Enacting the Locus of Enunciation as a Resistant Tactic to Confront Epistemological Racism and Decolonize Scholarly Knowledge

Abstract

AbstractThis forum article is an attempt to engage in a recent exchange between Figueiredo and Martinez and Kubota whose articles were published in this journal. Bearing out the tenets of the latter author’s claims regarding how to confront the dominance of white Euro-American hegemonic knowledge, Figueiredo and Martinez proposed an additional insightful way of challenging the dominance of this knowledge, namely by unmasking and exposing one’s own loci of enunciation. I take up the notion of the locus of enunciation further by not just simply conceiving it as a way, but rather as a resistant tactic. Construed in the latter sense, the article argues that scholars from the Global South do not passively and uncritically accept Eurocentric epistemologies as the sole universal and legitimate knowledge. Instead, they are capable of not only negotiating and appropriating the established knowledge, but also performing their agentive capacity from their specific geo-political and body-political positionalities to resist the dominion of Eurocentric epistemological practices, as well as to elevate and legitimate their own ecology of knowledges.