My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the place of our voice? Can we somehow speak from a more inclusive perspective, acknowledging the constraints of a rigid cartesian thought, and the attempts to challenge those discourses, while staying truthful to our own view and voice? Is there a place, a space, a geography, or a movable positioning from were to (attempt) to speak? The readings for today fed that conversation and I want to focus on “epistemicide” as a daily practice, not only as part of the main genocides of the common “History” of the world as Gosfoguel mentioned, but as a chameleonic violence in our own practice.
When Ramón Gosfoguel dismantles and connects different genocides throughout history and brings forward the concept of “epistemicide”, he starts from the cartesian “I think, therefore, I am” (75) as the foundation of Western thought and academic, he pretends to deconstructs that “I” as one that is exclusive and limited to a certain subject; not everyone can think as not everyone is considered and “I”. He defines “epistemicide”, elaborating from Boaventura de Sousa Santos term (Gosfoguel 74), as “… the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing… and colonial structures of knowledge as the foundational epistemology of Westernized universities” (74). He not only questions that shameful reality that “the Canon” has been shaped based on the knowledge produce by a few men from five different countries and that they have achieve the “epistemic privilege” of superiority. This is the underlying argument to describe a hierarchy in knowledge production, knowledge “quality”, and most importantly, a connection between historical genocides usually seen as isolated; the conquest of Al-Andalus, of the indigenous population of the Americas, the genocide against the enslaved Africans, and against women accused of being witches.
From Gosfoguel I would like to highlight the importance of establishing these historical connections, it shows that most of the “History” that is thought as universal is a narrative of isolation. Hegemonic discourse isolated these genocides/epistemicides to keep the victims, the “inferiors” alien to each other. Furthermore, Gosfoguel’s argument also shows that genocides of knowledge take place in universities. I could not stop thinking about Cusicanqui and how she was accused by her editors of ignoring “the Canon” in her papers for not quoting Mignolo or Walsh. That looks like another form of “epistemicide”; her experience and her sources were “inferior”, not worth of a citation.
I want to ask, how can we stop being the agents of the “paper epistemicide”? Aren’t we, in the anxiety of getting published and getting jobs in the academia, echoing the “epistemicide”?
I was told many times during my bachelor studies that my opinion was not important, that I could not write from the first person “I” in my papers, that I always had to cite someone else to make my own point… I was trained to forget about myself, my “I”, to reinforce the name of Descartes, and his “I”.
I cannot deny that I feel uncomfortable reading Cusicanqui and Lopez Intzin, because they challenged everything I was told by my teachers, and because they speak from the blurry line that distinguishes between personal experience/opinion and the production of “knowledge”. “Epistemology” means the theory of knowledge, of what distinguished belief from opinion. But this is also a limiting definition, because belief can entail opinion, and knowledge production. A holistic approach, that integrates a constant exchange between human and non-human subjects, is knowledge, opinion and belief. In this line of thought, what the “epistemologies of the heart” and the “epistemologies of the south” are proposing is that experience is knowledge and that opinion, and affect, are also involved in this process. For this reason, I want to thank Lee for mentioning her experiences in the Blue Mountains of Sidney, her way of constructing her post was an example of the new ways in which we can stop echoing the epistemicide.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. "The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11. no. 1: 2013. 73-90.