D. A. Wood - A Critical Investigation into the Anticolonial Politics of Knowledge

D. A. Wood

Epistemic Decolonization

A Critical Investigation into the Anticolonial Politics of Knowledge

1st ed. 2020

For Claire

Taken as a whole, European colonization has transformed the political, legal, social, gendered, economic, environmental, and cultural dimensions of the world more than any other set of historical processes in the past half-millennium. Whereas in 1800 Europe and its colonies covered around 55 per cent of the globe, in 1878 they covered 67 per cent and in 1914 84 per cent. Laws, customs, racial geographies, ecologies, desires, and political borders around the world harbor their own colonial histories. In some cases, these realities serve as signs of successful resistance to past forms of conquest and domination. At other times, they endure as scarsreminders of wounds that have never fully healed and which remain tender, or, even worse, which threaten to reopen. Due to modern colonialisms vastness and deep entrenchment in so many different spheres, it is hard to imagine anyone currently living whose existence has not been affected or shaped by it in one way or another. Well-aware of this state of affairs, many theorists and activists have striven to better comprehend those colonial realities that have shaped and continue to structure our worldhowever hidden and ugly they might be. This book critically examines and evaluates a variety of different approaches to one such reality among others, namely, the relation between modern colonialism and knowledge.

To demonstrate the types of problems with which this book concerns itself, I begin with three short stories that have different characters and settings, yet which share some common themes. Despite the centuries that separate them, the examples below highlight episodes in which colonialism and colonialist ideology , on the one hand, and the pursuit and production of knowledge, on the other, bear upon one another. The first story concerns Francis Bacons New Atlantis, the second recounts moments from the history of the Manhattan Project , and the third pertains to contemporary biocolonialism. After recounting each story, I will note some of their shared patterns to introduce this books overarching themes.

During the lifetime of the philosopher Francis Bacon (15611626), mercantile capital had begun to generate substantial competition between rival European powers. Along with the Dutch and the French, England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set out to curb Spanish colonialism through state-sanctioned privateering, smuggling, and raiding in the Americas. To these forms of extraction were added the conquest and establishment of overseas settler colonies and plantation systems in the early seventeenth century. The ensuing regular encounters between British forces and Indigenous groups resulted in the marginalization and decimation of the latter, most notably in the burgeoning Atlantic slave trade, the first voyage of which set sail from England the year after Bacons birth. Already by the middle of the seventeenth century, over one million slaves had been imported into Anglo-America.