Caribbean Roots: Knowledge And Global Coloniality

Despite the narratives of sustainable development, democracy, and a global village, a lot seems to be missing from solutions to global problems. Too often, these global initiatives do not properly consider and include the people of the Global South. Even when addressing issues such as poverty, mental health, inequality, and ecological destruction, the leading voices are generally white westerners.

Who are the knowers, the experts, the highly paid consultants, and the creators of the popular frameworks of modern life? How did a small minority of the world’s population come to dominate what is known about the world? What are the real-life, practical consequences of this knowledge inequality? What knowledge is automatically included, and what is sidelined? The Caribbean Roots Project will explore these questions from a Caribbean, global south and decolonial perspective.

Global Coloniality and Knowledge Inequality

In the present era of globalisation, massive technological advances have been made, which have dramatically increased the speed and flow of information. The narratives of our modern world promise connectivity, a level playing field, and development for the world’s citizens. Yet even as technology has helped alternative and anti-hegemonic ideas to emerge, knowledge from the West still dominates. Western countries, particularly the US, disseminate a high quantity of books, academic journals, magazines, television programmes, music, and computer software that are increasingly becoming elements of the global popular culture (Bernal, 2000). These mediums convey western perspectives on society, love, wealth, success, education, style, morality, justice etc., which are ultimately a part of the ideological foundation of global Euro-American empires. As Haitian sociologist Jean Michel Troilliot puts it, this dominant knowledge has involved “a massive silencing on a world scale” in which the global South has been systematically erased and suppressed.

Epistemic Violence and the Invisibility of the ‘other’

The widespread acceptance of current hegemonic western knowledge as absolute truth obscures histories of violence. For example, Columbus’ invasion of the New World in 1492 is a central part of the entangled histories of violence by which conquest, slavery, and the general history of colonialism interlink with knowledge production. Naming the process as a ‘discovery’, the people as ‘Indians’, and the space as ‘Hispaniola’ were epistemic acts of violence that detached the indigenous people from their history. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2009) explores the epistemic power of this naming process in which European ‘discoveries’ became new geographical markers that buried native memories of places. The fact that even today, the Global South is littered with place names and monuments that immortalise European ‘discoveries’, speaks to the epistemic power of coloniality to ‘plant their memories on whatever they contacted’ (Wa Thiong’o 2009, 7). At the same time, indigenous or counter-hegemonic knowledge is relegated to folk culture, superstition, or the margins of social consciousness. This invisibility of the ‘other’, of decoloniality, emerges from the waves of violent coloniality that shaped Caribbean societies in the aftermath of Columbus’ incursion.

It is in these relations of power that inequality in knowledge production and dissemination has become one of the pillars of global coloniality. Leadership styles, economic models, development paradigms, beauty standards, concepts of masculine, feminine, relationships, sexuality, agriculture, the environment, education, family structures, divinity, mental health, and leisure have been polluted by processes of domination. In these processes, the knowledge that aids conquest and domination has taken precedence over the knowledge that offers healing, justice, or cooperation as the generation of profit and the expansion and reproduction of control has been elevated over the wellbeing of diverse peoples and ecologies around the world. According to Bagele Chilisa (2012), this intellectual imperialism comes as a “tendency to exclude and dismiss as irrelevant knowledge embedded in the cultural experiences of the people”.

The lack of respect for the histories of diverse global peoples underpins global productions of knowledge, dominated by narratives of history that valorise Europeans as the originators, active drivers, and change agents of modernity. Thus, the usual starting point in the disciplines of science, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and mathematics is the Greeks and the later European ‘enlightenment’. Through this lens, the modern capitalist world is born from the cultural, linguistic, technological, and genetic superiority of Western societies and the sheer grit, courage, tenacity, and brilliance of (some of) its population. This prowess is explained in terms of mainly internal factors, that is, the religious, cultural, and racial superiority of Europeans.

This epistemic violence silences the diverse contributions of many non-European civilizations such as those in Maputo, Nubia, Kemet, Punt, Sumer, the pre-Columbian Americas, the Indus Valley, and China.

White Saviour Complex and the Coloniality of Resistance

While the narratives of modernity/capitalism promise development, progress, and solutions to various issues, the last 500 years of global coloniality have led to more suffering, dispossession, genocide, injustice, environmental destruction, and inequality than ever before. Yet the issue is not simply that these realities exist, but that the solutions to these are often conceived and dominated by the main sources and propagators of said issues. The dominant critiques of western capitalism have largely been made by white males located in dominant western centres of power, and by academics (in a context of global hierarchies that privilege academic and institutionalized sources of knowledge over non-academic ones).

The task of conceptualising, diagnosing, and solving global and local issues such as mental health, development, environmental degradation, crime, relationship violence, governance, mental health, and education has also mainly been undertaken by the West. It should therefore come as no surprise that many approaches to solving global challenges end up being top-down, ahistorical, loaded with western, white, and geographical privilege, and often fail to get to the root of the problem.

Even when people from the Global South speak, it is often the privileged voices of Global South academics entrenched or associated with global centres of power (such as Global North universities). Many powerful thinkers, academic and non-academic, exist almost invisibly in the Caribbean space, often only taken seriously when a mainstream global institution awards or recognises them. All of this contributes toward Eurocentric critiques of the Eurocentric (Mpofu 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012) where the frameworks of critical thought are dominated by those who do not carry the deepest wounds of coloniality. In this sense, no one who falls outside of “the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system” (Grosfoguel 2009, 4) can contribute to knowledge. Looking at knowledge this way is not about disqualifying someone for aspects of privilege but attempting to understand how knowledge (derived from narrow economic, racial, gendered, and religious interests) has been able to not only exert a massive influence but also project itself as universal and benevolent.

The Caribbean Roots Project is committed to unpacking the realities and impacts of hegemonic knowledge while also highlighting Caribbean, Global South, indigenous and decolonial knowledge. More of these topics will be explored through upcoming blogs and podcasts. Stay tuned.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.