Description
Book SynopsisEuropean colonization played a major role in the acquisition, formation, and destruction of different ways of knowing. Recently, many scholars and activists have come to ask: Are there ways in which knowledge might be decolonized? Epistemic Decolonization examines a variety of such projects from a critical and philosophical perspective. The book introduces the unfamiliar reader to the wide variety of approaches to the topic at hand, providing concrete examples along the way. It argues that the predominant contemporary approach to epistemic decolonization leads one into various intractable theoretical and practical problems. The book then closely investigates the political and scientific work of Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, demonstrating how their philosophical commitments can help lead one out of the practical and theoretical issues faced by the current, predominant orientation, and concludes by forging links between their work and that of some contemporary feminist epistemologists.
Table of Contents1. Introduction
1.1 Three Stories
1.2 Purpose, Scope, and Methodology
1.3 Thesis Eleven Revisited
2. An Epistemography of the Anticolonial Politics of Knowledge
2.1 An Eclipse between Greece and Guatemala
2.2 Modeling Various Approaches to Epistemic Decolonization
3. Anti-Janus: Or, Impasses of the Differential Approach
3.1 The Ontological Aporia
3.2 The Aporia of Religious Transcendence
3.3 The Aporia of Double Truth Doctrines
4. The Fanonian Alternative
4.1 Fanon’s Critique of Religion and Priestly Classes
4.2 To Be and Not to Be
4.3 On the Dynamics of Truth and Falsity
5. Becoming-Grounded: The Cabralian Option
5.1 Against Magical Interpretations of Reality
5.2 Cabral’s Dialectical Materialism
5.3 Decolonizing Luso-African Mesology
6. Forging Alliances: Fanon, Cabral, and Contemporary Feminist Epistemology
Appendix: Seven Theses on Identifying Something as Colonialist
Conceptual Glossary
