Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing

On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience

Abstract

Epistemic disobedience and border doing/thinking
requires to shift the geography of knowing, sensing and understanding.
The shift means to start from what the vocabulary (in the disciplines as
well as in every day life) that the rhetoric of Western modernity silenced,
disavowed, distorted and in the best cases reduced and integrated to the
regional and limited semantic of Western vocabulary derived mainly from
Greek and Latin. When languages other than Greek and Latin (like Arabic
for instance), entered Western vocabulary they entered in "disguise" and
it require philological investigation to realize that certain words comes
from Arabic or other languages with which Europeans intervened.
Pluriversality is the horizon that epistemic disobedience and border doing
and thinking are aiming at. And since both border doing/thinking
presupposes delinking from territorial epistemology, and territorial
epistemology is modern/colonial, both enact decoloniality; which means
delinking from modernity/colonialty (short hand for Colonial Matrix of
Power, CMP) and re-existing on other grounds that for the moment are
planetary borderlands.