Toward an Aesthetics of the Epistemologies of the South

Abstract

that have been with us throughout the modern era: capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy (Santos 2018). They are so intimately interconnected that none of them operates in isolation. However, the social forces that have been resisting against modern domination have usually focused on one of these forms and rarely on all of them. As a consequence, anti-capitalist struggles have often been colonialist, racist, and sexist in character, while anti-colonialist or anti-racial struggles have often condoned capitalism and hetero-patriarchy, and anti-patriarchal struggles have often been capitalist and colonialist or racist in character. The tragedy of our time is that domination operates as a coordinated totality, while resistance against it is fragmented. 2. This pattern of domination, rather than being a mere economic or political model, is a Eurocentric civilizational paradigm. It is served by an immense body of hegemonic knowledges—the epistemologies of the North—based on the negation of the inhabitants and knowledges of the territories that are subjected to colonization and exploitation and which I call the global South. The epistemologies of the North are the knowledge structure this civilizational paradigm has developed to legitimize itself. By ignoring the underlying articulation among the three main forms of domination, these epistemologies contribute to disarm social resistance against them. Under global neoliberalism, such disarmament has reached an extreme level illustrated by the idea that there is no alternative to the status quo, as supposedly proven by the failure of all attempts in the last 100 years to change it in substantive ways. However, as the most brutal forms of exploitation—exclusion, discrimination, inequality, and 7