality is a structure that exceeds colonization and capitalism, expressing itself as modernity. It is the epistemic and hermeneutical processes of decoloniality that reveal ways of living and being—what Mignolo calls “living in harmony and reciprocity”—that ultimately build a nonimperial, noncapitalist world (Mignolo 2011, 25). In this article I put decolonial theory in conversation with Indigenous articulations of decolonization and religious life to illustrate what Indigenous decolonial futures may look like. I argue that reclamations of Indigenous metaphysical life regenerate Indigenous ontologies (intersubjective personhood) in ways that not only secure decolonial futures but also heal historical trauma, which can be understood as ontological dispossession. (shrink)

In 2015, Willem Halffman and Hans Radder published in Minerva a paper, in which they diagnosed that our universities are colonized by “The Wolf of management.” Using the example of the reforms afflicting the Polish academic world, I show that this colonization has intensified, and apart from the processes described in the aforementioned paper, it brought consequences that have changed academic culture: research is subjected to publication policy, many academic activities are treated as a hobby, researchers must be in (...) a stand-by mode to react quickly to new regulations, and responsibility for the institutional prestige is collective. I argue that the attempts to reduce research results into numbers and algorithms stem from a quest for objectivity and a mistrust of academics’ ability to pass fair judgments. The Wolf tries to realize a utopian dream: the building of a structure that by necessity secures the productivity of research, which in turn brings the prestige of institutions, ultimately measured by rankings. Yet, prestige is not an epistemic but rather a political value, and when academics are forced to aim at prestige, vital academic values are endangered. Any efficient resistance to the Wolf requires grassroots work on the part of academics. By reconsidering the nature of research and education as well as their role in society, academics might be able to develop viable alternatives to the “productivist university.” This requires cooperation with broader society. As such, the alternative of either remaining in the ivory tower or submitting to the Wolf is a false dilemma. (shrink)

This Special Issue comes at a time when African countries and the Global South in general are facing unprecedented crises in securing energy to power their economies. The crises are necessitated largely by the developed Western countries exerting enormous power and pressure upon the developing world to move away from fossil fuels, while at the same time the West is increasing its uptake on fossils. However, with critical self-reflection we are able to understand that a crisis of this nature is (...) not without historical precedence, as it is preceded by a series of other forms of injustices meted out upon the formerly and still colonized peoples. And not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic on the health front, and the handling thereof, showed just how skewed and divided the world still is and laid bare race-laden inequalities both at local and global levels. So to be sure, the current crises are part of the history of struggle against race-based social injustices and demonstrate Western desire to continue its stranglehold over its former colonies. And although the energy transition is dubbed the “Just Energy Transition,” for those in the developing world who are negatively affected, there is clearly nothing “Just” about it. So whereas we generally tend to speak of social or historical injustices such as the energy crises and COVID-19, at an epistemological front we find cognitive injustice. Accordingly, the articles in this issue contribute to a series of responses by the anticolonial movement (broadly defined) in relation to injustice, particularly its epistemological ramifications on knowledge and knowledge production in the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery. Furthermore, the historical exclusion of African and other non-European peoples from participation in reason had the effect that Africans in particular were precluded from philosophy itself, a phenomenon that African philosophy and associated disciplines are today still grappling with in the academy. So in a word, the articles make an important contribution insofar as reckoning with the impact that race and the history of racism has had in philosophy in particular, both as a discipline and as a human mental activity.It should be remembered that the exclusion of Africans from reason and eventually from philosophy is preceded by an earlier one, the exclusion of Africans from recognition at a human level, qua rational beings. One can talk of a history of depersonalizations and dehumanizations; of massacres and deracination inflicted upon the oppressed owing to the colonial encounter. This is why for a scholar and a philosopher of the periphery, to use Enrique Dussel’s term, philosophical inquiry cannot and ought not be divorced from human reality. In fact, scholars of the periphery often stress the need for philosophy not to abstract too much from reality; and for philosophy to confine itself with liberatory human ends, among other things. There are a number of thinkers of the periphery who famously harp upon this point. For instance, Lewis Gordon has introduced the concept of “disciplinary decadence” by which he laments the fetishization of methods and whereby disciplines become an end in themselves, thus not necessarily serving human needs. Other thinkers in this school of thought include the likes of Enrique Dussel, Charles Mills, Cornel West, Angela Davis, and George Yancy to mention but a few. Yancy speaks of the “Density project” with which he has a normative injunction upon Black philosophers. In a similar vein, Dussel remarks in the Philosophy of Liberation that “Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical texts, except as a pedagogical propaedeutic to provide itself with interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.”1 This reality, as is averred, is in existential phenomenology, not merely objective reality or perhaps something out there existing on its own accord, but rather it is what Jean-Paul Sartre associates with “human reality,” which is reality as lived by people of flesh and blood. So in a world demarcated between center and periphery, human beings and subhumans, whites and Blacks, the anticolonial thinker cannot afford not to raise questions relating to social existence, “the reality.” Thus for those in the academy, one must be able to come to terms with the reality of non-Western and “non-scientific knowledges” (after Boaventura De Sousa Santos) not being recognized as credible knowledge, coupled with the possibility of being forgotten, of being completely wiped out from history. And, as we see with Bernard Matolino’s article in particular, this is the battle that African philosophy has vigorously had to deal with in the previous two or three decades.In the Western canon, philosophy is generally taken to begin with the Greeks and this, as is observed, is no historical accident but forms part of a project to relegate previous philosophical traditions to relative obscurity, and to preclude the rest of humanity from participation in reason. The idea is that for Western modernity to be a viable project, oppressed cultures must out of necessity be denied reason. On this very point, Frantz Fanon would remark in Black Skin White Masks in the following manner: “That victory [on the rational front] played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.”2 In this regard Mogobe Ramose’s article notes how the Aristotlean concept of man as a rational animal becomes a misnomer insofar as this relates to the Black person. With this sleight of hand, previous civilizations such as the African (Egyptian) and Arab traditions in philosophy are supposed to vanish from history and from the epistemological landscape. In this regard, Mills’s insights will continue to haunt philosophy well into the future, long after his passing. Mills had noted that a typical philosophy program in the Westernized university will normally start off with the two Greek philosophers, namely Plato and Aristotle. From here it moves to cover the Middle Ages and probably end with theories on liberalism. And although this period covers a history of more than two thousand years of Western philosophy, there will be little or no mention of traditions that shaped philosophical thought prior to the Greeks.The above notwithstanding, the articles in this issue show, however, that not only are Africans and oppressed peoples endowed with reflective reason, but that they also possess a unique brand of philosophy. By and large, the articles not only affirm the epistemological standpoint of African philosophy but show its own genealogy, discourse, and objectives among other things.With these short remarks, the following articles cut across these thematic areas: metaphysics of race, epistemic racism, racial ontology, feminism, and decolonial literature. Accordingly, the article by Bernard Matolino begins by delving into the metaphysics of race and notes that while there is no proof that there are distinct races (after Kwame Appiah), race as a matter of social life is alive and relevant. Further, his article goes on to demonstrate how African philosophy emerged as a form of protest and native philosophers’ need to show that indigenous peoples always had a philosophy. In a similar vein, Edwin Etieyibo’s article discusses epistemic racism, and how color prejudice historically translated to other forms of racial injustices such as epistemic racism. His article makes use of the works of such thinkers as Anibal Quijano and Ramon Grosfoguel to trace the genealogy of such injustices in the modern period.Siphiwe Ndlovu’s article looks into the problem of Black marginality, particularly in the modern period. He locates his musings within the social contract tradition but suggests a reading of contemporary marginality through the lens of Mills’s racial contract. Accordingly, instead of seeing Black marginality as a function of exclusion or being cast outside the contract, the article argues that such marginality is due not from exclusions per se but rather from inclusion albeit only as junior—and therefore inferior—partners in the racial contract.Mogobe Ramose’s article begins by endorsing Kwasi Wiredu’s view that there is nothing wrong with African philosophy being preoccupied with questions that are not exactly identical to those of non-African philosophies. Furthermore, his article traces, through D. M. Goldenberg, the roots of anti-Black racism from “colour symbolism” among the Arabs in the classical world, through the Rabbinic era, and later taking the form of race prejudice in Christianity. At the crux of his article is the argument that the prevailing practice of fragmenting the human race into multiple bits and pieces is against the pursuit of justice and peace in human relations.The article by Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse considers Anika Mann’s arguments on race and feminist standpoint as an existential standpoint and foundation. She takes up Mamphela Ramphele’s initial autobiography, Mamphela Ramphele: A Life, to critically reflect on what the actions of “non-subservient Blackwomen” reveal about the lived experience of being Black and a woman under Apartheid South Africa.The article by Siseko Kumalo infuses decolonial and literary criticism as projects that may allow for a recognition of the “ontological legitimacy” of amaqaba (those who rejected colonial influences and education). Through a close reading of S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Intshayelelo: Imbali, the article engages with the question How does a model of inclusive national identity in South Africa, once established, get us to the point of recognition for the Indigene? (shrink)

Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on “whiteness” in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of disciplines. A small number of philosophers, critical race theorists, postcolonial theorists, (...) social historians, and cultural studies scholars have revisited and reexamined questions of race and identity with an analysis that now focuses on historical studies of racial formation and the deconstruction of whiteness as an unmarked privilege-granting category and system of dominance. Collectively, these writings identify whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical, economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and relations of white supremacy (Mills 2003). In this way, whiteness studies is a conscious attempt to think critically about how white supremacy continues to operate systemically, and sometimes unconsciously, as a global colonizing force. -/- We extended the notion of ‘reproduction’ to include practices of reading and cultural forms of reiteration, but shied away from making the special issue into a philosophically driven cultural studies volume. Our volume is interdisciplinary by necessity: it offers theoretical and philosophical perspectives grounded in a variety of disciplinary starting points, all of which illustrate how whiteness remains at the center of reproduction and social regulation. Our hope is that this volume will further open philosophical conversations on the ways white supremacy regulates gender by providing new ways of thinking through those histories and reproductive materialities that make whiteness simultaneously a centrally defining signifier of bodies, values, and meanings and a signifier coding the “normal,”“the pure” and “the real” in white supremacist thinking. -/- We have categorized the contributions to this collection into three major areas: Resistance, Genealogies, and Miscegenation and Purity. These serve as both a guide for the reader's pathway through the volume and as a way of interconnecting the essays, although the intertextuality of all these writings also provides a rich field of rhizomic offshoots and a deeper connectivity. (shrink)

Resumo: Apresenta-se, neste texto, a perspectiva de uma crítica da modernidade, por parte do pensamento indígena brasileiro, a partir da sua denúncia da modernização como movimento expansivo totalizante que tem, na imbricação de eurocentrismo-colonialismo-racismo e/como fascismo, seu núcleo estruturante e dinamizador. Defende-se a proposta de um pensamento-práxis indígena que oferece uma explicação alternativa da modernização, enquanto guerra de colonização calcada no racismo estrutural e tendo como consequência o etnocídio-genocídio planificado, o qual também propõe um papel epistêmico-político-normativo aos indígenas, por eles (...) e desde suas formas de ser e estar no mundo, a saber, pacificar o branco. Com isso, inverte-se uma tripla lógica da modernidade: a modernidade como uma perspectiva endógena, autorreferencial e autossubsistente; a modernidade como movimento expansivo linear e reto, rumo ao universalismo pós-tradicional - e como universalismo pós-tradicional - via racionalidade cultural-comunicativa; e a modernidade como a condição exclusiva e necessária da crítica da modernização, da crítica do outro da modernidade e do sustento de uma noção universal de direitos humanos, os quais os outros da modernidade não conseguiriam gerar e nem sustentar.: We develop the perspective of a criticism of modernity by Brazilian Indigenous thinking, from its denounce of modernization as an expansive and totalizing movement that has in the imbrication of eurocentrism-colonialism-racism and/as fascism its structuring and streamlining core. We will argue the proposal of an Indigenous thinking-praxis that offers and alternative explanation of modernity as war of colonization based on structural racism and having as consequence the institutional ethnocide-genocide against Indigenous and Blacks; and also that proposes an epistemic-political-normative role to Indigenous since their forms of being in the world, that is, to pacify the White man. Therefore, we have the inversion of a triple logic of modernity: the modernity as an endogenous, self-referential and self-subsistent perspective; the modernity as a lineal and direct expansive movement towards post-traditional universalism - and as post-traditional universalism - from cultural-communicative rationalization; and the modernity as the exclusive and necessary condition for the criticism of modernity, for the criticism of the others of modernity and for the basement of an universal notion of human rights, tasks that the others of modernity cannot generate or sustain. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in (...) the discourse. INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

This article addresses the question as to whether it is logically possible to fashion a discourse exclusively for the natural environment. Could such a discourse emerge without colonization by other social spheres acting as proxy? The prospects appear to be rather bleak, for even in the case of two apparently non-human-directed or non-committal discourses, that of extensionist ethics and new sophisticated management (of environmental crises), the latent social-constructionism built into both renders them monistic discourses hegemonically mapping the territories of (...) what they refer to. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the human epistemic locatedness anti-anthropocentric critics demand. Despite this, such an exercise offers us the benefit of being mindful of what the crisis of social-scientific discourses amounts to as well as what to expect of discourse analysis as such. Furthermore, the prospects of the two discourses examined are being mapped onto two modified models drawing on Foucault and Deleuze thus helping us understand the pattern of our diverse environmental responses. Ecological thinking is perhaps the first subject-matter that transcends or shatters discourse boundaries and strains both imagination and human powers when selecting between conceptual frameworks, making us aware of the ineluctable feature of social-constructionism present in our social thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result (...) of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge. (shrink)

Sexual and racial differences matter. Indeed, facile assumptions of sameness born from the desire to claim universal truths persist as a dangerous tendency. Difference matters and we have yet to fully understand what difference means. But claims of absolute difference have a history of justifying colonization and recently can justify slipping into indifference about people with different embodiment. In philosophy of race’s emphasis that race has ontological significance, such emphasis on difference can leave differently racialized and sexualized people living (...) in isolation from each other. Absolute sameness and absolute difference are not true to phenomenological experience. Philosophy has long debated the relation between identity and difference, from its metaphysical origin in the relation between monism and dualism, to Hegel’s formulation of a dialectical relation between identity and difference. But the idea of an identity-in-difference explores a more immediate relation between the two. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work explores the idea of an identity-in-difference throughout his phenomenology in both its epistemic and ontologic senses. This paper explores at least four instantiations of the relation of identity-in-difference in Merleau-Ponty’s work to argue for upholding the value of both difference and sameness in developing our understanding of race. (shrink)

Historically critical reflection on whiteness in the United States has been a long-standing practice in slave folklore and in Mexican resistance to colonialism, Asian American struggles against exploitation and containment, and Native American stories of contact with European colonizers. Drawing from this legacy and from the disturbing silence on "whiteness" in postsecondary institutions, critical whiteness scholarship has emerged in the past two decades in U.S. academies in a variety of disciplines. A small number of philosophers, critical race theorists, postcolonial theorists, (...) social historians, and cultural studies scholars have revisited and reexamined questions of race and identity with an analysis that now focuses on historical studies of racial formation and the deconstruction of whiteness as an unmarked privilege-granting category and system of dominance. Collectively, the writings in this volume identify whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical, economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and relations of white supremacy (Mills 2003). In this way, whiteness studies is a conscious attempt to think critically about how white supremacy continues to operate systemically, and sometimes unconsciously, as a global colonizing force. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing Universality:Postcolonial Theory and the Quandary of Ethical AgencyEsha Niyogi De (bio)Living in colonial India, the Bengali thinker and creative writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) often meditated on ways that "concord" (milan) and "harmony" (sāmanjasya) could be established between persons and cultures [BIC 450-51]. Noting that "ruptures in balance and harmony" (bhār sāmanjasyer abhāv) that once were more localized now affected the whole world, he maintained that these reinforced the (...) progressive message of the modern age that the local "problems of a people are a part and parcel of humankind's" (swajātir samasyā samasta mānusher samasyār antargata) [RC 279]. In his view, the means to reestablish harmony in this unequal world lay in social practices and ideas conducing "freedom" (mukti) rather than enforcing "power" (shakti) and "coercive discipline" (shāsan) [SaS 408-09]. He argued that such progressive trends of practice and thought would be found not in one culture alone but through traveling across different cultural "seas of knowledge (jnān)" [SwSm 699]. For only through such conceptual journeys would we enkindle in ourselves "arguments with and doubts about" (yukti tarka o sandeher udbhav) our own cultures, and also learn from all the "voyagers in the path of progress" (unnatipather yātri) who emerge in different locations and times [SJ 39-40].As these comments reveal, Rabindranath maintained that inequalities could be rectified by making individual and collective norms and actions accountable to and measurable in terms of a speculative notion of universal humanity. While alert to the injustices proliferating from European colonization, he insisted that coercive practices and imbalances of power could not be entirely localized, and that in order to correct multiple forms of coercion we must seek across cultures and societies for (partial) achievements of human freedom and harmony. In so viewing transcultural negotiations of a common humane proclivity as the means to decolonize the world, Rabindranath did not stand alone but in a diverse company of anti-imperialist thinkers who adapted modern humanism to their ends: W. E. B. Dubois—who lauded Rabindranath's appropriation of [End Page 42] such liberal notions as democracy and equal opportunity "for greater ends" than were allowed by the "inconsistencies" of a racist European perspective [74]—Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and from Rabindranath's own colonial context, the Bengali Anarchist poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (to name but a few). Reflecting upon worldwide experiences of subjection, these radical modern intellectuals tried above all to avoid reinventing separatism by declaring non-Western cultures to be unilaterally superior to Western imperialist culture. Driven by an activist ethics, they attempted instead to correct the roots of separatism through objectively evaluating, against a common frame of reference, right and wrong, relatively successful or failed practices of human empowerment and community.In this essay, I consider if and how we could characterize as "postcolonial" these evaluative ethics that rationally seek to correct coercive relations between persons and societies through referring to an affirmative idea of a human nature shared by all. If we take postcolonial agency to rest on a thorough critique of and resistance to all political and epistemic maneuvers that subordinate or exclude people and cultures, might this form of resistant agency reside in the ethical normativity of anti-imperialist humanism? This question elicits conflicting responses from contemporary postcolonial theorists.The argument, on the one hand, is that if postcolonial theory is to ethically address the multiple and interlocked hierarchies of a postimperial world, it indeed must take into account how people mobilize against separatism by working through critiques of ethnic divisiveness to negotiate a common human ground. Commenting on the universalism of thinkers such as Rabindranath Tagore and W. E. B. DuBois, Edward Said, for example, suggests that "vital" critiques of chauvinistic separatism arise only from viewing "local identity as not exhaustive" but as elaborating in reference to "larger, more generous realities of community between cultures, peoples, and societies" [Culture and Imperialism 217, 229]. His implication is that only through evaluating ourselves on the basis of a notion of noncoercive universality are we able to think against the identity politics that pervade our world, stemming at once from a nativist... (shrink)

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in (...) the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought. (shrink)

Hind Swaraj by Mahatma Gandhi is arguably the greatest text to have emerged from the anti-colonial movement in India and the first to seriously challenge the cultural and civilizational premises of the colonizers' mentality. It is also the first text in India that falls within the broad tradition of modern political philosophy, advancing a complex cluster of theses with conceptual sensitivity, analytical precision, and sustained argument. This book critically engages with Hind Swaraj and explores the fascinating and subtle dialogue set (...) up by Gandhi between the characters of the reader and the editor. With essays from leading contemporary thinkers on Gandhi, the volume looks at themes such as Gandhi on epistemic servitude, decolonization and intercultural translation; his complex critique of modern civilization, his views on the empire; democracy, citizenship and violence; the normative structure of Gandhian thought; Gandhi and the political praxis of educational reconstruction and how to read this text. An important intervention in Gandhian studies, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of peace studies, political philosophy, Indian philosophy, Indian political thought, political sociology, and South Asian studies. (shrink)

There Are No Facts examines the uncommon ground we share in a post-truth world. It unpacks how attentive algorithms and extractive data practices are shaping space, influencing behavior and colonizing everyday life. Articulating post-truth territory as an architectural and infrastructural condition, it shows how these spatial architectures of attention and datamining are in turn situated within broader histories of empiricism, objectivity, science, colonialism and perception. These entanglements of people and data, code and space, knowledge and power are considered across scales (...) ranging from the trans-locality of the home to the planetary extent of the COVID-19 pandemic, with stops along the way at the corner bodega, a neighborhood for the proverbial 1%, a waterfront district in Toronto, and a national election. Through an introduction, nine chapters and a coda, the book addresses the erosion of a common ground on which truth claims were once negotiated and the epistemic fragmentation that results. It probes how these socio-technical systems bracket what we know about the world, how they construe our agency to act within it, and how they shape these spaces that, in turn, shape us. (shrink)

i am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Josina Vink’s rich paper on “Designing for Plurality in Democracy by Building Reflexivity.” Vink suggests that design has its roots in pragmatism and that by returning to them, design can improve itself by becoming more pluralistic and less colonizing in its effects. Focusing on health care systems in particular, Vink emphasizes reflexivity as crucial for the decolonizing of design. As Vink argues, reflexivity can help cultivate epistemic humility on the (...) part of designers, acknowledge the important role of embodiment in design practices and outcomes, reject allegedly universal approaches to solving design problems, and recognize that the tools of design are not... (shrink)

Abstract If the question of the humanity of “the other“ may become a question, and not be reinscribed into Western colonizing patterns of thought, then its issuing must concern a limit (always arising beyond Western thought), a delimitation of existence that is risked and put at risk without recourse to the project or operation of that colonizing thought that situates it. Ideas of subjectivity, agency, and power-knowledge potential for progress, as well as rationalist instrumental thought used to recognize those peoples (...) and cultures excluded and oppressed under the Western Modern tradition, must be put into question by the very agents claiming recognition, as well as the epistemic structures that sustain these concepts and the dispositions and subconscious expectations constituted by the colonizing practices of bodies and imaginaries that project the very horizons of one's existence. (shrink)

This essay contextualizes the Dantean figure of Ulysses, as conceived by Yuri M. Lotman, and draws this key figure of modernity into a network of mutually interconnected discourses: primarily transhumanist visions of the human future in space, which nevertheless arise from the specifically modern epistemic dimension of “restlessness,” and intertwine with post-war astronautics, cyborg visions of human re-engineering, and revolutionary considerations of speculative realism. The key is Lotman’s emphasis on Ulysses as a figure of “energy of thought”; in this (...) regard, the essay shows how the original poetic “decision,” embodied by the Ulysses figure, advocates implicit cruelty in the name of the future (treated as an inevitable fate), and how this decision generates a logical and progressively unfolding series of “inhuman” images of man situated in the universe as an event of saturation of matter with merciless intelligence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dekoloniales Philosophieren. Versuch über philosophische Verantwortung und Kritik im Horizont der europäischen Expansion by Rolf ElberfeldAdy Van den Stock (bio)Dekoloniales Philosophieren. Versuch über philosophische Verantwortung und Kritik im Horizont der europäischen Expansion. By Rolf Elberfeld. Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag Hildesheim; Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2021. Pp. 244. Paperback €19.80, isbn 978-3-487-16042-9. Calls for the decolonization of knowledge have come to resound far beyond the walls of institutes (...) of higher education in recent years and are tied up with a much broader quest for social justice in various domains of social life. If to decolonize presupposes taking a stance in relation to the history and ongoing effects of colonialism in different societies across the globe, decolonizing the academic discipline of philosophy would first of all involve dragging it out of the safety of its conventional epistemic and institutional confines in order to face up to past and present realities usually considered to be tangential to its primary concerns and interests. In taking its cue from the historical entwinement of (modern Western) philosophy with colonial practices and experiences of colonization, Rolf Elberfeld's Decolonial Philosophizing: Toward Philosophical Responsibility and Critique in the Horizon of the European Expansion approaches this "negative history" (Negativgeschichte, p. 14) as belying the categorical separation between genesis and validity, which the author sees as being at the heart of the analytical tradition dominating academic philosophy in Germany and beyond (pp. 11, 19–20). For Elberfeld, philosophy in general has tended to "immunize" itself against its own entanglement (Verstrickung) with the historical reality of colonialism. In his view, a prevailing disavowal of the latter's relevance for philosophical practice has made it hard, if not impossible, to come to terms with phenomena of exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization in the history of philosophy and has prevented us from subjecting these "blind spots" to a thoroughly reflexive critique (pp. 11–18). As a result, the kind of justifiable anger expressed by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950) when he writes that colonialism has effectively made European civilization "untenable" (quoted on p. 13) cannot be taken as seriously as it deserves, insofar as it is seen as merely being of "historical" (or worse: "anecdotal") instead of properly "philosophical" relevance. By contrast, in Elberfeld's view, the historical entanglement of philosophy and colonialism is not merely, to paraphrase Adorno, a shameful "splinter in our eye" with the [End Page 1] somewhat limited function of provoking moral outrage or a blanket condemnation of all things "Western" (see pp. 14, 40, 83), but can also serve as a "magnifying glass"1 allowing philosophers to come to a better understanding of the history of their own discipline and thus break new ground. He argues that it is only by taking Césaire's pronouncement seriously, that is to say, by first of all patiently listening to (pp. 12, 219, 221) and thinking through such indictments, that the (European-all-too-European?) project of the Enlightenment can be salvaged and carried further. For Elberfeld, "Enlightenment" (Aufklärung) must now both recognize and arise from within its historically entangled (verstrickungsgeschichtliche) nature. Instead of unilaterally declaring its independence from history, it must now become, as the delightful but quasi-untranslatable German expression goes, verstrickungsgeschichtliche Aufklärung (pp. 9, 17, 209–218). If, then, the project of "decolonial philosophizing" is more than mere virtue-signaling, this is because it allows us to "know better," that is to say, enhances our capacity for assuming "epistemic responsibility."2Despite the complexity and contentious nature of its subject matter, Rolf Elberfeld has succeeded in producing an eminently readable and highly nuanced book which can serve as a good introduction to some of the most important topics and problems relevant to what has been dubbed the "decolonial turn" in philosophy and the humanities more broadly speaking. In twelve relatively brief chapters, the reader is taken on a journey across several continents and cultures through a period roughly spanning the symbolic date of 1492—which the author, following Enrique Dussel, sees as marking the birth of "modernity" (pp. 25–26)—up to the present day. Reflecting the basic... (shrink)

Rousseau has always had an uncertain relationship with the theory of constituent power. On the one hand, his distrust of political representation and support for popular sovereignty seem consistent with the idea of the people as a legally unlimited constitution-maker. On the other hand, if, from those views about representation and sovereignty, it follows that Rousseau is a proponent of direct democracy, then there seems to be no place in his thought for a theory that presupposes, above all, a separation (...) between those who exercise a delegated authority and those who possess an original constitution-making power. In a legal order in which all laws must be directly made by the people, such a separation is absent: the constituent and the legislative body are one and the same. It is therefore not surprising that Rousseau’s name is largely absent from contemporary literature on constituent power. In this article, however, I will show that once Rousseau’s particular conception of law, as well as his distinction between sovereignty and government, are properly understood, one finds in his work not only the first major formulation of the theory of constituent power, but also a careful exploration of its implications for actual constitutional practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Problem with BreathÉglantine Colon (bio)On day 1, when my comrades and I talked about it, we couldn't quite figure out how it happened. It just seemed as though we had suddenly been incited not to communicate or enact our love for each other. This time, no policy had been formulated, no law had been issued. It was harder than usual to locate where, to which parts of the (...) apparatus, we should direct our attention.On day 2, we were at a loss. We had gotten so good at reading the apparatus. We had developed wonderfully efficient techniques of resistance. Each and every one of us had become most brilliant at crafting discrete gestures of love. On day 3 onwards, we were misfiring on a regular basis, falling in and out of love with the same wrong comrades, over and over again, and always out of sync. The loving gestures we composed were barely legible and when we would intuitively find a genre in which to communicate our love, something would inevitably break down. Voices, generally. Sometimes the entire figurative system. Bodies, always. We would lose sleep and appetite over love and get useless for weeks.And then, the problem with love became a problem with breath. On day 6, the air got hot and busy with ashes and all sunsets turned red. At every breath, for all we knew, we could be inhaling particles of carbonized pine sap, debris of melted trailer parts, or burnt baby birds in bits. I quit smoking. I bought boxes of white masks at the construction store. The dominant smell during these days was a cagey mix of ghost paint, polymer fibers, and dry chemistry.On day 17, the air got cold and saturated with drops of viral poison. The city shut down. An incredibly sad number of lungs, too. The perspective to live in pods and die alone, disconnected from each other's breath, hyper-connected to life-support machines, plunged many of us, myself included, into brand new strands of historical despair. For those of us whose lungs had been weakened by bad inner-city fumes, evil chemicals, or entire centuries of racialized exposure to horrendous air quality, the problem with breath became plain lethal.Our neighborhoods were saturated with wildfire smoke and unnecessary death. Elsewhere, the streets were not empty. And when I say not empty, I mean they were just not. Or not yet. Usual metallic densities on the bridge. Geometrical glows of digital light in the underground. [End Page 237]Abnormally, no bodies of any ancestries were being captured, or hanged, or tortured, or kneeled upon. Nothing tangible, nothing blatantly repressive this time. No gas, no gag, no name, no whip, no rope. No strangulating remnant of sovereignty within no softness of biopower. A racist and classist brand of distributive pneumocracy is what it was, or at least this is how it initially appeared.On day 25, "Critical Pandemic Studies" became a thing, and "Pod Theory" a subgenre in post-social anthropology. Denounced as a "white fantasy of networked individualism," (in one of its purest forms) as "domestic fascism dressed as elective affinity," the pod appeared to us, from the get-go, as a thoroughly ratchet social formation. On day 29, the "podtag" emerged as a timely intervention in existing forms of street art. Equational in its form, efficient in its power of evocation, and satirical in its poetic economy, the podtag proliferated on the privatized walls of neighborhoods where the biggest challenges presented to breathing were unreasonably difficult Pilates classes on Zoom. Click for larger view View full resolutionOn day 35, the air got complex and full of knots, so striated that we could no longer count on our capacity to share the same air. A meal was being cooked, an instrument was being played, a child was given birth to, and suddenly the rhythm of all breaths would break. Sometimes a pair of lungs would refuse, stubbornly, to take in any oxygen until someone else's pair of lungs had released its own dose of carbon dioxide. At other times, the quantity of air available to each one of us would decrease with... (shrink)

El conjunto de ensayos que el lector tiene entre sus manos expresa un cuerpo sistemático de ideas provocadoras sobre la tensión entre el constitucionalismo y la democracia. Su autor, el profesor Joel Colón-Ríos, boricua, formado en las dos facultades de derecho canadienses de mayor renombre, e investigador de una de las mejores universidades de Oceanía, las ha fraguado a lo largo de más de un lustro y debatido con gran éxito ante la elite intelectual de Norteamérica. La propuesta central del (...) libro es una original reivindicación de la democracia frente al constitucionalismo. Su institucionalización consiste en un constitucionalismo débil. La piedra angular de este modelo es una constitución inacabada, permanentemente abierta al cambio, que permite y promueve la participación y la deliberación popular continua, en particular, mediante el potencial ejercicio del poder constituyente en cualquier momento. De esta manera, el pueblo tiene la posibilidad de hablar por sí mismo cuando lo juzgue pertinente. Puede cuestionar y reformular los principios básicos de la organización social. No está supeditado a las decisiones adoptadas por los ancestros que expidieron la Constitución, ni por sus representantes que, en el Congreso, ostentan el poder de reformarla. Precio: 49.000 pesos. (shrink)

Salomón de la Selva (1893-1959) was a Nicaraguan writer/activist who authored many books of verse in Spanish, but only one in English: TropicalTown, And Other Poems (1918). Published in New York by John Lane–and regarded by Silvio Sirias as the first book of English verse published in the U.S.by a Latin American–Tropical Town exhibits a curious dynamic of avantgarde impulse: radically subversive in invoking counter-politics resisting U.S. colonial transnationalism, yet tending toward inherited, traditional aesthetic forms of poetry meant to legitimize (...) Selva’s Latin American identity with an impression of authority that contiguous Modernist experimental poetries could not. Through its sympathy for the U.S. immigrant’s nostalgia for homeland, coupled with express disapproval of U.S. international affairs, Tropical Town leaves a poetic record that challenges presuppositions about the integral relationships between ethos, aesthetics, and consciousness vis-à-vis assumed understandings of what constitutes radical poetry in the Modernist moment. (shrink)

As we have discussed elsewhere, Franz Boas and John Dewey were intellectual and political allies at Columbia University for over thirty years.1 Dewey advocated for an increased role of anthropology for philosophical insight, and he often used anthropological knowledge as a starting point for his ethics and politics, including such knowledge as learned from Boas. We hold that Boas and Dewey shared a common core understanding of human global and evolutionary diversity, and that this shared understanding itself forms a core (...) component of their progressive projects.However, with regard to the problem of racism in the United States, Boas and Dewey had different engagements. Boas made the questioning... (shrink)