Epistemic violence and structural racism. can the subaltern make science?

Abstract

This article critically analyses how Eurocentrism was self-established as the only valid form of scientific knowledge production; undervaluing multiple local knowledge, representations and imagineries. The text addresses how modern subjectivity built the othering among peripheral sectors in terms of epistemic inferiority, the aim is to see whether current representations of black otherness really constitute a paradigmatic shift in the way the difference is addressed, or whether they correspond to a euphemistic continuation of the colonial legacy. In the elaboration of this article, the genealogical method was used, as a political and academic commitment that proposes the elaboration of a historiographic narrative to unravel concretely the way in which official discourses were shaping the subjectivities that today consider Afro-Colombians as an identity category. In this sense, it resumes some criticisms made by intellectual sectors affiliated with post-colonial studies, subaltern studies,coloniality of power, and counter-hegemonic feminism.
It reflects on the possibility of establishing a truly intercultural dialogue among different knowledges, in which historically excluded sectors – specifically Afro-Colombians – produce
and disseminate scientific knowledge.