‘Turkeys Cannot Vote for Christmas’: Why Epistemic Disobedience in an Anti-Black World Matters

Abstract

Never in the history of global coloniality has the idea of epistemic disobedience been as important as in the 21st century. This is not only because the struggle for decolonisation has shifted from physical confrontation between the coloniser and the colonised into a battle of ideas but also because the former has deployed the idea of knowledge to co-opt the latter into sustaining the very power structure in which he/she is oppressed. While the idea of epistemic disobedience has become irresistible to many decolonial scholars, policy makers and activists, its meaning (s) and implications in practice are yet to be elucidated. In this article, I seek not only to explicate the necessity of epistemic disobedience for black liberation within an anti-black world, but also to unpack its practical implications when deployed as a strategy for progressive decolonisation. Thus, I deploy the ideas of diachronic and synchronic agency to emphasise the significance of right positioning in the practice of epistemic disobedience within the power structure of global ‘modernity/coloniality’. (The term ‘modernity/coloniality’ is meant to emphasise that Western modernity is always constitutive of coloniality as its darker side).