The decolonial subject and the problem of non-Western authenticity

Abstract

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Mapping practices and spatiality in IR knowledge production: from detachment to emancipation

“…As highlighted earlier, it could result in unproblematic reifications of pervasive ‘West/non-West’ binaries. This raises important questions about who and what counts as authentic ‘non-Western’ knowledge (Biswas and Deylami, 2017; Vieira, 2019) and potentially reduces IR knowledge to a form of identity politics (Acharya and Buzan, 2010: 14; Capan, 2017: 8; Narain, 2017: 20). As one respondent highlighted, ‘one doesn’t want to go down the reductive route of saying what you study should be conditioned by who you are because then only Indian people should be qualified to speak on India .…”

Decolonising the Discourse on Resilience

“…According to Maldonado-Torres (2008, 5), "[d]ecolonial theory and praxis do not emerge from 'wonder' in face of a strange world, but out of scandal and horror in face of the 'death world' of coloniality". The claim that the West itself has a coherent and unified subjectivity and mode of totalising control is profoundly problematic and unpersuasive, because this becomes a mere caricature of what is otherwise a far more complicated set of subjectivities (Vieira 2019).…”

“…I argue that the colonial violence of subordination and dominance is reproduced by the misrecognition of epistemic injustice and its constitutive role in human subjectivity. In terms of misrecognition the centre-periphery relations (asymmetrical encounters between the colonised and the coloniser) suggest that local knowledge about how things work and are affected on the ground is ignored or devalued in the form of epistemic injustice (Vieira 2019).…”

“…The contours that shape the landscape of decoloniality can be traced to leading black intellectuals and academics who fought for epistemic freedom and opposed the violence of Euro-modernity (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020, 893). Decoloniality is not part of modernity; it is border thinking, border epistemology, delinking and unlearning dominant narratives as a way of re-learning the knowledge that has been pushed aside, subjugated, forgotten, buried, or discredited by the continued unfolding of Western modernity (Vieira 2019). Thinking decolonially is essentially to unmask, disrupt, question, displace, rattle, and unsettle modernity and, of course, render coloniality visible wherever it seeks to hide itself by exposing both its rhetoric and its reality (Mignolo 2011).…”