Epistemic Decolonization as Overcoming the Hermeneutical Injustice of Eurocentrism

Abstract

This paper is broadly concerned with the question of what epistemic decolonization might involve. It is divided into two parts. The first part begins by explaining the specifically epistemic problem to which calls for epistemic decolonization respond. I suggest that calls for decolonization are motivated by a perceived epistemic crisis consisting in the inadequacy of the dominant Eurocentric paradigm to properly theorize our modern world. I then discuss two general proposals, radical and moderate, for what epistemic decolonization might involve. In the second part, I argue that the inadequacy of Eurocentric epistemic resources constitutes a hermeneutical injustice caused by an irreducible form of epistemic oppression. I then argue that addressing this form of epistemic oppression requires thinking ‘outside’ of the Eurocentric paradigm because the paradigm might fail to reveal and address the epistemic oppression sustaining it. This lends further plausibility to the radical proposal that epistemic decolonization must involve thinking from ‘outside’ the Eurocentric paradigm, but also accommodates the moderate proposal that adopting critical perspectives on Eurocentric thought is an important part of epistemic decolonization.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for feedback and comments from Lucy Allais and discussions with Shrey Kapoor on the first draft of this paper.

Notes

1 Alcoff is taking this to be Walter Mignolo’s view.

2 In particular, decolonial perspectives ‘seek to interrupt the idea of dislocated, disembodied, and disengaged abstraction, and to disobey the universal signifier that is the rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality, and the West’s global model … ’ (Mignolo & Walsh 2018: 3). In this sense, decoloniality stands as a competing paradigm to the western paradigm in the sense that it has different concepts, theories, methodologies, metaphysical presuppositions and so on.

3 The thesis is popularly advanced by standpoint theories, and is the subject of some philosophical contestation, see for example Fricker (1999) and Mills (1988). The sort of theorizing from marginalized positions, or sites of struggle against oppression, described here is illustrated, within Western thought, in Marxist and feminist traditions which attempt to theorize the world from the point of view of workers’ and women’s movements, respectively.

4 Allais’ views concern specifically ‘Western’ philosophy, but I think they largely apply to ‘Western’ thought, and treat them as such here.

5 Sometimes it refers to the Western world—Europe, Australasia and the Americas—and sometimes it refers more narrowly to Western Europe and North America, leaving the status of Russia and Eastern Europe ambiguous.

6 The suggestion is that Eurocentric thought imposes its ‘provincialism as universalism’ (Quijano 2007: 177) through an epistemology that treats knowledge as dislocated and disembodied. Crudely, this suggests that modes of thought and understanding the world which originate from and respond to European conditions are posited as universally valid across all social and geographical conditions. Alcoff (2017) also makes the point that Eurocentric thinking is underpinned by the separation of thought from its socio-historical genealogy and context.

7 There is a growing sense that critical theories, such as decolonial and postcolonial theories, are making strides in their efforts to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentrism. Mbembe (2017: 1), for example, argues that ‘Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. This is the significant event, the fundamental experience, of our era. And we are only just now beginning the work of measuring its implications and weighing its consequences. Whether such a revelation is an occasion for joy or cause for surprise or worry, one thing remains certain: the demotion of Europe opens up possibilities—and presents dangers—for critical thought’.

8 Alcoff (2007: 91) makes clear, the target of decolonial theory ‘is rarely the content of specific epistemological positions or theories but rather of their imperial assumptions and scope of application’. The decolonial critique of Eurocentrism goes ‘beyond the truly magnificent and brilliant body of theories generated by such thinking and to question their epistemological foundations’ (de Sousa Santos 2018: viii).

9 Coloniality refers to ‘long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). It is a ‘global power structure that sustains asymmetrical power relations between the Euro-American world and the Global South’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013b: 11). Maeso and Araujo (2015: 3) argue that the dominant Eurocentric paradigm often interprets the processes of colonialism and racial slavery as ‘a dark chapter in the triumphant development of modernity, that is, an appendix to this history that is offset by the eventual progress in rights, equality and democracy’.

10 Hence the importance of the suggestion made by Allais (2016) that the notion of ‘Western’ thought be problematized and historically investigated.

11 See, for example, de Sousa Santos 2007, 2018; Mignolo 2007, 2011; Mignolo & Walsh 2018; Ndlovu 2008; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a 2013b; Quijano 2007. To be clear, proponents of decolonization make sure to emphasize that coloniality does not exhaust the modes of exploitation and domination between peoples (Quijano 2007). Hence to recognize coloniality as a fundamental aspect of the current global order is not to preclude any other aspects that possibly yield different ways of theorizing the world.

12 Fricker’s approach to addressing hermeneutical injustice by introducing virtue has been criticized by various scholars as failing to properly account for the structural nature of the wrong involved. See, for example, Alcoff (2010), Doan (2018), and Langton (2010).

13 Dotson (2012: 31) writes that ‘contributory justice is caused by an epistemic agent’s situated ignorance, the form of wilful hermeneutical ignorance, in maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced or biased hermeneutical resources that result in epistemic harm to the epistemic agency of a knower’.

14 He argues that ‘it would not be rational to try to reject everything of colonial ancestry’ because some of this thought may be valid and/or of some benefit to humankind.

15 Alcoff (2007: 91) writes of Western epistemology, for example, that its internal diversity and complexity is somehow able ‘to coexist with a uniform resistance to engaging with the implications of the fact that its own historical genealogy precisely maps onto the period of European colonialism’. Decolonial perspectives make a similar point about Eurocentric thought in general.

16 This view is expressed most clearly in the articulation of what ‘epistemologies of the South’ aim to do (see de Sousa Santos 2018).