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Key Texts

Key Texts

Boaventura de Sousa Santos 'Why the Epistemologies of the South?'

De Sousa Santos and ‘pluriversality’

 

In the reading group, we discussed de Sousa Santos’s description of ‘pluriversality’. In particular, we asked whether this necessitates a form of commensurability between decolonial thought and hegemonic Western Enlightenment thinking.

 

De Sousa Santos, along with some other thinkers of coloniality, dares to go down the route of asking the ‘what now?’ question of decolonisation. If we assume that epistemologies – including those of law - are divided along what de Sousa Santos calls the ‘abyssal line’, then what kind of knowledges should we pay attention to and is this process possible in a Western institution which by its very structure reproduces Western Enlightenment thinking? Can we cross the abyssal line? We discussed that De Sousa Santos may be attempting to ‘tame the fire’ of decolonisation with his work. This takes us to the question of audience. When invoking Foucault and Goethe, is his audience one in the Global South? What would decolonial struggles of the Global South make of this text? This is where there is a possible departing then from Frantz Fanon’s work - who believes that to overcome imperialism, violence is inevitable. Would Fanon have agreed with the concept of pluriversality? The suggestion of alternative ways of thinking suggested by de Sousa Santos are helpful for starting a conversation and at the same time appear to lump very different things together. It was mentioned that ubuntu and Pachamama have different significance for resistance struggles. A danger in using indigenous ways of being and thinking in a tokenistic fashion might moreover lead to a problematic ‘fetishising of the local’ which is approached from the viewpoint of a Western conception of ‘the global’.

 

Christine Schwöbel-Patel

Fri 11 Oct 2019, 08:50