Philosophy and the Global Majority: Politics of Knowledge Production and Transversality

Note: Continuing the Miami Institute’s philosophy forum, Mickaella L. Perina discusses “biases and discriminations against the global majority discourses to highlight, politicize and contest the hegemony of Euro-American philosophical discourses” and explores “methodological approaches, rooted in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, that suggest different epistemological practices.”

I conceive of philosophy as a practice of interrogation that takes multiple forms in various places at different times. I am however aware that as a field of study in contemporary academia, primarily, but not exclusively, in the global North, it is a territory that maintains its identity through the policing of its borders. Within such territory the activity of knowledge production creates categories that become tools to order inquiries hierarchically and distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate ones. Such ordering is often presented as neutral and objective and in an ideal world I suppose it could be, but philosophy as an academic discipline is not immune to politics of knowing and politics of disciplinary divisions. Despite critique, processes of knowledge production, reproduction and dissemination in philosophy continue to exclude non-European philosophy and to secure the hegemony of Euro-American philosophy affording power to some, taking power away from others and having significant implications for all. With that in mind, in what follows, I discuss biases and discriminations against the global majority discourses to highlight, politicize and contest the hegemony of Euro-American philosophical discourses and explore methodological approaches, rooted in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, that suggest different epistemological practices.

Hegemonic discourses and contestations

Concepts and discourses often gain currency because of politics of knowing through which epistemological categories are produced and disseminated while others are marginalized, silenced, or excluded. The production and use of knowledge and expertise is organized under political conditions and has political consequences. Hierarchies of power and knowledge change over time but are always influenced by the legacy of earlier periods. Consequently, any serious attempt at assessing and responding to discriminations and biases against the global majority in philosophy today must start with an examination of the coloniality of power understood as the ontological and epistemic dimension of colonial racism that created racialization of peoples and regions and their intellectual productions and either marginalized them or excluded them from specific domains of knowledge. Such processes of racialization continue to have tremendous impact on philosophical knowledge production and dissemination today. Indeed, what counts as knowledge, who counts as a knower or whose knowledge matters remain often predicated upon the coloniality of power. 

Nevertheless, epistemological categories and frameworks do not typically exist in isolation, they are part of a world “in relation,” to use a key concept proposed by the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, and they get contested. Indeed, discourses compete in and outside academia and travel in the various worlds of academia. An example of such contestation in the Afro-Caribbean philosophical tradition is Antenor Firmin’s book, The Equality of the Human Races, first published in France in 1885 when anthropology was emerging as a specific field of study. The book presents an argument for the equality and perfectibility of all human beings against Arthur de Gobineau’s thesis of an innate and permanent inequality among the “human races;” and more broadly it is a response to the racialist anthropology of the 19th century. A foundational text in critical anthropology, the book is also, in my view, an essential text in philosophical anthropology understood as an interpretation of the empirical investigation of the nature of humans. Firmin argued that the equality of the races could be demonstrated through a positivist scientific approach at a time when Gobineau’s contradictory thesis was the received view, and as a result his radical position was marginalized. Firmin challenged what he regarded as a racial myth and laid basis for the understanding of human variations as adaptation to climate and environment. Additionally, and contrary to the polygenist doctrines of the infertility of interracial mating, Firmin exposed the value of racial mixture as experienced in Haiti and more broadly in the Caribbean. I use this example to point on the one hand to processes of marginalization and exclusion applied to a text that was undoubtedly ahead of its time but also to a text produced by someone from a colonized and racialized periphery often considered as object of knowledge but not as site of knowledge production and on the other hand to the strength of the contestation that is affirmation of a difference in approach, observations, experience and results in addition to a form of resistance and disobedience. 

Towards transversality?

What would it mean to free philosophy from the type of discriminations and biases described above? In my view, attempts to answer this question correlates with attempts to address another question inspired by Glissant, namely “what would it mean “to consider the world as it happens through the reversal of our current imaginaries”? Indeed, to free the field of philosophy from bias and discrimination against the global majority seems to require a reversal of current imaginaries, both the imaginaries of others and ours.

Such a transformative project would require specific epistemic practices. The literature offers various conceptual frameworks to think through the discriminations and bias against non-Euro-American experiences and understandings in the field of philosophy; they include, among others, epistemology of ignorance, epistemology of resistance, epistemic disobedience. They all point to the need to recognize the inverted epistemology at play in various fields, to address the ignorance that “presents itself as knowledge” (C. Mills) and excludes other experiences and understandings as not relevant and to design methodological approaches to respond to this specific knowledge production. I see them as examples of the variety of approaches that can be used “to reverse our current imaginaries.”  To focus on epistemic disobedience is to aim at distancing oneself from forms of ‘imperial knowledge’ and ‘disciplinary management’. Other methods might include connecting various forms of epistemic disobedience or epistemic resistance to encourage scrutinizing epistemic exclusions and hegemonic discourses. To be fully successful such transformative project would need to change not only the content of what counts as knowledge but also to identify the necessary steps to conceive of and create a different type of knowledge.

Here again Caribbean philosophy provides insights. In this tradition, there often is a focus on the discontinuities and the relation between experiences and between frameworks designed to understand them; an emphasis on the hidden presences (gaps, silences, and absences) is often considered as having the potential to bring to light what is knowable but perhaps is not fully known or is unspeakable for those who experience them. Beyond forgetfulness, disavowal, misrecognition, and amnesia there is the possibility for new understandings and the creation of a new form of temporality grounded in histories (as opposed to a universal History), which invites taking seriously what Glissant calls transversality. Transversality, for Glissant, is both disruption and connection, an ontological nexus of conflicting directions (rather than an ontological condition or status) that is shaped in flows and networks and characterizes the Caribbean. It is important to account for both disruptions and connections to account for the diversity of experiences and of philosophies developed to understand them. At one level part of the work that needs to be done is to account for concepts and frameworks that are accessible through texts that do not necessarily present the form of philosophical argument expected in circles regarded as authoritative. At another level it is crucial to account for concepts and frameworks that are accessible not through texts but through oral forms, especially in places impacted by colonial rules where local languages and creoles were regulated if not strictly prohibited and where vernaculars constituted vectors of expression, of resistance and of relationality.

Last, I want to warn against the danger of reproducing forms of linguistic oppression and more broadly logics of domination and exclusion, within the global majority while designing new methodologies to address biases against the global majority. It seems to me that it is worth keeping in mind that one of the perverse effects of systemic exclusion is to coerce those who would normally be able to resist into assimilation and recognizing that engaging in epistemic disobedience might come at a cost which makes it also necessary to develop ways to address such cost while designing new methodologies.

Philosophy, like other established academic disciplines, can become a site of epistemic violence against the global majority by providing exclusive legitimacy to Euro-American sites of knowledge production and silencing others. While knowledge production is a dynamic that should allow for contest and dissent and make possible (and at times necessary) associations and alliances, processes of knowledge production and politics of disciplinary divisions often contribute to securing the hegemony of Euro-American experiences and understandings. To free philosophy from bias and discrimination against the global majority is a challenge that requires a clear commitment on the part of various actors in the production (and reproduction) of knowledge. Such non-hegemonic endeavor must take seriously issues of credibility and authority as well as resistance and contestations and examine how new deployments of power and authority are overtly manifested or disguised in the process. I believe Africana philosophy and its sub-field Afro-Caribbean philosophy, with its various components, is well positioned to significantly contribute to the reversal of our imaginaries that can change contemporary forms of knowledge production in philosophy.

-Mickaella L. Perina

Mickaella L. Perina is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a co-organizer of the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race. She published numerous articles on inclusion/exclusion in liberal democracy theory; race, identity, and citizenship; and remembering and forgetting as processes at the interplay between official public memory and counter-memories. She is the author of Citoyenneté et Sujétion aux Antilles Francophones [Citizenship and Subjection in the Francophone Antilles] (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997). She is currently completing a manuscript on Caribbean Philosophy.