Alternative Epistemologies Research Articles

The People Know Best: Situating the Counterexpertise of Populist Pipeline Opposition Movements

Critical scholarship suggests that environmental populism is either an expression of radical democracy beyond the paternalistic liberalism of mainstream environmentalism (Meyer 2008) or that it is paranoid, irrational, and merely reactive to elite technocratic governance (Swyngedouw 2010). Because both frameworks take populism to instrumentalize knowledge production, they miss how practices of counterexpertise might condition the emergence of left-populist oppositional identities. I argue that counterexpertise is a political activity not by producing an alternative epistemology but as a minor science that contests science from within and in the process shapes left-populist political coalitions. This is illustrated through research on populist responses to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in the Great Plains region of North America, where environmentalists, landowners, and grassroots organizers sought to position themselves as experts. Through public participation in environmental review, pipeline mapping projects, and construction monitoring, environmental populists created an educational campaign concerning topics as diverse as hydrology, economics, and archaeology. Developing counterexpertise not only contested the evidence produced by oil infrastructure firms and the state but also consolidated the oppositional identity of “the people.” By examining populist knowledge production within the broader field of contentious politics, I argue that we can better understand it as neither an irrational reaction nor transparently democratic but as part of a processual production of identities of resentment and resistance. One implication is that climate change denial and disinformation spread by the oil industry might be challenged by resituating science for political ends rather than renewing neutral objectivity. Key Words: environmentalism, expertise, oil pipelines, populism.批判研究主张, 环保民粹主义不是超越温和专制的自由主义下的主流环境保护主义之基进民主的展现 (Meyer 2008), 便是仅只是针对精英官僚治理的偏执、非理性之反动（Swyngedouw 2010）。上述两种架构皆运用民粹主义操作知识生产, 因而忽略了反专家的实践如何可能成为左翼民粹主义的反抗性身份认同的浮现之条件。我主张, 反专家作为一种政治活动, 并非透过生产另类的认识论, 而是在科学内部进行争夺的微科学, 并在过程中塑造左翼民粹主义的政治联盟。此一论点通过研究北美大平原区域中的基斯顿输油管（Keystone XL）和达科他输油管（Dakota Access pipelines）之民粹反应进行阐述, 其中环境专家、土地所有者和草根组织者寻求将自身置于专家的位置。通过环境审查、输油管製图计画、以及工程监督的公众参与, 环保民粹主义者创造了考量水文、经济和考古等多样主题的教育倡议。发展反专家运动不仅对石油基础建设公司和国家所生产的证据进行争夺, 同时巩固了“人民”作为反对者的身份认同。我通过检视更广泛的争议政治领域中的民粹知识生产, 主张不将其视为不理性的反动或显而易见的民主, 而是更佳地将其理解为生产愤怒与抵抗的身份认同的过程中的一部分。其中一个意涵便是, 气候变迁否认主义和石油产业所传播的虚假信息, 或可通过将科学至于政治端、而非重拾客观中立性来进行挑战。 关键词: 环境保护主义, 专家, 输油管, 民粹主义。La erudición crítica sugiere que el populismo ambiental es, o una expresión de la democracia radical que trasciende el liberalismo paternalista de la principal corriente del ambientalismo (Meyer 2008), o paranoico, irracional y meramente reactivo a la gobernanza tecnocrática de la élite (Swyngedouw 2010). Debido a que ambos marcos toman al populismo para instrumentalizar la producción de conocimiento, ellos no captan cómo las prácticas de contraexperticia podrían condicionar la aparición de identidades opositoras izquierdo-populistas. Sostengo que la contraexperticia es una actividad política no productora de una epistemología alternativa, sino como una ciencia menor que cuestiona la ciencia desde dentro, proceso en el cual configura coaliciones políticas izquierdo-populistas. Esto se ilustra por medio de investigación sobre las respuestas populistas a los oleoductos Keystone XL y Dakota Access en la región de los Grandes Llanos de América del Norte, donde los ambientalistas, propietarios de la tierra y organizadores de las bases buscan posicionarse como expertos. A través de la participación pública en la revisión ambiental, proyectos de mapeo de los oleoductos y monitoreo de las construcciones, los populistas ambientales crearon una campaña educativa relacionada con tópicos tan diversos como hidrología, economía y arqueología. El desarrollar contraexperticia no solo cuestionó la evidencia producida por las firmas de infraestructura de petróleos y el estado, sino que también consolidó la identidad opositora de “el pueblo”. Al examinar la producción populista de conocimiento dentro del campo más amplio de la política de confrontación, sostengo que es posible entenderla mejor si no la consideramos como reacción irracional ni transparentemente democrática, sino como parte de una producción de proceso de identidades de resentimiento y resistencia. Una implicación es que la denegación del cambio climático y la desinformación difundida por la industria petrolera podrían retarse resituando la ciencia más para fines políticos que para renovar la objetividad neutral.

Social Domination and Epistemic Marginalisation: towards Methodology of the Oppressed

Marginalisation is both a structural and an epistemic issue. The struggle against exclusion and marginalisation should take place within larger social structures. Moreover, we should address the legitimacy offered, through the knowledge production process itself, for exclusion and marginalisation. Knowledge production regarding the oppressed should document their lives, experiences and concerns. It must take place with an appropriate methodological struggle informed by alternative epistemologies. While creating alternative epistemologies, it is important to challenge the value-neutrality claim of mainstream research practices. We should acknowledge that mainstream epistemic domination exists ‘not because of objectivity or universality of their research practices but their privileged location within a historical, material and social setup of dominant power relations’. A ‘situated knowledge’ building process may help to end the epistemic oppression of marginalised groups. This process lends new forms and applications of enquiry that are necessarily inclusive and that pay closer attention to elements such as personal experiences, subjectivity, worldviews, and emotions.

CONTESTING ‘DEFORESTATION’: CIVIL SOCIETY MOVEMENTS AND KNOWLEDGE CO-PRODUCTION IN INDONESIA

This article explains the emergence of civil society movements around deforestation issue in Indonesia as contestation over knowledge claims that defines ‘deforestation’ as a political term. The term ‘deforestation’, which is translated into ‘perusakan hutan’ in Indonesian forestry laws and regulation, is a product of political epistemology that serve the needs to sustain state-reinforced developmentalism. It is imposed by valorization of modern scientific and technocratic values as well as bureaucratization of the forestry sector. Engaging with critical political ecology literatures, this study unpacks the constitutive interactions among various ways of seeing that redefine state forestry and its implications to the reproduction of political order. ‘Perusakan hutan’ is continuously re-negotiated in the relations between the state and its formative societal elements. Knowledge on addressing deforestation is organized around three contesting epistemologies: conservation, redistribution, and indigeneity. Each epistemology seeks to claim political space in the institutionalization of knowledge that fortifies state’s policies in the forestry sector. Politics of knowledge co-production operates at two levels: between hegemonic knowledge construct and its counter knowledge formation, and within the formation of counter-knowledge through alternative epistemologies.

Languaging in digital global South\u2013North spaces in the twenty-first century: media, language and identity in political discourse

Drawing inspiration from two theoretical framings: a sociocultural perspective on languaging and writings on a decolonial-turn, the study presented in this paper center-stages issues related to the need to engage analytically with, (i) social actions of political parties, citizens, including netizens in Web 2.0 settings, and (ii) alternative epistemologies where issues from the global-South are privileged. A central concern of decolonial linguistics enables asking new questions that destabilize established Eurocentric models of language. Thus, peripherally framed sociocultural premises contribute to critical social-humanistic perspectives that allow for (potentially) unpacking northern hegemonies and contributing to global-North challenges. Building upon an analytical design, this paper presents cross-disciplinary analysis of languaging in contemporary political mediascapes of the nation-states of India and Sweden. Bringing to bear that language does not only mirror reality, but is also a constitutive cultural-tool, the study aims to highlight the contrastive ways in which the dominating political parties and citizens engage with languaging (i.e. the deployment of semiotic resources across language-varieties, modalities, including imagery). The study unpacks similarities and differences in salient issues related to the nature of social media and language and identity-positions in political discourse, highlighting dimensions of the participants voices. Thus, patterns that emerge from the contrastive analysis of political discourses, including the features of social media are highlighted and discussed. Data includes social media pages of two political parties from both the nation-states across a 6-week period at the end of 2017.

The Humanities And The University: Craig Calhoun Interviewed

In this interview Craig Calhoun talks about universities, the Humanities and his own research. Universities reinvent themselves in the face of societal and technological change. In the midst of this change, however, universities are charged with maintaining old ideals, with informing the public and creating opportunities for human development. The Humanities often bemoan these changes but they are ideally positioned to contribute to the changing university – especially through teaching – and so protect the traditional place of the university in society. The Humanities must help to defend the canon but, at the same time, be open to new rethinking the canon by embracing alternative epistemologies. One means to do this is to opening knowledge up by embracing languages other than English. Calhoun’s own research is focussed on those ‘parts of globalisation’ that are not commonly investigated: Belonging and Identity, Social Emergencies as an exception; the fragility of Global capitalism.

The Universal and the Contextual of Media Systems: Research Design, Epistemology, and the Production of Comparative Knowledge

Current discussions about the state of comparative research in journalism studies and political communication suggests the field is characterized by a methodological imbalance (i.e., many quantitative studies, few qualitative ones). This paper suggests the problem is better understood as an epistemological imbalance. We suggest that one epistemology—we call it “universalism”—underpins much comparative scholarship. While this approach produces numerous comparative insights, it also struggles to adequately account for the diversity of contexts it studies. We therefore describe an alternative epistemology, which we term “contextualism.” This approach aims to identify the mechanisms or principles that unify or differentiate cases across contexts. We suggest that progress in the field depends in part on the coexistence of multiple epistemologies, each with careful awareness of its strengths and limitations.

Feminismos del Sur, abriendo horizontes de descolonización. Los feminismos indígenas y los feminismos comunitarios

Decolonizing Feminism implies the internal critique of «western hegemonic feminisms», and especially the way in which these theoretical and political approaches discursively produce «women of the third world» as monolithic and ahistorical subjects (deconstruction). This criticism is, however, insufficient if there is not an epistemic detachment from the Modernity/Coloniality matrix and a creative intention oriented to search for alternative thoughts located «outside» the European and American universe. Is in this tension that some feminist thoughts and practices from Latin American indigenous worlds can be located. In particular, it is interesting to analyze the communal feminism, since it is located beyond the postcolonial critique. Through categories such as territory-body and territory-land, this feminism grounds itself in an alternative epistemology. The strength of this feminism lies in conceiving sexual oppression as the counterpart of colonial domination, which suggests a double depatriarchalization of the different territories against the forms of oppression of capitalism and, also, of the ancestral patriarchy.

Mohammed Almagout poetry in his collection ( Seyaf Alzehour) Textual reading in Purposefulness

Mohammed Almagout is a fruitful poetical character of innovative ideas , violating the standard system in thinking and writing. He aims to create intellectual and epistemological alternatives , to reach the future, where the targeted poetical dreams rather than reality. He is with humanistic vision seeking glimpses of hope. His poetical approach is humanistic targeting new horizons to provide life with purposefulness for the responder . The research problem: The research tackles the concept of ( purposefulness) as textual criteria , and basic condition in humanistic communication process, between the poet, the creator of coherence and aim connected text , and the responder , who intends to investigate the purposefulness. The research method and aim.The research follows textual approach, to explain the language of the poet in this collection, and to locate and investigate the mechanism of the poet purposefulness, where that opens a gap to show the text, and multiple readings. The purposefulness is of condensed dimension rather than significance rational , as in ordinary text.

Pan-Africanism and Epistemologies of the South

Abstract The topic of pan-Africanism today brings to the fore questions of the unfinished humanistic project of decolonisation in Africa. When Kwasi Wiredu (1996) calls for the need for conceptual decolonisation in Africa, he recognises the intellectual price the continent continues to pay as a result of conceptual confusions and distortions caused by a colonial conceptual idiom implanted in the African mind. Reflecting on the potential which the ideology of pan-Africanism holds for the continent’s future, my position is that the same passion and energy which brought about political independence should now be redirected to the epistemic front. A new form of pan-Africanism on the intellectual front is required to galvanise Africans to develop and deploy in their thinking veritable categories of analysis born out of the experiences of being African in Africa. It is in the generation and application of these alternative epistemologies that the future of the continent lies.

Toward a Radical Imagination of Law

In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice.” The Movement for Black Lives is the leading example of a contemporary racial justice movement with an intersectional politics including feminist and anti-capitalist commitments. The visions of such radical social movements offer an alternative epistemology for understanding and addressing structural inequality and injustice. By studying not only the critiques offered by radical social movements, but also their visions for transformative change, the edges of law scholarship can be expanded, a deeper set of critiques and a longer set of histories—of colonialism and settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and mass incarceration—centered, and a bolder project of transformation forwarded. These visions should push legal scholars toward a broader frame for understanding how law, the market, and the state co-produce intersectional structural inequality, and toward agendas that focus not on building the power of law and law enforcement, but on transforming the state and society and building the power of marginalized communities. This shift would invigorate the social movements literature and bring new energy to scholarship on substantive areas of law, from criminal and immigration law to property and contract law. To illustrate the creative potential of studying radical social movements, this Article considers policing the Vision for Black Lives with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Ferguson and Baltimore reports. The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of police in their failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a remedy, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a historical and violent force in Black communities underpinning a system of racial capitalism and limiting the possibilities of Black life. Here, law is central to the shape and legitimation of racialized violence and inequality. The Vision’s reimagination of policing—rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions—transforms mainstream approaches to reform. The Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting resources into other social programs in Black communities: housing, health care, jobs, and schools. It focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the relationship between government, market, and society. In forwarding an abolitionist imagination, the movement offers transformative, affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality—something legal scholarship has for far too long lacked.

Theoretical development in the context of nursing-The hidden epistemology of nursing theory.

This article is about nursing theories, the development of nursing knowledge and the underlying, hidden epistemology. The current technical-economical rationality in society and health care calls for a specific kind of knowledge based on a traditional Western, Socratic view of science. This has an immense influence on the development of nursing knowledge. The purpose of the article was therefore to discuss the hidden epistemology of nursing knowledge and theories seen in a broad historical context and point to an alternative epistemology for a future context. It is a question about which nursing theories and what nursing knowledge should be developed in order to benefit patients and relatives of the future. We suggest that future knowledge development in nursing be developed in an interchange between theory and practice and guided by philosophy like a kind of pendulum where all three elements are treated as equals. We suggest a framework for the development of nursing knowledge based on a caring-ethical practice, a theory on life phenomena in suffering and relationship-based nursing, and thereby, we may be able to help patients to be cured, to recover, to be alleviated or comforted when suffering.

Islamization of Knowledge – Symptom of the Failed Internationalization of the Social Sciences?

ABSTRACTThe internationalization of the social sciences, understood as the increasing circulation of people, ideas and materials, has been accompanied by critiques of material and power differentials and of theoretical and epistemological Eurocentrism. Within this context of debate, Islamization of knowledge (IOK) appears as an alternative epistemology. After a brief historical account of IOK’s international institutionalization, the paper focuses on one key institution, the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), where interviews were conducted with key protagonists of IOK. Analyses of these interviews reveal that IOK has been symptomatic of the failed aspects of the internationalization of the social sciences. To overcome the current state of affairs, proponents suggest three different projects for universalization of the social sciences. The paper concludes with a critical appraisal of these projects’ significance for sociology and hints at potential epistemological fractures within the di...

Towards a decoionial music education in and from Latin America

This article introduces the special issue about decolonial music education the authors have edited, while presenting some core concepts of the “modernity / coloniality” framework and approaching them on the music education realm. Particularly, it provides some basis of a theoretical perspective to understand instituted forms of music education in Latin America as derived from the modern civilizatory project, Besides, this framework allows to rescue, visualize and understand, as well as imagine and configure, music education experiences that offer resistance to such process and promote epistemological alternatives. As a presentation of this special issue the article also proposes some keys for reading the papers that follow it.

“Slowness” in the Anthropocene: ecological medicine in Refuge and God’s Hotel

How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in the Anthropocene, or what is being called the new “Age of the Human,” with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? These are the questions that Stacy Alaimo poses in Bodily Natures (2010). Six years later, literary critics, doctors, and environmentalists are still considering the powerful and pervasive material forces of toxins and pollution and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. This topic was first introduced by Joni Adamson in a monograph that signaled a turn in ecocriticism to environmental justice that considered toxins and pollution in the places we live, work, and play (2001). Alaimo (2010), Linda Nash (2006) and others took up that new direction to reinforce the argument that the history of the environment is intertwined with the notion of disease and with the issues of social class, gender, and race. Drawing on the perspectives of elemental/material ecocriticism in relation to disease, the environment, and bodies, this essay explores Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991) to analyze how nuclear detonation, underground, was constitutive of the history of what she terms the “clan of the one-breasted women.” After emphasizing the possible (environmental) causes and risks of cancer or other chronic diseases in the age of the Anthropocene, the essay then focuses on attempts to uncover the “underground” or alternative epistemologies of cancer and other diseases and their associated therapies based on a reading of Victoria Sweet’s book God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine (2012). Sweet’s professional experience acquired over twenty years of practice as a doctor at Laguna Honda, a chronic care hospital, resonates with the perspectives of other authors who are also interested in alternative and ecological health care and in notions of “slow medicine,” “ecological medicine,” the art of gardening, and mind–body interactions. In the framework of elemental ecocriticism, this essay argues that in picturing an era of anthropogenic culture and confronting invisible xenobiotic chemicals, Sweet’s elemental ecocritical thinking of medicine, bodies, and environment is not obsolete but perhaps an “antidote” to the suicidal tendency of modern society.

A Social Constructionist Model of Therapeutic Factors

Evidentiary support for the efficacy of therapeutic models has been a contentious issue since the professionalization of psychology. Despite advances in evidence-based practices in psychology and common factors research, discontent still exists among postmodern psychotherapists in that evidence is mainly defined in modernist/positivistic terms, thereby excluding therapeutic models based on alternative nonpositivistic epistemologies. I proposes a model, which is based on social constructionist theories, for investigating the therapeutic efficacy of various approaches. This article evaluates and differentiates between two models for viewing the efficacy of psychotherapy, namely outcome versus process efficacy. A social constructionist model of therapeutic factors is proposed as a means to incorporate therapeutic factors into psychotherapy processes that are consistent with a social constructionist theory of change. Three main therapeutic elements, which are identified as central to an effective psychotherapy process, are outlined in the model. The proposed model may be useful as a guide to efficacious psychotherapy and as a means for investigating the efficacy of social constructionist therapies.

The Comparative Education Review at 60: Still Pondering “Which Way Is Up?”

The <i>Comparative Education Review</i> at 60: Still Pondering “Which Way Is Up?”

Epistemological Dominance and Social Inequality

Can epistemologies anchor processes of social inequality? In this paper, we consider how epistemological dominance in science, engineering, and health (SE&amp;H) fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native American students enrolled at two US research universities who adhere to or revere indigenous epistemologies, we find that epistemological dominance in SE&amp;H degree programs disadvantages students through three processes. First, it delegitimizes Native epistemologies and marginalizes and silences students who value them. Second, in the process of imparting these dominant scientific epistemologies, SE&amp;H courses sometimes require students to participate in pedagogical practices that challenge indigenous ways of knowing. Third, students encounter epistemological imperialism: most students in the sample are working to earn SE&amp;H degrees in order to return to tribal communities to “give back,” yet, because the US laws regulating the practice of SE&amp;H extend onto tribal lands, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten indigenous knowledge ways to practice on tribal lands. We examine how students navigate these experiences, discuss the implications of these findings for SE&amp;H education, and describe how epistemological dominance may serve as a mechanism of inequality reproduction more broadly.

Philosophy: The Next Step

Philosophy: The Next Step Anand Jayprakash Vaidya (bio) Comparative Philosophy without Borders. Edited by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. viii + 246. isbn 978-1-4725-7624-8. Comparative Philosophy without Borders, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (hereafter CPWB) is an outstanding and groundbreaking anthology that is also a prolegomena to all future philosophy, not just comparative philosophy. The anthology sets forward an agenda that is arguably the next step for philosophy. Chakrabarti and Weber have a dream (a dream that, in this reviewer’s mind, echoes the sentiments of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech “I Have a Dream”): Our dream is that future fusion philosophy will shed its local epithets, even the epithet “comparative.” All good philosophy should be unapologetically, and, eventually, unself-consciously, comparative and culturally hybrid. (p. 237) They point out that the use of “comparative” must be seen from the perspective of epistemic inequalities that are part of the historical condition in which philosophy continues to be housed, and from which it needs to be set free. Their hope has an early Wittgensteinian ring to it: Once we have climbed up to the level playing field of global combative cooperative critical creative philosophy from the fetid wells of centuries of unacknowledged epistemic inequalities . . . , we can, it is hoped, throw away the ladder of comparison. We can then do just philosophy. . . . (p. 238) While there are many works in comparative philosophy that one can read in order to get one’s feet wet or see where comparative philosophy is headed, it must be pointed out that this work is unique in the way in which it illuminates, through each piece, the ideology of doing philosophy without borders in a progressive, forward-looking way. Because of the depth and intricacy of each piece, I will focus my review on some portions of the “Introduction” and “Afterword/Afterwards” written by the editors. My goal is to engage the ideology of the anthology as opposed to the nuances of each individual piece. The Ostensive Engagement Aside from the wonderful “Introduction” and “Afterword/Afterwards,” CPWB brings together nine engaging and educational papers. The editors point out three unique [End Page 922] features of the volume. First, the choice of topics is not narrowly captured. CPWB engages topics from metaphysics to politics. Second, the choice of method is not singular. Although the title engages with doing philosophy comparatively without borders, it is not correct to describe the collection as one in which the authors take on the method of doing philosophy without borders as a single methodology. Rather, the volume engages a variety of methods that come from not holding on to borders that allow for only a single method to be used, such as conceptual analysis or phenomenological analysis. Below, I list the table of contents with a brief summary of each chapter, and following that I offer my general comments. 1. “Count Nouns, Mass Nouns, and Translatability: The Case of Tibetan Buddhist Logical Literature” by Tom J. F. Tillemans is a highly engaging piece that traverses the important terrain in the primary and secondary literature on the Tibetan Collected Topics “in light of the now classic arguments on intertranslatability and its philosophical limits” (p. 23). 2. “Translation, Interpretation, and Alternative Epistemologies” by Barry Hallen also engages work on translatability deriving from Quine. He “sets out . . . to examine, compare, and, in terms of topic, fuse the philosophy retrieved from the semantics of the West African languages of the Akan of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria and of the English language . . . with regard to the underlying problematique of inter-translatability,” and he engages issues surrounding criteria for truth in natural language (p. 23). 3. “Resolving the Ineffability Paradox” by Chien-hsing Ho engages a broad range of traditions that discuss what he calls the “ineffability paradox.” The central question is: “how can one say that something is unspeakable without getting irretrievably implicated in paradox or self-refutation?” (p. 24). 4. “The Bowstring Is Like a Woman Humming: The Vedic Hymn to the Weapons and the Transformative Properties of Tools” by Laurie L. Patton “practices comparative philosophy crossing boundaries both of cultures as well as time...

Reggae as Subaltern Knowledge: Representations of Christopher Columbus as a Construction of Alternative Historical Memory

In this article, I examine how identity is not being “rediscovered” in reggae music, but rather produced through a re-telling of history that blends trauma and witnessing. Albert Memmi underscores the importance of re-telling history in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) when he rightly declares that the greatest consequence of colonialism was the exclusion of the colonized from both history and their community (151). Representations of Christopher Columbus, largely through first-person testimony, illustrate a metonym for how reggae music can be useful for the diffusion and endurance of a counter-discursive epistemology to undermine Western knowledge and culture as hegemonic. These musicians re-write themselves into history and forge a community by raising doubts over the problematic encounter between Columbus and indigenous peoples, an encounter often perceived as one of the fundamental moments for the development of modern American civilization. Such a project is not unique to Jamaica. According to Kenyan postcolonial theorist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “most national liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer, by repudiating the religion of the oppressing nation and class and the entire education system of the colonizer” (27). Although not a liberation movement in and of itself, reggae and Rastafari have sought to revise history since for these musicians, the “truth” surrounding the encounter has been one-sided and misrepresented. Indeed, in Reggae Wisdom (2001), Anand Prahlad discusses how reggae musicians take on the role of teacher in order to “focus on specific areas of history and culture that have been distorted by the texts found in colonial school systems or in other forms of hegemonic propaganda” (33). Reggae musicians, in an act of counter-discursive difference, reduce Columbus, viewed as heroic in the Western world (the United States still celebrates Columbus Day as an official holiday), to a liar, thief, slaver, and pedophile. Central to the alternative epistemology in reggae is the revision of Western historical figures often credited with Western expansion to present him as a villain of the Antilles.

Louis H. Sullivan: that Object He Became

Louis H. Sullivan constructed a world view based on a hierarchy of powers. Over this hierarchy he placed the emotion of sympathy. Characterising it as another power he described sympathy as a way of being in communion with the world that manifests in a fusion of identities. Through a close reading of his writings with particular attention paid to his often-encrypted references to Walt Whitman, together with a close reading of selected sources from his library, this essay interrogates his understanding. Sensitive to the question of ‘queering’, it focuses on his conception of fused identities and its effects on gender and sexuality. It excavates an understanding that suggests that Sullivan deliberately constructed an alternative epistemology that overcame a whole host of bipolar oppositions to include male and female. He opted instead for an emotive and fluid ontology where the fixed category of being dissolves in vital consubstantiation – and it was eroticised. Suggesting a uniquely queer stance, Sullivan insists that without a clear vision of it, one may never understand architecture.