Abstract
Global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice, Boaventura de Sousa Santos asserts. The aims of Epistemologies of the South are twofold: it critiques Western modernity’s hegemonic, monocultural way of knowing that creates distance from Western critical theory, and it outlines a movement toward revolutionary, paradigmatic, counterhegemonic “epistemologies of the South.” Though a fast-paced, dense read, this transdisciplinary theoretical text urgently illuminates a foundation for epistemological and cognitive justice.
The first part of the book problematizes the Western hegemonic cultural way of knowing and makes visible our contemporary global epistemological/political landscape that is the global North and the global South. The global North, a political and epistemological territory, monopolizes ways of knowing through monocultural and monolingual means that sustain “capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and all their satellite oppressions” (p. 10). Western, Eurocentric theory 1) assumes weak answers to significant questions that reduce understanding (for example, the inability to imagine the end of capitalism/colonialism), 2) resigns itself to a linear time that limits the present and expands the future, and 3) separates theory from practice that does not explain or foresee contemporary emancipatory practices and social movements. The global South represents the culmination of peoples, ancestors, lands, waters, animals, and plants that suffer oppressions by the global North and resist for good living, bien vivir. As a result of this global epistemological landscape, the twentieth century consists of two times: the European American century that enforces societal fascism that excludes and rejects large segments of the population from any social contract, a hegemonic globalization; and the Nuestra America century that opposes societal fascism through the “metaright to have rights,” situated knowledges, the “mixed roots” of the mestizaje, and the dynamics of “recognition and redistribution,” a counterhegemonic globalization (p. 49, p. 51).
An abyssal line of thinking separates “metropolitan from colonial societies,” makes visible only knowledges and social realities that reproduce capitalism and colonialism, makes invisible knowledges and social realities that resist oppression, and lastly, makes the copresence of knowledges impossible to envision (p. 71). Within Western modernity’s paradigm, social regulation and social emancipation are made into a roots/options dialectic that structures thinking about social transformation. For example, the past is seen as roots that deny certain groups good living, and the future is seen as options. However, destabilizing the image of history empowers a memory of the past “as negativity, as a product of human initiative” in which other alternatives were possible (p. 89). This process empowers counterhegemonic globalization, or insurgent cosmopolitanism, that is grounded in the universality of human suffering and requires equilibrium between theories of separation and theories of union.
Abyssal thinking reproduces orthopedic thinking that constrains and impoverishes thought by limiting all problems to specific “analytic and conceptual markers” and the problems that they raise, which in practice leads to strong questions and weak answers (p. 106). Movement beyond the West’s orthopedic thinking and epistemological monopolization requires 1) learned ignorance, 2) ecology of knowledges, and 3) the wager, all of which aim to denaturalize oppression. Learned ignorance understands that there are infinite ways of knowing finite human groups’ experiences that we do not know; the ecology of knowledges attempts to understand this diversity of what we do not know; and the wager comprehends rational thought for social emancipation.
The second part of the book outlines movement toward a revolutionary way of knowing: “epistemologies of the South.” In our historical present, abyssal thinking structures the fields of law (law/nonlaw) and science (science/nonscience) that enforce social regulation/social emancipation in metropolitan societies and appropriation/violence in colonial territories. With the reappearance of colonial peoples in the colonizers’ metropolitan societies (i.e., as terrorists), the abyssal response forces the returned colonial outside of the social contract where “human rights are thus violated in order to be defended; democracy is destroyed to safeguard democracy; life is eliminated to preserve life” (p. 127). The countermovement to this new abyssal response is subaltern cosmopolitanism. Subaltern cosmopolitanism counters societal fascism in each of its five forms and requires a post-abyssal thinking—a “nonderivate thinking” that radically breaks “with modern Western ways of thinking and acting” (p. 134). Subaltern insurgent cosmopolitanism resists abyssal thinking and cognitive injustice and organizes and unites resistance on a global scale.
The epistemological foundations of subaltern, insurgent cosmopolitanism include epistemologies of blindness and seeing entailed by the sociologies of absences and emergences. An epistemology of blindness investigates how Western modernity’s hegemonic way of knowing blinds the representation of social reality and misrepresents the consequences thereof. Today in Western modernity, social regulation encompasses social emancipation where hegemonic ignorance is chaos and solidarity, while hegemonic knowing is order and colonialist knowledge. The epistemology of blindness illuminates the limits of which social realities are relevant (scales of knowing), how relevant are certain social realities (perspectives), how social realities are identified including methods to detect and theories to recognize (resolution), how social realities are placed in temporality (duration/signature), and how social realities are interpreted and evaluated (agents of knowledge and knowledge practices). The epistemology of seeing authenticates a way of knowing where ignorance is colonialism and knowing is solidarity. This trajectory requires three moves: 1) the epistemology of absent knowledges, where social practices are relevant ways of knowing that collectively illustrate a “constellation of knowledges geared to create surplus solidarity[:] . . . a new common sense” (p. 157); 2) the epistemology of absent agents that “decenter[s] conform[ist], docile bodies” and energizes spontaneous and rebellious action; and 3) reevaluation of the limits of representation so that consequences are understood in the context of actions that cause them.
Western modernity’s hegemonic way of thinking wastes experience through lazy reason, a way of knowing rationality that excludes social practices as knowledge. Lazy reason contracts the present and indefinitely expands the future, grounded in five monocultural modes of production; 1) knowledge and the rigor of knowledge, 2) linear time, 3) the naturalization of differences, 4) logic of the dominant scale (relevance), and 5) of the capitalist logic of productivity. Counterhegemonic subaltern cosmopolitan rationality, however, as a way of knowing, expands the present and contracts the future, creating a “time-space” to know, and not waste, social experience. Specifically, the sociology of absences expands the present through ecologies, or “radical copresence,” of knowledge that, in solidarity, make relevant the “diversity and multiplicity of social practices” as knowledge practices and employ counterhegemonic ecologies (p. 181).
The epistemologies of the South move toward post-abyssal thinking, in which the ecologies of knowledge and intercultural translation are central. The ecologies of knowledge assume 1) intersubjectivity, 2) interscalarity (different scales of knowing social reality), 3) intertemporality (different times and duration), 4) trans-scalarity (local-global linkages), and 5) context dependent knowledge-as-intervention. Intercultural translation asserts that all knowledges are incomplete and in practice is a tool for “mediation and negotiation” that promotes intermovement politics of peoples and struggles against the oppressions of the global North (p. 224).
In all, this book problematizes Western hegemonic ways of knowing and outlines revolutionary “epistemologies of the South,” premised on the idea that global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Though a dense epistemological and philosophical sojourn, this book illuminates a tangible way of knowing that connects theory and praxis. Therefore, this book warrants urgency and makes important contributions to the field of sociology specifically, and our ways of knowing generally, as well as the praxis of social justice.