Abstract
‘Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it.’ So wrote Jean-Paul Sartre to his colonial peers in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. While he warned Western readers that it wasn’t ‘for’ them, he argued that they needed to understand Fanon’s analysis of the epistemological violence which ‘liberal hypocrisy hides . . . and which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.’ Fifty years later, Epistemologies of the South presents another invitation to break from the hegemonic knowledges that still underpin global abjection today, and offers an epistemological and ethical framework for a new ‘insurgent’ sociological imagination.
This book, written for potential allies of ‘rearguard intellectuals’ in the anti-imperial South, is two things: a post-neoliberal sociology of knowledge, and a manifesto for intellectual, emotional and political rebellion against systemic epistemic injustices in history, science, law, culture and everyday life. While it is impossible to capture the rich texture of Santos’s sweeping theoretical analysis of knowledge and power in this review, I hope to give Sociology readers a flavour of its importance for both the critical sociology of knowledge and counter-capitalist struggles around the world.
After a passionate manifesto introducing the struggles for buen vivir (good living) in the global South, and a ‘minifesto’ explaining why it is both impossible and imperative to engage in them ‘this side of the line’ in the global North, the book divides into two parts. The first presents a decolonial history of modernity which reveals a plurality of counterhegemonic globalizations across the South that were ‘cannibalized’ by Western-centric epistemologies and meaning systems, and thus rendered non-existent in the global imagination. In ‘Nuestra America’ (Chapter 1), we learn about the rebellious subjectivities and forms of sociality that formed on the margins of empire in Latin America, where mestizaje identities emerged long before theories of postcolonial hybridity and where hegemonic globalization was always a border to be transgressed in art, political struggle and everyday life. Defining Nuestra America as an unfinished project, Santos offers it as a metaphor for new mestizaje alliances that share history as a resource of emancipation. In ‘Another Angelus Novelus’ (Chapter 2), Santos resurrects Walter Benjamin’s injunction to read the past for glimpses of nonconformity rather than as a record of domination. Arguing that the modern obsession with ‘roots’ and ‘options’ (i.e., structures and agencies) prevents us from seeing the indeterminacy through which even ‘roots’ are made, he recommends creating ‘destabilising images’ of the past (e.g., epistemicide and global apartheid) that historicize affects of outrage and rebellion in our present ‘moment of danger’. This deconstructive work is aided by the reconstruction of a ‘non-Occidental west’ (Chapter 3) which privileges knowledges that help us unlearn hegemonic epistemologies and make better wagers on their emancipatory alternatives.
The second part of the book recovers emancipatory tendencies that have been ‘wasted’ by the domination of Northern social science, and introduces methods for the production of knowledge-as-emancipation. It explains why moving ‘beyond abyssal thinking’ (Chapter 4) demands both learning ignorance and educating hope. Through these activities, we gain new perspectives on the co-constitutive logics of power that shape people’s lives both ‘this’ and ‘the other’ side of the line, and strengthen our ‘will to fight for a better world’. The sketches for an ‘epistemology of blindness’ (Chapter 5) and ‘critique of lazy reason’ (Chapter 6) introduce a range of sociological strategies for making both ‘absent’ and ‘emergent’ knowledges and agents of counterhegemonic life visible. All of these are situated within new ‘ecologies of knowledges’ (Chapter 7) that can be drawn on for practical purposes through ‘intercultural translation’ (Chapter 8), for which Santos also suggests an ‘epistemological pragmatics’. The result is a radical politics of knowledge which facilitates ‘new hybrid forms of cultural understanding and intercommunication that may be useful in favouring interactions and strengthening alliances among social movements fighting, in different contexts, against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and for social justice, human dignity, or human decency’.
This book will be read in many ways. What matters most is how it is translated for acts of ‘epistemological direct action’ in grassroots struggles against cognitive injustice in – and particularly between – South and North alike. Many sociologists will itch to translate the ideas into their own partial epistemological frameworks – asking whether they advance or depart from the projects of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and other ‘post-abyssal’ intellectuals, for example, or whether they valorize counterhegemonic anti-antipatriarchies as much as other knowledges. Santos acknowledges that the book is not only part of a project (with years of activism in the World Social Forum behind, and the forthcoming Reinventing Social Emancipation) but also permanently incomplete. He thus offers readers ‘orientations for prudent knowledge’ to nurture the flourishing and intercommunication of other emancipatory experiments in the development of new decolonializing sociologies of knowledges in the service of global justice.