Epistemic Decolonization

“D.A. Wood brilliantly accomplishes what critique at its best understands as its task: making explicit the radical intent of a political and intellectual enterprise. Wood helps us to understand the strengths and misadventures of rival versions of the project of epistemic decolonization. We are thus better placed to extend to the realm of the politics of knowledge the integral implications of Fanon’s distinction between false and true decolonization. This is an original philosophical inquiry into a crucial debate of our time.”
—Ato Sekyi-Otu, Emeritus Professor of Social and Political Thought, York University



“This book highlights the myriad ways in which colonialism and imperialism not only shape what we think we know about the world, but even the very ways in which we come to know it. Wood describes how power relations based on nation, class, race, and gender inequality affect our comprehension while, at the same time, he advocates an emancipatory theory of knowledge that recognises the possibility of applying scientific methods to the resolution of social problems.”
—Zak Cope, author of The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer and co-editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism



European colonization played a major role in the acquisition, formation, and destruction of different ways of knowing. Recently, many scholars and activists have come to ask: Are there ways in which knowledge might be decolonized? Epistemic Decolonization examines a variety of such projects from a critical and philosophical perspective. The book introduces the unfamiliar reader to the wide variety of approaches to the topic at hand, providing concrete examples along the way. It argues that the predominant contemporary approach to epistemic decolonization leads one into various intractable theoretical and practical problems. The book then closely investigates the political and scientific work of Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, demonstrating how their philosophical commitments can help lead one out of the practical and theoretical issues faced by the current, predominant orientation, and concludes by forging links between their work and that of some contemporary feminist epistemologists.