Power, Knowledge, and Epistemic Delinking

Aneta Stojnić

doi:10.25038/am.v0i14.218

Aneta Stojnić

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i14.218

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Abstract

In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the Colonial Matrix of Power as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the (racial) Other. Those power relations render certain bodies and spaces as (epistemologically) irrelevant. In order to discuss possible models of struggle against such condition, firstly I have addressed the relation between de-colonial theories and postcolonial studies, arguing that decolonial positions are both historicising and re-politicising the postcolonial theory. In my central argument I have focused on the epistemic delinking and political implications of decolonial turn. With reference to Grada Killomba I have argued for the struggle against epistemic violence through decolonising knowledge. Decolonising knowledge requires delinking form Eurocentric model of knowledge production and radical dismantling the existing hierarchies among different knowledge. It requires recognition of the ‘Other epistemologies’ and ‘Other knowledge’ as well as liberation from Western disciplinary and methodological limitations. One of the main goals of decolonial project is deinking from the Colonial Matrix of Power. However, delinking is not required only in the areas of economy and politics but also in the field of epistemology.

Highlights

In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the “colonial matrix of power” as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the Other
This means that coloniality is not a result of any kind of colonial power but has its origins precisely in the specific social and historical context of the concurring of the Americas,[2] when capitalism has become firmly intertwined with mechanisms of domination and subordination, that will be disseminated to the other geopolitical spaces.[3]
For establishing this new colonial capitalist order the process of racialization had a key role: “One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific rationality: Eurocentrism

Summary

Introduction

Abstract: In this paper I shall argue that radical epistemic delinking has a key role in liberation from the “colonial matrix of power” as well as the change in the existing global power relations which are based in the colonialism and maintained through exploitation, expropriation and construction of the (racial) Other. When the racially other has been established as if on a lower level of development than a human – and for colonialists the real humans were only white Christians – it was possible to introduce new order of power based on dehumanization into the historical project of modernity.

Results

Conclusion