Decolonizing Knowledge: An Epistemographical Mise en Place

 

Decolonizing Knowledge: An Epistemographical Mise en Place Dan Wood1

This is the English version of: “Descolonizar el conocimiento: una mise en place epistemográfica.” Tabubla Rasa: Revista de Humanidades Numero 27 (Diciembre, 2017). Please reference the published version. Thank you.

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Adjunct professor and PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy, Villanova University.

 

Abstract: In this essay I analyze and chart a number of the different conceptual and philosophical issues pertinent to discourses concerning ‘epistemic decolonization.’ Such discussions occur across a wide range of disciplines and often involve equivocations and/or overt disagreements about fundamental issues. This piece offers one account of why epistemic (de)colonization is a problem in the first place and brings to light some of the key differences between a number of different approaches to the decolonization of knowledge. The present clarification, I argue, is crucial to linking projects of theoretical decolonization to concrete political programs and to overcoming a prima facie approach to decolonizing knowledge. Keywords: Decolonization; epistemic decolonization; anticolonialism; politics of knowledge; decolonial theory

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  I. Why Decolonize Knowledge? The word ‘decolonization’ is understood in many ways, and the term ‘knowledge’ is understood in perhaps more ways. The conjunction of these terms acts as a large pocket, “into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once.”2 So the meaning of epistemic decolonization is not only not self-evident, but also contains an enormous number of possible interpretations and requires much intellectual work for the sake of analysis, clarification, and political strategizing. In this sense Achille Mbembe was entirely correct when in a speech in Johannesburg, addressing the issue of decolonizing knowledge, he said, the questions we face are of a profoundly intellectual nature. They are also colossal. And if we do not foreground them intellectually in the first instance; if we do not develop a complex understanding of the nature of what we are actually facing, we will end up with the same old technobureaucratic fixes that have led us, in the first place, to the current cul-de-sac…The harder I tried to make sense of “decolonization” that has become the rallying cry for those trying to undo the racist legacies of the past, the more I kept asking myself to what extent we might be fighting a complexly mutating entity with concepts inherited from an entirely different age and epoch. Is today’s university the same as yesterday’s or are we confronting an entirely different apparatus, an entirely different rationality—both of which require us to produce radically new concepts?3

Adopting divergent points of departure, attempts at decolonizing knowledge are and have been underway for quite some time, and such processes have been named and gestured toward in such a way as to bring to the fore real and politically important asymmetrical relations of power between colonized and colonizing politico-semiotic and epistemic systems. Yet in addition to the conceptual ambiguities that arise in the conjunction of the concepts of ‘knowledge’ and ‘decolonization,’ the term ‘knowledge’ proves to be in itself quite invidious and contentious,4 while the term ‘decolonization’ is typically considered desirable in an undefined and unqualified way. Unfortunately, the conjunction of both concepts only multiplies and intensifies the affective and theoretical issues that tend to underlie these concepts when treated by themselves in everyday language. In other words, the conceptual problems intimated by Mbembe are always bound up with a variety of competing affects and desires between groups, and this doubly complicates the question of how to adequately approach the topic at hand from a philosophical point of view. Taken broadly, there have been a variety of approaches to the discursive and political thematic of decolonizing knowledge, as well as an exponentially increasing number investigations into the decolonization of disciplines, thinking, methodologies, and the mind. For example, theorists such as Seloua Luste Boulbina, Lewis Gordon, Amita Dhanda, Archana Parashar, and others speak explicitly about decolonizing knowledge.5 Some scholars have even spoken of                                                                                                             2

Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 160. Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”, 8. 4 For a characterization of knowledge as invidious, see Williams, Problems of Knowledge, 11. 5 If one includes not only those texts that mention the decolonization of knowledge, but also relevant claims to decolonizing disciplines, theory, thought, methodologies, reason, and the mind, one can see how vast such a literature is becoming. For a non-exhaustive set of examples, see Boulbina, “La décolonisation des saviors et ses théories voyageuses”; Morgensen, Spaces Between Us; Dhanda and Parashar, “Introduction: Decolonisation of Knowledge: Whose Responsibility?”; Gordon, “Fanon on Decolonizing Knowledge”; Gordon, “Problematic People and Epistemic Decolonization”; Diversi and Moreira, Betweener Talk; Wiredu, Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy; Apffel-Marglin, Decolonizing Knowledge; Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, “Introduction: Opening Up the Canon of Knowledge and the Recognition of Difference”; Dussel, “Meditaciones anticartesianas”; 3

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  decolonizing not just knowledge but also the politics of knowledge (which is presumably an entirely different target).6 On the other hand, various people engaged in political processes of decolonization have oriented their actions with assumptions about what counts as knowledge, and how one should understand the relation of knowledge to broader decolonial concerns. For instance, while Léopold Senghor does not use the phrase ‘decolonizing knowledge,’ he nonetheless—at least early on—endorses a form of negritude in which rationality functions as a specifically Western characteristic in contrast to Africa’s putative rhythmic essence. Here, “Emotion, rhythm, and sympathy with the object are themselves processes of knowing that are more effective, if only because they are more ethical, than the invasive dissection which the Enlightenment represented as the only means of true knowledge.”7 This belief inevitably affected Senghor’s other political, theoretical, associational, and artistic commitments—commitments which others involved in African political decolonization vehemently rejected. Before proceeding to a characterization of the different ways in which the decolonization of knowledge is and has been conceived, we should begin by getting a sense of the problem at hand. Since in most cases projects of epistemic decolonization begin from a hermeneutics of suspicion—in which some forms of or claims to knowledge are variously understood to be directly connected to processes of colonization and criticized/contested on cultural, epistemological, ethical, sociological, geopolitical, and/or other relevant grounds—we should understand why such suspicions and intuitions arise in the first place. I propose that an interpretation of Augusto Monterroso’s short story, “El Eclipse,” provokes some of the central issues that those concerned                                                                                                             Mills, Decolonizing Global Mental Health; Sandoval, Lagunas, Montelongo, and Díaz, “Aboriginal Knowledge Systems”; Oland, Hart, and Frink, Decolonizing Indigenous Histories; Jones, Decolonizing International Relations; Mohanty, Feminism without Borders; Allen, The End of Progress; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Kangas and Salmenniemi, “Decolonizing Knowledge”; Wood, “Descolonizando las Historias Biopolíticas con Amílcar Cabral”; Wood, “Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism”; Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology; Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi, Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa; Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics; Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native; Hoppe and Nicholls, Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy; Mignolo and Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option; Oduwole, The Concept of Truth in an African Language; Young, White Mythologies, 158; Isasi-Díaz, Decolonizing Epistemologies; Geniusz, Our Knowledge is Not Primitive; Pieterse, The Decolonization of Imagination; Santos, Epistemologies of the South; Adjei, “Decolonising Knowledge Production”; Simpson, “Aboriginal Peoples and Knowledge”; Bitter, “Decolonizing Ecology through Rerooting Epistemologies”; Bañales, “Decolonizing Being, Knowledge, and Power”; Garcia, “(Un)learning Indigeniety and Decolonizing Knowledge in the Andes”; Skafish, “The Metaphysics of Extra-Moderns,” Whelshula, Healing through Decolonization; Fernandes, Ruptura epistêmica, decolonialidade e povos indígenas; Arowosegbe, Decolonising the social sciences in the global South; Boulbina, Décoloniser les savoirs; Estrada, “Indigenous Maya Knowledge and the Possibility of Decolonizing Education in Guatemala”; Eudey, “Decolonizing Knowledge”; Sherwood, Do No Harm; and Vergès, “To Cure and to Free: The Fanonian Project of ‘Decolonized Psychiatry.’” 6 Denzin and Giardina, Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge. 7 Adeeko, “Trends in African Literature,” 306. Senghor defines Négritude as “the ensemble of black Africa’s cultural values” and “the whole of economic and political, intellectual and moral, artistic, and social values not only of the peoples of Africa but also of the black minorities of America, and indeed Asia and Oceania.” This macro view of the unity of African and diasporic cultural values as well Senghor’s roles in the French government and support for the French war in Algeria signal the strikingly different way in which he understood ‘decolonization’ from figures such as, e.g., Ho Chi Minh or Frantz Fanon. Adi and Sherwood, Pan-African History, 170-171. For other brief comparisons, see Wood, “Marxian Displacements”, 34-37. Unlike some contemporary scholars, Senghor does not wholly abandon the question of the possibility of a scientific socialism in regard to the question of decolonization. See Senghor, “Pour une Relecture Africaine de Marx et d’Engels” and Senghor, “Socialisme et liberté.” For critical assessments of Senghor’s thought, see Uwodi, La Philosophie et l’africanité, 68 and 77; Rabaka, The Negritude Movement; and McCulloch, “Negritude,” in Black Soul, White Artifact.

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  with the decolonization of knowledge face. The questions that arise from this narrative exceed its imagined socio-historical context, and its depth and merit in large part derive from its ability to speak to issues that arise in a variety of colonial contexts. Rather than privilege one method or strategy of epistemic decolonization as exemplary, I begin by exploring some of the basic, interpretive possibilities faced by most interested in such problematics. A short story of historical fiction by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, “El Eclipse,” brings to the fore numerous issues pertinent to the anticolonial politics of knowledge. The story might be thought of as a parable concerning colonial epistemic geopolitics, yet, like all parables, it will prove to not only have one definitive interpretation. Reading and analyzing this story foregrounds the many motivational and conceptual issues that give rise to attempts to decolonize knowledge in the first place. It offers a vividly depicted scene concerning the use of knowledge in a colonial confrontation, opening an introductory space for hermeneutical experimentation. In this sense, reading “El Eclipse” allows one to grasp the “Why” that subtends projects of epistemic decolonization. When Brother Bartolomé Arrazola felt that he was lost, he accepted the fact that now nothing could save him. The powerful jungle of Guatemala, implacable and final, had overwhelmed him. In the face of his topographical ignorance he sat down calmly to wait for death. He wanted to die there, without hope, alone, his thoughts fixed on distant Spain, particularly on the Convent of Los Abrojos, where Charles V had once condescended to come down from his eminence to tell him that he trusted in the religious zeal of his work of redemption. When he awoke he found himself surrounded by a group of Indians with impassive faces who were preparing to sacrifice him before an altar, an altar that seemed to Bartolomé the bed on which he would finally rest from his fears, from his destiny, from himself. Three years in the country had given him a passing knowledge of the native languages. He tried something. He spoke a few words that were understood. Then there blossomed in him an idea which he considered worthy of his talent and his broad education and his profound knowledge of Aristotle. He remembered that a total eclipse of the sun was to take place that day. And he decided, in the deepest part of his being, to use that knowledge to deceive his oppressors and save his life. “If you kill me,” he said, “I can make the sun darken on high.” The Indians stared at him and Bartolomé caught the disbelief in their eyes. He saw them consult with one another and he waited confidently, not without a certain contempt. Two hours later the heart of Brother Bartolomé Arrazola spurted out its passionate blood on the sacrificing stone (brilliant in the opaque light of the eclipsed sun) while one of the Indians recited tonelessly, slowly, one by one, the infinite list of dates when solar and lunar eclipses would take place, which the astronomers of the Mayan community had predicted and registered in their codices without the estimable help of Aristotle.8

I first want to offer what the moral of this story would seem to be at face value, which I take to capture many of the valuative, affective, epistemic, cultural, and political commitments of those implicitly or explicitly engaged in epistemic decolonization. I will refer to this reading as the                                                                                                             8

Monterroso, Complete Works and Other Stories, 29-30.

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  “prima facie approach,” and will generalize this naming to include any similar understanding of the problems presented by the interaction of (de)colonization and knowing. After this, I argue that many questions remain that point to the need to engage this narrative at another level. This set of questions will bring to the fore the need to rethink the problems involved in the overlap of colonization and knowledge beyond this story’s ostensible lesson. Taken at face value, this short story constitutes a creative exercise in cultural memory and tragic irony. It allows one to remember the violence and arrogance of Spanish colonization, which was not only physical, social, and economic, but also an imposition of systems of knowledge. The Mayans already had (astronomical) systems of knowledge prior to European colonization. The missionary, Fray Bartolomé, makes use of the only two forms of knowledge that the reader knows he possesses—passing knowledge (‘dominio’) of the native languages and knowledge of Aristotelian astronomy—to trick his captors. Knowledge here is deployed for the sake of the preservation of the life of a Spanish, Catholic authority 1. with the intent to mislead the indigenous individuals present, 2. with the presumption that these indigenous individuals do not have an equally effective system for the prediction of certain sidereal phenomena, and 3. with the assumption that the indigenous individuals will not recognize the deception at play. In many ways these three dimensions summarize the experience of the role of knowledge in European colonization in general. Much taught to indigenous individuals was directed to the end of conversion or “civilization,” with the prior colonialist assumption that such individuals needed such knowledge and, furthermore, did not know that they needed such knowledge. But such colonial pedagogy was in every instance only about the preservation-enhancement of Europeans and the control of non-Europeans. Knowledge was a means to the end of blood-soaked mercantilist capital, and, moreover, both astronomical systems were able to predict eclipses.9 In the plot’s dénouement, and after having likely misinterpreted the Mayans’ ‘disbelief,’ Fray Bartolomé turns out to be ignorant, arrogant, and powerless. The universality of European culture and knowledge is revealed as a sham, and the typical relation of knowledge and power in the colonial world reverses with the irony of retributive justice. Monterroso’s story reveals that what the colonizing missionary brings and conveys as good and true is in fact false and malignant. The author demonstrates through literature what Frantz Fanon refers to as the general “lie of the colonial situation.”10 Bartolomé conveys his knowledge of Aristotelian astronomy through a self-deifying lie, namely, that he can and will make the sun darken on high.11 Astronomically accurate predictions are thus filtered through an arrogance that changes the meaning and social function of the claim, which crosses the sociopolitical boundary separating the colonizer from the colonized in the form of covert dissimulation. In terms of José Medina’s epistemology of resistance, Bartolomé’s utterances and sense of entitlement would likely                                                                                                             9

See also, Bricker and Bricker, Astronomy in the Maya Codices. The constitutive and ironic arrogance of Iberian colonialism is best exemplified in Cortes’ sincere and repeated pronouncements against theft and anthropophagy to autochthonous Amerindians. He and his men typically set out after ritually consuming the body and blood of their own human-god, had in fact dedicated their lives to piracy and expropriation, and removed the “hideous” sacred statues of natives only to demand the worship of an instrument of torture (a cross). One should also not forget the astrology brought into the heart of Tenochtitlan by the earliest conquistadors. See Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, 301-02. 10 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 14; Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 128; and Fanon, “Rencontre de la société et de la psychiatrie”, in Écrits, 442. 11 The decolonial critique of Western knowledge as self-deifying finds expression, among other places, in Grosfoguel, “Descolonizando los Universalismos Occidentales”; Dussel, Philososphy of Liberation, 8 and 100; Maldonado-Torres, Against War, 113ff; and Visvanathan, “Between Cosmology and System: The Heuristics of a Dissenting Imagination”, 191.

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  count as betraying an underlying vice of epistemic arrogance.12 In the colonial context, knowledge possessed by the colonizer always functions to bolster various colonialist systems. One can see this everywhere from the Americas in the 16th century to 19th century India and early/mid-20th century Africa. But it turns out that Fray Bartolomé’s knowledge is doubly useless because it finds an equal contender in Mayan astronomy. On this reading, the moral of this narrative consists in the need to resist colonization, and to do so by virtue of local knowledges since these are already equal to colonial knowledge. The killing of Bartolomé symbolizes the longed-for sacrifice of colonial trauma in general, and the triumph of indigenous knowledge—establishing a new cognitive justice.13 Bartolomé’s intent and presumptions are turned on their head. The foregoing engagement with Monterroso’s microcosmic parable is largely and generally accurate about really existing relations of knowledge and power in colonial situations. The prima facie reading is so powerful and persuasive precisely because it corresponds to so many experiences of the lie of European and Euro-American colonization around the world from the 15th century onward. European colonialism from the 15th-20th centuries, through a whole variety of different levels of authority, restructured political, legal, social, gendered, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions of the world in fundamental and long-lasting structural ways. “Whereas in 1800 Europe and its colonies covered around 55 per cent of the globe, in 1878 they covered 67 per cent and in 1914 84 per cent.”14 The development of new ways of collecting, categorizing, speaking about, and analyzing objects and phenomena within different realms of inquiry has been one of the most significant ways that classical modern racial colonialism has altered the world.15 Whether in regard to the development of English studies and comparative literature for the sake of quelling rebellions in India, or in regard to the anthropological investigations of so-called primitive peoples, the construction of entire disciplines emerges in tandem with processes of European imperialism.16 As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, “Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.”17 For those interested in epistemic decolonization, imperialism and knowledge production do not only happen to emerge alongside one another, but instead serve as mutually reinforcing and causally interrelated forms of domination.18 The ‘power’ of colonial knowledge systems’ ‘explanatory power’ turns out to have a connotation far closer to ‘coercion,’ ‘exploitation,’ and/or ‘repression’ than to ‘ability.’19 Similarly, ‘justification’ of true belief/information often functions in a manner closer to ‘rationalization’ than to the unbiased provision of logically coherent grounds and evidence for a particular commitment. These are the                                                                                                             12

Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 57. Santos, Nunes, and Meneses, “Introduction”, xlix and Santos, Epistemologies of the South. 14 Cope, Divided World Divided Class, 7. There has been much debate on the periodization of colonialism, modernity/coloniality, and postcolonialism. Dussel has written a large amount on colonialism and first/second modernity. For an example of the periodization of postcolonialism, see Comaroff and Comaroff, “Naturing the Nation”, 125ff. For present purposes, I will leave debates concerning periodization aside. 15 See Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation and Headrick, The Tools of Empire. 16 See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 42; Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think; and Bernal, Black Athena. 17 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 1. 18 The “European paradigm of rational knowledge, was not only elaborated in the context of, but as part of, a power structure that involved the European colonial domination over the rest of the world. This paradigm expressed, in a demonstrable sense, the coloniality of that power structure.” Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, 28. See also Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 53-62. 19 I draw these and similar, clearly articulated distinctions concerning power from Hearn, Theorizing Power and Morriss, Power: A Philosophical Analysis. 13

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  central, fundamental insights of the prima facie approach to the anticolonial politics of knowledge in general, and as an historical hypothesis and as a guide for research, these intuitions are entirely legitimate and correct. Their correctness is one reason for the widespread acceptance of the prima facie orientation within the anticolonial politics of knowledge. But one should also subject the face-value reading of Monterroso’s text to a dialectical process in order to prevent it from conveying a moral as would a nursery tale. Like all good pieces of literature and philosophy, there are in fact fewer simple morals to be derived from this story than complex issues that it only begins to intimate. A host of questions should be posed against this text in order to negate, preserve, and elevate its prima facie interpretation to a new level: 1.   How should one understand and evaluate the different relations of power operative in the confrontation of colonizing and colonized semiotic systems, and knowledge systems in particular (here, Iberian and Mayan astronomical systems)? 2.   Do moral failures or biases (such as arrogance or ethnocentrically based presumptions of universality) always and everywhere affect the relation of a knowledge system to its purported object(s) of study?20 3.   Does effective resistance to colonial power require at least equal abilities in regard to prediction of events in the natural and social world(s)? If so, are there cases in which one must use parts of the colonizer’s knowledge system against him, as a slave might liberate herself by means of the master’s tools, or like the women of the Tupac Amaru rebellion gathered the best of rocks to be launched at the ruling classes from one of the very sources of oppression, namely, the mines?21 4.   Are there advantages to the ability to distinguish degrees of plausibility of statements/beliefs/information within lived semiotic systems in regard to anticolonial resistance? 5.   In scenarios where coercion, power, and force are not, as in Monterroso’s story, organized in favor of the colonized (however provisionally), but in fact radically asymmetrical in the colonizer’s favor, and where such asymmetrical relations in turn alter one’s relations to past and present knowledge systems, can selfdetermination and self-defense be sought in the same way as might occur in more relatively equal power relations?22 6.   What are the different ways in which truth and falsity might be conceived in the colonial world? 7.   What roles do institutions and priestly classes play in the colonization and decolonization of knowledge? 8.   Does it make a significant difference for a project of epistemic decolonization if one were to qualify a Mayan (or Incan, or Chinese) archaeoastronomical knowledge system as ‘indigenous’?23

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Note that here the question is about the relation between the (perhaps widely shared) epistemic vice of arrogance and the objects of knowledge systems, not necessarily the epistemic vices, meta-blindness, or credibility excesses attributed to one or many individuals and particular propositions/beliefs. For rigorous and enlightening analyses of the latter, see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice and Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance. Anderson helpfully distinguishes between three basic types of bias: 1. bias in relation to the object of inquiry, 2. bias in relation to hypotheses to be tested, and 3. biases in relation to a question or controversy. See Anderson, “Use of Value Judgments in Science”, 18. It would seem that Bourdieu would answer ‘No’ to this question, stating that “the partial explicability of scientific strategies by social variables would in no way reduce the scientific validity of the scientific products.” Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 43. 21 See Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion, 43. 22 For arguments in favor of non-violent organization from below in scenarios of radically asymmetrical relations of power, see Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy. 23 Much really incredible work has been done in archaeoastronomy that would render a prima facie approach to epistemic decolonization in the present or any similar case quite inadequate. See, for example, López, “Interactions between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Colonial’ Astronomies”; Steele, “Astronomy and Politics”, Ziólkowski and Lebeuf, “Were the Incas able to predict lunar eclipses?”; Sprajc, “Astronomical alignments at the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, Mexico”; Hart, “On the Problem of Chinese Science”, 193; Steele, Observations and predictions of eclipse times by early astronomers; Chamberlain, Songs from the Sky; and Holbrook, African cultural astronomy. On the theoretical and practical difficulties of defining or applying the term ‘indigenous,’ see Sanders, “Indigenous Peoples.”

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  9.   How do narratives about colonization affect the ways in which one contests contemporary imperialism, and can one derive (or presume the legitimacy of) various ‘oughts’ from such narratives, whether historical or historical-fictional?

Far from being trivial, these questions take us well beyond the affects of satisfaction that accompany the retributive dimension of Monterroso’s historical fiction to the incredibly important yet opaque realm of debates about the colonial and anticolonial politics of knowledge. In order to think of ways to deal with such important issues, one must be willing to move beyond enjoyment of the prima facie reading of this story—or any simplistic and universal moral derived therefrom— and grapple with the host of important questions it raises and does not answer. These critical questions negate and preserve our first reading of “El Eclipse.” Like the colonized intellectual who passes through dialectical transformations of national culture, certain negations of “knowledge frozen in time” are necessary in order to reach “that place of bubbling trepidation from which knowledge will emerge.”24 The prima facie reading is negated insofar as the real complexity of the questions posed regarding power, decolonization, truth/falsity, transcendence (as allegedly mediated by priestly classes), normativity, and so forth have moved the text well beyond a simple parable of good versus evil, right versus wrong, and virtue versus vice. One cannot both hold to the prima facie reading of this story and acknowledge that the questions pertinent to a rigorous understanding of the entanglement of knowledge and (de)colonization do not have self-evident answers. After all, “noble savage” myths can often serve as ignoble lies.25 But the original sense of the story is also preserved insofar as the aforementioned questions further investigate the general lie of the inherently exploitative colonial situation. Without the recognition of the general lie of the colonial situation—that goodness and correctness are in fact generally expressed as their opposites across divisive lines of race, class, and gender between the colonizer and the colonized—one could not then hope to accede to a grasp of the complexities of decolonizing knowledge with the deserved analytical and strategic attention. The insufficiency of the prima facie approach to the anticolonial politics of knowledge can be further elaborated by means of two examples. First, consider the following scenario. In colonies governed by indirect rule (what Mahmood Mamdani calls decentralized despotism), colonialist authorities imposed ethnic and tribal divisions where such forms of organization by identity had often not necessarily existed before. The decentrally despotic colonialist state instituted ‘native authorities,’ whose social function consisted in deciding and administering ‘customary law,’ thus mediating between racialized/tribalized subjects and white citizens. Customary law was distinct from civil law, and the former comprised a mixture of past customs and practices as well as new arbitrary innovations of a particular native authority’s opportunistically fused power. ‘Customary law’ thus comes into existence as a hybrid set of rules that is understood as ‘really belonging’ to newly compartmentalized social units. Yet if virtually all of the mechanisms for collective memory and the transmission of customary law are filtered through native authority and colonialist education, and if these are mistakenly believed to belong essentially to a perduring natural group, then this colonized group can in no simple way combat colonial exploitation through a re                                                                                                             24

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 161. This prima facie interpretation of “El Eclipse” in many ways resembles the first cultural reactions of the colonized intellectual, who “decides to draw up a list of the bad old ways characteristic of the colonial world, and hastens to recall the goodness of the people, this people who have been made guardians of truth.” Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 158. See also Cabral’s similar discussion of diasporic petit bourgeois intellectuals’ first negation of colonialist culture in “The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence” in Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization. 25 See Williams, Jr., Savage Anxieties and Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage.

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  appropriation and use of the group’s own knowledge of customary law (as the prima facie moral of Monterroso’s story might suggest). The group itself and its understanding of customary law are both recent and strategically exploitative fabrications of colonialist authorities in conjunction with arriviste native authorities. If the ‘our’ and the ‘knowledge’ of a traditional form of ‘our knowledge’ are both functional elements of the exploitative colonial system, then the presumption that that which constitutes a group’s traditional knowledge can serve as the sole or most effective reservoir for anticolonial politics only begs the question. Whether such a knowledge might be wielded strategically cannot be determined only through certain assumptions about its rightful owners, but must also take into account other relevant tactical concerns. It is important to not only see this example as a rare possibility or thought experiment, but as an instance of the labyrinthine and not-merely-binary relations of power/knowledge in the colonial world. For example, there are ways in which the construction of modern nation-states involved the folklorization and tradition-construction of indigenous pasts as a constitutive part of this very European and Euro-American project of hegemonic consolidation. Such constructions should not be accepted uncritically.26 This does not mean that all customary knowledge or all forms of historical representation are mere colonial fabrications. But the very fact that at least some forms of knowledge considered local and customary are in fact part and parcel of colonialist decentralized despotism and modern nation-state formation means that one must complexify any facile notions of identity, power, knowledge, and liberating strategy in order to be effectively anticolonial. Secondly, similar difficulties arise when empire and colonization are considered as perduring layers of different historical struggles, and not only as binary conflicts between contemporaneous and discrete civilizations. Not all forms of colonization involve the wholesale destruction of the particular colonized group (genocide), and some groups that are incorporated into new colonial relations were established through their own formative role in prior expansion, conquest, and consolidation of power. For example, a particular indigenous priestly class might function as an institution that has merely digested and assumed the privileges of its group’s prior expansion, conquest, and consolidation of power at the great expense of other internal and external groups. During the Late Postclassic era of Mayan civilization in Guatemala (the setting of “El Eclipse”), certain “priestly positions were also of high rank and were inherited by the elites, such as Aj Tohil, Aj Q’ukumatz, and Aj Awilix.”27 The far more brutal imperial domination of the Spanish typically renders similar locally and historically absorbed privilege and power less palpable after European colonization begins. But at times new colonialisms do imbricate with and overlay past forms of expansion, conquest, and power consolidation, and do not simply erase the historically constituted divisions among a newly colonized people. In regard to “El Eclipse,” this raises the following questions: Might not a confrontation between an Iberian member of a priestly class and indigenous Mayan members of a priestly class be read not only as a confrontation between colonizer and colonized, at one level, but also as a conflict between current colonizers and past colonizers, at another? Are those of a particular, doubly colonized group (e.g., subaltern women previously forcefully incorporated into a kingdom, which then itself becomes colonized from without) at any point able to claim this priestly knowledge as their own?28 Or should we not                                                                                                             26

See Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. Foias, Ancient Maya Political Dynamics, 100. 28 A variety of studies exist that pay attention to the double colonization of women. See Urdang, Confronting Two Colonialisms; Petersen and Rutherford, A Double Colonization; and Knauss, The Persistence of Patriarchy. The analysis of double colonization opens up a new critique of colonization by paying attention to multiple layers of gendered, economic, racial, and political power-over. Such an emphasis is crucial to my questions, concerns, and claims here. 27

10

  speak of knowledge as belonging to whole societies but rather to smaller social sets? In many cases, those who beg the question about the ‘our’ of ‘our knowledge’ benefit from some unspoken form of patriarchal privilege. The forgoing questions complicate any excessively binary approach to colonization and decolonization. For example, were not the Cempoalans and Tlaxcalans of the early 16th century Aztec empire doubly subjected to forms of expropriation, violence, and domination by the empires of Montezuma and Charles V?29 After all, “Cortes’ general methods of conquest and control were, indeed, not so very different from those used by the prior Aztec conquerors themselves: conquest by force of arms, alliance with the promise of mutual benefit through mutual risk, presentations of gifts and rewards, and nurturing close relationships with local rulers and high-ranking nobles.”30 A merely reactionary approach to Iberian colonization and its knowledges alone does not address the relevant dynamics of, or effective responses to, such imperial imbrications. I highlight such knotty historical possibilities here not (again, not) in order to sophistically argue for any sort of defeatist or justificatory view of societal expansion and conquest as actually homogenous across all different social units—capitalist or non-capitalist. Rather, I mention this complication because if we are concerned with advancing contemporary anticolonialism and anti-imperialism as such,31 we cannot pretend that the formations of new webs of authoritative interactions can be dealt with in merely moralistic and binary terms. In regard to epistemic decolonization, this second issue challenges the prima facie approach to the anticolonial politics of knowledge insofar as it forces one to question the assumption that colonization considered broadly (i.e., any form of conquest, domination, and consolidation of power over one group by another exogenous group) can only be imagined as a confrontation between two poles. We need a historical-political analytic of linkages between colonization and knowledge that staves off facile repetitions of reactionary mores, especially insofar as the latter often only bolster forms of religious and patriarchal authority.32 II. What is Epistemic Decolonization? The use of the term ‘decolonization’ in regard to epistemic matters often functions either as jargon, as a concept, or somewhere in between. By ‘jargon’ I understand the deployment of imprecise, unnecessarily neologistic language to which another cannot be initiated without making use of similarly and relatedly imprecise terminology. Some mutual understanding can occasionally occur by means of jargon, but this understanding proves to be 1. costly in terms of time-to-initiation and in terms of meaning-extraction, 2. practically and discursively insulating in relation to other epistemic communities, and thereby 3. limited in overall explanatory power and communicability across different forms of life and language-games. Concepts, on the other hand, synthesize whole states of affairs, are precise, and assist in handling real theoretical and practical problems. “Concepts orient us to the world.”33 Unfortunately, because of its inflation in the market of                                                                                                             29

See Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, 107-13 and 140-88. Smith and Berdan, “Introduction”, in Aztec Imperial Strategies, 1. 31 As distinct from Hardt and Negri, I do not consider “Empire good in itself but not for itself,” but rather consider imperialism/empire to be good only for itself and not in itself or for its others. See Empire, 42. 32 Smith argues similarly when she writes, “The binary of colonizer/colonized does not take into account, for example, the development of different layerings which have occurred within each group and across the two groups.” See Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 28. 33 Mills, “White Ignorance”, 27. 30

11

  contemporary academia, the term ‘decolonization’ often tends to circulate as jargon rather than in a conceptual way. It christens rather than works. Ironically, whereas jargon often ensures greater theoretical exchange-value within in some sectors of contemporary cognitive capitalism, it is precisely the use-value of concepts with which one should be primarily concerned. And unfortunately, philosophers at times add to the quagmires derivative of jargon rather than raising conceptual problems and offering provisional solutions. How should one analyze the meaning of the term, ‘decolonization,’ then? Proceeding charitably—i.e., assuming that those who use the term as a slogan desire to use it as a concept, or have a concept in mind which has yet to be made explicit—we should begin with what we know: the word decolonization is used differently for different ends. We should therefore examine various uses of this term and its meanings to avoid any hasty or uncharitable judgment concerning its differential status as a magic wand or as a sharpened tool. Because it is more basic, the phrase ‘colonizing knowledge’ should be better understood before proceeding to analyses of ‘decolonizing knowledge.’ The phrase ‘colonizing knowledge’ contains both semantic and syntactic ambiguities, and these should be examined in order to avoid conceptual and argumentative equivocations. ‘Colonizing’ has a number of distinct but not necessarily mutually exclusive senses. First, ‘colonizing’ connotes expropriation. Colonization amounts to a shift in relations of ownership, where the colonizer expropriates something (or, more often, nearly everything) from the colonized. In regard to epistemic colonization, this semantic variation of ‘colonizing’ emphasizes that those who were or are now colonized possess(ed) a certain knowledge or set of information appropriated by the colonizer. Secondly, the term ‘colonizing’ carries with it resonances of power, where power signifies force or domination. To colonize is to dominate by force. For those who study epistemic colonization, this means that the colonization of knowledge largely amounts to the forceful imposition of one knowledge system upon another, the destruction of various indigenous knowledge systems, forced re-education, and so forth. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bob Scholte differently refer to similar processes as ‘epistemicide.’34 Thirdly, the term ‘colonizing,’ has been used by Foucault to refer to a specific type of disciplinary power that slowly begins to abrogate (most notably in the 17th and 18th centuries) the dominance of sovereign power in both Europe and in various European colonies.35 In this sense, colonization means disciplinarization. Next, the word ‘colonization’ carries overtones of compartmentalization. Rabaka’s provocative phrase ‘epistemic apartheid’ captures the full force of this sense. Historical-material processes of colonization not only entailed the creation of work camps, migrant hostels, bidonvilles, native reserves, and other Manichean divides, but these remained variously tied to the conceptual divisions of the colonizer.36 Whether in the division between Hutus, Tutsis, and whites fabricated by Belgian colonizers or in the de jure and de facto splits between customary and civil law, really existing colonization was and remains inseparable from colonial conceptual                                                                                                             34

Santos, La globalización del derecho: los nuevos caminos de la regulación y la emancipación, 208; Santos et. al., “Introduction: Opening Up the Canon of Knowledge and the Recognition of Difference”, i; and Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 7. 35 See Taylor, “Fanon, Foucault, and the Politics of Psychiatry”, 57 and Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 66-73. 36 See Rabaka, Against Epistemic Apartheid. Consider also Mills’ claims about conceptual decolonization via biopsychiatric categorization, Serequeberhan’s claims about colonialism and ideas, and Gordon’s claims about the colonization of reason by rationality. See Mills, Decolonizing Global Mental Health, 56; Serequeberhan, “Decolonization and the Practice of Philosophy”, 150; and Gordon, “Fanon on Decolonizing Knowledge”, 6. For an example of the use of the word colonization in the sense of ‘compartmentalization,’ see Shani, “De-colonizing Foucault.”

12

  distinctions. One of the most significant divisions is that of race. Questions of race suffuse modern connotations of colonization, and modern European epistemic colonization is typically (and correctly) understood to be entangled with white supremacist practices and presuppositions. Finally, even where multiple people understand ‘colonization’ under the same abstract dimensions mentioned above, nevertheless the historical processes and experiences of these same aspects are often quite heterogeneous. To put the point succinctly: Amerindians under Spanish rule and Indians under British rule might describe colonization using the previous categories, and yet there is a plethora of real differences between 15th and 16th century Spanish colonialism and 19th century British imperialism. In addition to semantic issues that arise with the phrase ‘colonizing knowledge,’ the locution also harbors a number of revealing syntactical ambiguities. Knowledge can be understood as the object being colonized, where knowledge operates as a direct object of the action. In this case, epistemic colonization amounts to the colonization of knowledge, where the subject of the action remains either implicit or as-of-yet undetermined. The question ‘Who or What?’ colonizes or decolonizes knowledge remains, and how one answers this question of the subject will lead to significant differences in the conception of these processes.37 On the other hand, ‘colonizing’ can also be understood adjectivally, where there is a form of knowledge that is qualified as engaged in (and whose specific difference consists in) the act of colonization in contrast to knowledge that is not so involved. In this case, forms of knowledge are understood to differ from one another as types, insofar as one performs the function of colonizing and one does not: knowledge of type A colonizes, whether in a specific instance or essentially, whereas knowledge of the sort B does not. These grammatical distinctions suggest two initial characterizations of the phrase ‘colonizing knowledge.’ The first suggests that ‘colonizing’ be understood verbally, as a process. The verb ‘to colonize’ would always seem to be transitive; it must have an object. The latter use of the term suggests that ‘colonizing’ is a predicate and quality—whether accidental or essential—of some type of knowledge. Neither the syntactical nor the semantic distinctions found within the phrase ‘colonizing knowledge’ need be taken as mutually exclusive alternatives. One will often find a range of such meanings operative in works that deal with epistemic decolonization. That said, making these distinctions explicit proves highly important insofar as the phrase ‘decolonizing knowledge’ harbors many of the same ambiguities and, since this process or type of knowledge will be directed against ‘colonizing knowledge,’ the senses in which it attempts to subvert or counteract the latter should be made clear. In regard to knowledge, is ‘decolonizing’ a relation, an action, a quality, or some combination of these? (Qualities or properties, after all, can be spoken of as acting. For instance, one’s frenetic demeanor arouses anxiousness in another, or, the heaviness of one’s suitcase weighs on and slows one down; and, both claims involve relations between differently individuated things). And does the goal consist in confronting colonizing knowledge’s expropriative, dominative, divisive, disciplinary, or racist dimensions? While these dimensions are typically historically-materially related, the question of how they are related, whether one relation is more important than another, and what tactics would serve to best undermine such relations remains an open question. I contend that the aforementioned analytic considerations should not be overlooked in the consideration of political tactics.                                                                                                             37

Because of my own linguistic limitations, I cannot here analyze epistemic decolonization in languages where predication operates fundamentally differently than in English and romance languages. I signal this limitation for different possible research avenues as well as to again highlight the heuristic and provisional status of my present analyses.

13

  The term ‘decolonization’ signifies processes that seek to undermine possible and real colonialist structures, agents, actions, things, systems, functions, and mechanisms, thereby simultaneously reducing the quantity and quality of the ways in which said realities have been and/or continue to be colonized. But there exist two predominant approaches to decolonization, and their divergent approaches to the state typically entail different approaches to knowledge. On the one hand, organic intellectuals such as Cabral and Fanon adopt forms of revolutionary African socialism in which political decolonization can be best summarized as ‘decolonization-asdialectical-transformation.’ Both revolutionaries and scientists understand decolonization not primarily as a form of cultural preservation and restoration but as the negation of the past and present in favor of future creativity.38 While neither conceives of dialectics as a mere application of Hegelian, Marxian, or Sartrian schemas, their conception of decolonization is suffuse with the general thematic of temporally mediated instances of negation and transformation. Such a conception of decolonization affects their approach to knowledge. I call this orientation to knowledge and knowledge systems ‘revolutionary epistemic decolonization.’ On the other hand, scholars writing in contexts where the overthrow of the state is/was either highly unfeasible or undesired—or who write with some association to such a tradition— tend to adopt an entirely different perspective concerning decolonization. This approach can be characterized as ‘decolonization-as-preservation-and-restoration.’39 I call this approach ‘liberalmulticulturalist epistemic decolonization.’ It is ‘liberal’ in the sense that its political values center around ‘rights’ discourses and because it is centrally concerned with garnering negative freedoms through limitation of sovereign state power. It is ‘multiculturalist’ in that myriad different cultures are taken as the units requiring more rights from hegemonic cultural or state power. Both approaches to decolonization should be understood as matters of degree. Revolutionaries are also concerned with certain forms of restoration (for instance, the reclamation of land), and liberalmulticulturalists wish the colonial state did not exist in the first place. But the assumption that both approaches value the same things, have the exact same goals in mind, approach epistemic matters identically, and would rank their political values in the same way is both mistaken and undertheorized. So far we have considered a number of the grammatical and semantic possibilities within the gerunds ‘colonizing’ and ‘decolonizing’ in relation to knowledge. Let us now explore a number of the formal possibilities that emerge in regard to the subject and direct object of epistemic decolonization given its numerous connotations and denotations. The most basic conceptual issues that many activists and theorists of epistemic decolonization makes is represented in Figure 1.1. This chart presents some of the most general options that lie before—or the decisions already implicitly made regarding—epistemic decolonization. While both interconnected decision trees offer a simplified and binary set of alternatives, this simplification allows one to grasp some of the structural issues faced by the problematic of epistemic decolonization.                                                                                                             38

Fanon does not abandon the vocabulary of dialectics even in his late work. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 141 and Fanon, “L’indépendance nationale, seule issue possible”, in Écrits, 464. Cabralian progressive dialectics is best exemplified in Cabral, “The Role of Culture in the Struggle for Independence”, in Resistance and Decolonization. 39 I will also here leave aside the important question that Melissa Forbis poses, namely, “Can Zapatista autonomy be understood as a practice of decolonization?” If one answers in the affirmative, then perhaps one has a case of decolonization in which restoration, preservation, and the armed creation of a temporary autonomous zone overlap in such a way as to to not fit neatly into the two main streams that I analyze here. I note this ambiguity for further research into the possible peculiarities of Zapatista epistemic decolonization. Forbis, “After autonomy: the zapatistas, insurgent indigeneity, and decolonization.”

14

  In regard to debates within the ambit of epistemic decolonization, where X decolonizes Y, one can begin to unpack the possibilities within each of these variables as follows:

X   K  

~K  

C  

 

~C  

C  

E  

~E  

E  

~E  

E  

~E  

E  

~E  

1  

2  

3  

4  

5  

6  

7  

8  

       

  E  

  9  

K ~K C ~C E ~E

~C  

Y  

K  

~K  

 

C  

~C  

  ~E  

E  

 

 

 10  

 11  

  ~E  

E  

 

 

  12  

 13  

C  

~C  

  ~E  

E  

 

 

 14  

  15  

~E  

 

 16  

= knowledge = not knowledge = colonialist = not colonialist = essentially = not essentially

Figure 1.1 Most Basic Alternatives in Debates on Epistemic Decolonization

15

  One should proceed through the decision trees by asking the following questions: Is X (or Y) a form of knowledge? Is such knowledge or non-knowledge colonialist or not colonialist?40 Finally, is the knowledge or non-knowledge, whether colonialist or not, essentially or not essentially so constituted? The two connected decision trees of Figure 1.1 only pertain to debates specifically concerned with epistemic decolonization. Note that this representation also leaves open the the question concerning whether ‘decolonizes’ is understood as ‘decolonization-asdialectical-transformation,’ ‘decolonization-as-preservation-and-restoration,’ or in another sense. I do not incorporate this distinction here because such distinctions are usually not explicitly theorized in the literature on this topic, and this section is only meant to introduce current debates, not to resolve them. In order to understand some of the problems that this literature encounters, it here suffices to limit our variables, which are already quite numerous. The graph aids in some of the initial, most rudimentary disjunctions faced by activists and theorists of epistemic decolonization, but it by no means resolves all the theoretically relevant difficulties (this, after all, is not the functional, simplifying role of decision trees). The alternative variables are dealt with synchronically because one must first understand the basic reasons for the wide array of differences that exist before understanding how they do or might change over time (conceptually speaking, intension determines extension). One can better understand Figure 1.1 by inputting some of the different interpretations of “El Eclipse” that are possible when one specifies the variables X and Y above. A reader might understand the moral of Monterroso’s story to suggest that the object to be decolonized (Y) is Aristotelian astronomy. This reader might approach Aristotelian astronomy as a form of essentially colonialist knowledge (9), since its only role within the story is to preserve the hegemonic authoritative relations of the colonizer over the colonized. Or, another reader might understand Aristotelian astronomy to be only an accidentally colonialist form of knowledge (10), distinguishing the truth-content of the knowledge system from its use for colonialist ends. This second reader might argue that since such knowledge has been deployed in non-colonialist settings, it therefore cannot be considered essentially colonialist in and of itself. Perhaps a third reader would disagree. She might suggest that Aristotelian astronomy is best understood as an essentially colonialist element of Iberian ideology, where ideology is understood as a theoretical expression of historical-material class interests which has little-to-nothing to do with correspondence to reality (13). As geocentric, Aristotelian astronomy is not really a form of knowledge at all, but is nevertheless essentially colonialist insofar as the ideas of the ruling (colonizing) class cannot but wield such a constellation of ideas for their own benefit. These three readers might also take any number of different positions on X, where a plethora of options subtend the alternatives between knowledge and non-knowledge.41 As that which decolonizes, for example, non-knowledge might be understood as local spirituality, Amerindian perspectivism/multinaturalism, Mayan mythology, and so on. Or, Mayan astronomy and the practical knowledge that Bartolomé is lying might be taken as the knowledge needed to decolonize                                                                                                             40

Some scholars/activists advance positions such as the following, “Whether we currently identify as the colonizer or the colonized, we are never completely one or the other.” See Sandoval et. al., “Ancestral Knowledge Systems”, 21. This may be the case in regard to certain individuals and groups at particular times, but for decolonization to mean anything it must identify something either as colonized or as colonialist in a particular time and in a particular sense. 41 The variables dealt with here are already quite numerous, but to them could be added a host of other possible subvariables concerning positions within the philosophy of science, such as disagreements involving constructive empiricism, structural realism, and entity realism. See French, Science, 90-121. Note also that ‘being-colonized’ (expropriated, compartmentalized) might be best located under the ‘not colonialist’ variable of Figure 1.1.

16

  Y. Just as our hypothetical readers disagree on how one should best understand Aristotelian astronomy, so too might they disagree on the agent of decolonization, on whether this agent primarily involves, or is, knowing or not knowing, and on what ‘decolonization’ means in general. The most commonly held positions would seem to be: 3 decolonizes 9, 3 decolonizes 13, and 7 decolonizes 9. In the first case (3 decolonizes 9), an essentially non-colonialist form of knowledge is understood to be directed toward the decolonization of a form of essentially colonialist knowledge. Such a position frequently arises in contemporary discourse out of an engagement with or indirect influence by the Foucauldian approach to knowledge. To be far too succinct, in the mid-70s, Foucault conceived of regimes of truth as those forms of power that produce and sustain “system[s] of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements.”42 This social and political-philosophical approach to knowledge does not investigate typical epistemological concerns regarding justification and truthvalue, but examines regimes of knowledge in their historical emergence, production, and transformation. Many contemporary scholars of indigenous studies, critical ethnic studies, and/or decolonial theory likewise approach knowledges in a Foucauldian vein, at times partially bracketing the questions of truth-value and justification to understand how systems of statements emerge, function, and interact in various matrices of power (pouvoir). It is in this sense that a variety of authors speak of the decolonization of colonialist knowledges by non-colonialist knowledges. From such a perspective, speaking of knowledge in the plural is not intended to be contradictory, but is a key methodological presupposition of socio-historical and political analysis. The second case (3 decolonizes 13), in which an essentially non-colonialist knowledge decolonizes an essentially colonialist non-knowledge, makes a more explicit commitment to a classical distinction between truth and falsity than the Foucault-influenced approach. In this perspective, one foregrounds non-colonialist truth in comparison with colonialist falsity. For example, many indigenous peoples had and have a knowledge of plants, seeds, farming techniques, architectural design, weather cycles, and so forth (what Vandana Shiva calls ‘metaknowledge’) that colonists did/do not.43 When colonists or imperialists presume that they themselves have adequate ways of knowing such things and in fact do not, and when this latter presumption combines with systematized forms of domination, the decolonization of colonialist non-knowledge by non-colonialist knowledge can take the form of critique, rights claims, consciousness-raising, coalition building, or re-appropriative political movements. Part of what must be decolonized is the colonialist ignorance that motivates and rationalizes the domination and expropriation of indigenous information and knowledge. The third most common approach (7 decolonizes 9), in which one attempts to decolonize an essentially colonialist knowledge by means of an essentially non-colonialist non-knowledge can be found, on the one hand, in the theories and practices of those who hold spiritual, surrealist, postmodernist, mythological, or related commitments. In such approaches, the machinic scientific rationality of the West often stands over against non-Western beliefs/practices that in some sense                                                                                                             42

Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 133. The strategy of ‘pluralizing knowledges’ is also furthered by discussions that arise from juridical contexts in which intellectual property rights, indigenous innovations, sustainability, immaterial labor, and international law are central concerns. Similar to the Foucauldian approach, such discussions do not focus on classical epistemological questions but are concerned with legal matters of access, patrimony, use, ownership, prohibition, and multicultural legitimation. Knowledges in this register belong to communities that are considered to have relatively durable identities over time; questions of evidence, truth-value, warrant, and justification are often side-lined. See, for example, Garcia dos Santos, “High-Tech Plundering, Biodiversity, and Cultural Erosion: The Case of Brazil”; Shiva, Biopiracy; and Whitt, Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples. 43 Shiva, Biopiracy, 71.

17

  transcend (instrumental) knowledge in their depth or insight. Césaire’s surrealism, Senghorian negritude, Dussel’s veritas primas of the Other beyond being, and all religiously-based attempts at epistemic decolonization might be understood to exemplify this strategy.44 Similarly, Vivieros de Castro’s thought experiments in which correspondence to a single natural world does not play a role offers a unique example of the attempt to decolonize knowledge through indigenous conceptual worlds.45 On the other hand, since ‘non-knowledge’ as a sub-variable within Figure 1.1 remains quite underdetermined, it should also be understood to include, for example, Mbembe’s argument for the removal of the busts of colonists from university campuses and Boulbina’s argument that forms of migration can contribute to the decolonization of knowledge. While rearrangement of symbols and migration are understood to decolonize knowledge according to these theorists, neither in and of themselves, as actions and processes, presumably are knowledge.46 The formal possibilities of Figure 1.1 are important because they allow one to notice crucial strategic and tactical differences that are easily glossed over at the level of everyday language. For instance, recall the Mamdani-inspired example of a group’s traditional knowledge of customary law provided above. In this case, we can imagine some individuals arguing that knowledge of customary law is an essentially non-colonialist form of knowledge that can decolonize an essentially colonialist form of knowledge, such as white lawyers’ erudite familiarity with the civil law of urban areas (3 decolonizes 9). But we can also imagine another individual who considers customary law to be an essentially colonialist form of non-knowledge, insofar as the recent fabrication of customary law only benefits colonialist decentralized despotism and insofar as this knowledge has no correspondence to said “group’s” history. Such an individual might then argue that a study of the history of colonial civil law provides strong reasons to demand the decolonization of customary law. In this case (2 decolonizes 13), both individuals are concerned with juridical and legal decolonization. But insofar as both interlocutors remain only at the discursive register of “decolonizing law,” and do not proceed to consider the actual differences in their respective positions and strategies, both will end up talking past one another. They do not realize that their strategies and tactics are in fact the inverse of one another. This no doubt makes a substantial difference for discussions about viable and desirable anticolonial political alternatives. Just as the variables X and Y contain a number of positions concerning knowledge and coloniality within them, so too does the result of the process represented in Figure 1.1 contain a number of alternatives. One of the more interesting and yet unfortunately often overlooked matters regarding the possible alternatives presented above pertains to the outcome of epistemic decolonization. What is the (sought after) result of epistemic decolonization—knowledge, nonknowledge, freedom from exploitation, or something else? By what criteria should one judge the efficacy of this process? And can decolonized knowledge in turn be coopted for new colonialist or imperialist ends?47 The answer to these questions largely depends on the variables chosen. For                                                                                                             44

Dussel, Filosofía de la Liberación, 184. See Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics. 46 See Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive” and Boulbina, “La décolonisation des saviors et ses théories voyageuses.” 47 Nissim-Sabat, for example, argues that Fanonian humanism will resist future cooptation, but she does not go into the specifics on how this will occur or answer hypothetical counter-examples. See “Fanonian Musings”, 52. It is also not impossible for one to argue that something essentially colonial might decolonize something else colonial by means of a shared logic, as Ferat Güven seems to suggest: “the project of decolonization has been most effective 45

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  those who think that “knowledge is power,” where the copula is one of identity, and where power means domination and oppression, if the decolonization of knowledge involves the cessation of knowing, then all the better. In such cases, one might judge epistemic decolonization as efficacious to the extent that mythological thinking without recourse to invasive scientific practices replaces forms of knowing in which the natural and social worlds are variously pried open and controlled. This position has a Wordsworthian air to it, Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect.48

On the other hand, those for whom historical-material processes of colonization lead to wholly untenable and colonialist forms of value-laden observation might conceive of epistemic decolonization as the systematic critique and removal of biases. Here, coming to identify and effectively contest such biases itself constitutes a form of knowing empowerment. The success of such a program would be gauged to the extent that biases are removed from forms of knowing, and to the extent that specifically colonialist forms of value-laden observation are precluded from future research and epistemic production/discoveries. Understanding the desired goal of a theorist’s or group’s project of epistemic decolonization can help to elucidate why certain tactics are chosen rather than others. Figure 1.1 aids in mapping a number of the basic alternatives that activists and theorists face in projects of epistemic decolonization. But the core of many of these debates also includes presuppositions about morality, values, and normativity. Moreover, not all theorists accept a bivalent account of truth. One can come to better understand the divergences between those engaged in epistemic decolonization as occurring on continua rather than through disjunctions. Value and coloniality are not, in the non-ideal world, best understood as On-Off switches. One can reach greater precision by distinguishing between discrete units of truth and falsity, on the one hand, and theoretical wholes, on the other hand. To these ends, we can begin to map various approaches to epistemic decolonization through a heuristic cube (Figure 1.2).

                                                                                                            when it remains within the colonial logic or when it itself is most ‘colonial.’” Güven, “Hegel, Fanon, and the Problem of Negativity in the Postcolonial”, 172-73. 48 Wordsworth, The Major Works including the Prelude, 130.

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Figure 1.2 Heuristic Cube for Understanding Debates about Epistemic Decolonization

This heuristic cube adds a dimension of normativity to our considerations, and charts truth/falsity and coloniality/anticoloniality as continua rather than as binary alternatives. Positions within debates on epistemic decolonization should be compared on continua because the contextual analysis of such positions reveals important gradations. Within this heuristic cube, one should imagine that points represent individualized signs or propositions whose determinate meaning is recognizable within a certain context and social group. Spheres, on the other hand, should be understood to represent theoretical wholes—whether knowledge systems or bricolages—whose determinate meaning is recognizable within a certain context and social group.49 Whether or not the different parts of a particular whole (e.g., points within a sphere or a smaller sphere within a larger sphere) are considered separable or inseparable from one another without compromising this whole will influence whether or not said spheres are properly systemic or more heap-like. Figure 1.2 opens a synchronic space for the comparison of debatable stances concerning epistemic decolonization, and one can use this cube to chart alternatives 1-16 derived from Figure 1.1, whether in regard to particular signs/propositions (points) or theoretical wholes (spheres). The cube is currently divided into four smaller quadrants for the sake of simplification, but the three-dimensional space contains a virtual infinity of positions. As with Figure 1.1, however, it should be used as a conceptual map, a simplifying tool that orients one until nuanced positions can be further elaborated. The function of Figure 1.2 becomes clearer by means of an example. Take, for instance, a range of concerns with colonial psychology. Fanon would represent the psychiatrist Octave Mannoni’s claim that the dependency complex of the colonized is natural and essential to the colonized as a point squarely in the Colonialist/False/Malignant quadrant above. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that Mannoni’s claim bolsters and justifies colonial domination, is not                                                                                                             49

For more on this distinction, see Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, where the question of what might distinguish a set of statements as a system from a set of statements taken as a mere aggregate constitutes a central, experimental concern.

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  true, and furthers the malignant dehumanization of the colonized. But aside from this proposition, psychiatry itself for Fanon would not neatly occupy this same quadrant. As a scientific knowledge system, psychiatry would rather comprise a sphere toward the center the above heuristic cube, since it harbors colonial/anticolonial potential, has certain malignant/benign aspects, and contains a number of both true and false propositions. But Fanon would chart Mannonian psychiatry as a sphere that remains far closer to the Colonialist/False/Malignant corner than to the Anticolonialist/True/Benign corner. Nevertheless, certain spherical peripheries of the representation of Mannonian psychiatry overlap with other quadrants, and so his psychology in fact contains certain aspects of verisimilitude and minor virtues. Fanon writes, “Before going into detail, let us say that his analysis is intellectually honest. Having experienced firsthand the ambivalence inherent in the colonial situation, Monsieur Mannoni has managed to grasp the psychological phenomena—albeit, unfortunately, too exhaustively—that govern the colonizernative relationship.”50 Mannoni in fact accurately and honestly describes the psychological phenomena of the colonial situation, but wholly misunderstands their causes. Shifting focus to current debates, we can compare this mapping to the work of contemporary critiques of colonialist psychiatry. For instance, critical psychologist China Mills would situate the sphere of psychiatry itself much closer to—and probably entirely within—the Colonialist/False/Malignant quadrant than would Fanon. The extent to which Fanon and Mills’ spherical representations of psychiatry itself overlap in a three-dimensional Venn diagram would represent their space of theoretical convergence. Using Figures 1.1 and 1.2 in conjunction can also aid in critical assessment. For example, consider the following claim by Mills, “Fanon vigorously fought for Algerian independence and decolonization, and so, to take the reading of psychiatry as colonial to its full conclusion would be to decolonize it.”51 This argument assumes that 1. psychiatry itself should be identified as essentially colonialist, and that 2. such an identification would better assist Algerian political decolonization. Yet Figures 1.1 and 1.2 allow one to see that, for Fanon, psychiatry certainly has colonialist dimensions but is not itself essentially colonialist. The ‘as’ involved in the different identifications of ‘psychiatry as colonialist’ are in fact significantly different—both analytically and in terms of implied political strategy. Mills and Fanon are playing different games in regard to epistemic decolonization. Distinguishing between both games proves important to the extent that both involve different political commitments and presuppositions. To the extent that some engage with claims or belief systems beyond truth/falsity, colonialism/anticolonialism, and the malignant/the benign, they should be understood as literally ‘thinking outside the box.’ For instance, the central thought experiment of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics consists in large part in bracketing questions of truth/falsity, the benign/malignant, and the immediate direction of this experiment to politically charged anticolonial ends.52 The advantages of such an approach lie in its avoidance of moralizing discourse and common prima facie assumptions about determinate linkages between coloniality, falsity, and malignancy.53 The prima facie approach often simply presumes—but does not                                                                                                             50

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 64. Fanon is largely engaging with Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban. Mills, Decolonizing Global Mental Health, 138. 52 See Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 8. Mignolo’s call for macronarratives would also fit into this category insofar as his concern is not “to tell the truth over lies, but to think otherwise, to move toward ‘an other logic.’” In Local Histories/Global Designs, 69-70. 53 For Viveiros de Castro, anthropology is no science of the ‘ought.’ Rather, “if anthropology ‘is’ a science of something, it is undoubtedly the comparative science of the relations that make us human. But since comparing is relating, and vice-versa, our discipline is twice over the science of the ‘and,’ that is, of universal relational 51

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  demonstrate—that nothing could possibly exist in the colonialist/true/benign or colonialist/true/malignant quadrants. One cannot easily object, on moral grounds, that Viveiros de Castro simply consumes and cannibalizes indigenous thought for himself, since the book as a whole brackets questions about the ethics of cannibalism. But if we represent the central thought experiment of Cannibal Metaphysics as a sphere that exceeds the boundaries of the heuristic cube, nonetheless certain propositions that frame this experiment still fall within the heuristic cube, and so the text as a whole can be understood as pertaining to debates about epistemic decolonization. For instance, insofar as the description of Amerindian concepts is relatively accurate and not a mere fabrication, and insofar as the decolonization of thought/knowledge is an explicitly desired goal,54 the text as a whole continues to overlap with portions of Figure 1.2. In the case at hand, then, the whole of Cannibal Metaphysics could be represented as a sphere with certain sections that overlap with the heuristic cube (e.g., the set of the text’s factive, descriptive claims), while other portions of the text (e.g., the set of statements in which truth, goodness, and coloniality have been bracketed) would comprise a smaller sub-sphere which does not overlap with the cube yet which nonetheless remain subject to its gravitational pull. III. Conclusion The foregoing epistemographical introduction began to analyze some of the myriad conceptual tools available for orienting oneself and navigating within the anticolonial politics of knowledge. Rather than to just begin to use all of the silverware ready-to-hand in the literature, I have tried to give a layout of the kitchen, preparing an initial mise en place, one might say, so that we can reflect on what things will best assist the project of decolonizing knowledge.55 The foregoing should thus assist in recognizing when incompatible theoretical cutlery is used simultaneously, as if, in the attempt to roll out dough, one tried to roll the pin forward and backward simultaneously—leaving the ultimate goal unachieved.

                                                                                                            immanence. Not of the ‘is,’ therefore, and still less of the ‘ought’—but simply of the ‘and.’” However, there is a certain “epistemo-political imperative” peculiar to anthropology motivated by the fantasy that “somewhere there must be a life worth living.” Yet how anthropology’s bracketing of the ethical ought and its internal political impetus to facilitate l’imagination au pouvoir are related remains unclear. The Relative Native, 40, 54, & 81-2. (After writing the foregoing, I realized that Graeber has made very similar critical remarks, “The problems, it seems to me, arise largely when OT [proponents of the ontological turn] begins making explicitly political claims, and therefore, setting itself up as a metatheory that can legislate what anthropologists should and should not say.” Graeber, “Radical alterity is just another way of saying ‘reality’”, 32). 54 Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 18, 40, 47-48, and 92 and Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 75. 55 The present metaphor should not be read as indicative of a bias for French culinary hegemony; I use the phrase ‘mise en place’ for its general recognizability. For a wonderful analysis of French culinary hegemony and coloniality, see Janer, “(In)edible Nature: New World Food and Coloniality.”

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