Unsubmissive Epistemology

The notion of decolonial Black feminist unsubmissive epistemology comes out of my academic research and teaching, and from my activism in Black feminist and decolonial movements in Brazil. It departs from dominant knowledge and dominant modes of academic knowledge production that were historically constituted here exclusively by (Brazilian and foreign) white men. In the 1950s, Black Brazilian researchers began to critique this situation. For example, Alberto Guerreiro RAMOS (1996) established a distinction between Black life and Black thematics. Subsequently, other Black authors (Abdias DO NASCIMENTO, Lélia GONZALEZ, and Beatriz DO NASCIMENTO among others) gradually contributed to problematizing and transforming the field of intellectual production both from a theoretical-methodological and epistemological point of view.

When considering the field of more recent Black intellectual production, I identify an approach that privileges Black feminist and decolonial perspectives and theoretical paradigms. From a methodological point of view, we are more inclined to use qualitative methodologies, notably ethnography and autoethnography, which is often confused with autobiography or life history. Considering the short space for the development of this text, I will prioritize analysis over epistemology. 

First, it is necessary to recognize feminist contributions on the place of enunciation of the subject of knowledge. This is an important contribution. However, it places emphasis on the position of those who produce knowledge and not those who are positioned as the “objects” of knowledge. In contrast, decolonial Black feminist unsubmissive epistemology makes the subjects who produce knowledge coincide with those who were defined as the object of investigation, but which we prefer to call interlocutors or subjects who lead the investigation. Patrícia Hill COLLINS (2000) defines the epistemic position of Black women as standpoint theory, highlighting the importance of gender and race in the constitution of the subject that produces knowledge. She also highlights the importance of epistemology in determining the questions that deserve to be investigated and the analytical and interpretative frameworks through which knowledge will be constructed and developed. 

In an earlier text, I discussed the historical emergence of Black feminist epistemology (FIGUEIREDO 2020). Here, I would like to highlight that we created a practice that attends to the place of the subject, or rather the racialized gendered subject, in the production of knowledge. I emphasize the word subject to demarcate an important area of dispute in the reconfiguration of the academic and political field. The demand for a new vocabulary, a new racial and gendered grammar that questions grammatical rules in which the neutral subject is masculine, and that adopts neologism as a daily practice of resistance and resignification of experience, is notorious. In this way, Black feminists have feminized, rather than paid homage. I also recommend Blackening the bibliographical references, bolding the surname the first time the author is cited to indicate that these are contributions by Black authors. For us it will be NASCIMENTO, Valdecir, for example.

Lélia GONZALEZ (1984) states that the trash will talk, because trash is all those who are discarded by the capitalist system and who are represented by others in the political and academic universe. Claiming a place of legitimacy and authority based on experience, Gonzalez denounces the submissive and sexualized representations of Black women in Brazilian culture, as manifested through the figure of the Black mother, the mulatta, and the domestic worker. By taking up this marginal position of reflection and enunciation, she puts into relief the exact position of Black women subjects in the production of knowledge.

It is important to highlight that alluding to positionality does not simply mean emphasizing the issue of social values ​​in the production of knowledge, or mentioning the fact that knowledge is always partial, a perspective that is already widely addressed within the Social Sciences. Instead, the central point here is the place of enunciation, that is, the location in the social structure, derived from the constructed and continued privileges of the colonial/modern/capitalist/racist/sexist/queerphobic and class system of the subject who enunciates. In Western philosophy and sciences, the location of the subject who enunciates is always disconnected from that subject’s epistemic location. In this way, the relationship between the subject's location in power relations and epistemic location is neglected. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez (2005) called “point zero epistemology.” “Point zero” is the point of view that covers up its own particular point of view, constructing itself as having no point of view and therefore as neutral and universal.

In Brazil, the notion of positionality along with actual Black points of view emerged in greater force after affirmative action was introduced in 2002. From an epistemological point of view, the issues being investigated are now realigned in a way that is increasingly closer to what Ramos defined as Black life, that is, to the empirical universe of the researchers. With the entry of more Black and indigenous students into the Brazilian academy, this research increasingly seeks to offer answers to problems faced by communities. Currently, this means that state violence has gained special prominence, along with Black political resistance.

However, this newly positioned, engaged Black academic production is experienced with much tension insofar as the search for legitimacy goes hand in hand with the desire to intervene. This means that most of the time our academic questions are, above all, political questions. We face discourses that seek to disqualify our work, referring to it as common sense or reducing it to simply activism and thus supposedly less scientific, because it challenges the myth of axiological neutrality.

Additionally, Black intellectual production seeks to establish more horizontal relationships between the researchers and the researched. To take account of these new perspectives it is necessary to formulate new concepts, and theoretical and methodological tools. I would like to recover the definition of epistemology proposed by María Lugones (2011), since decolonial Black feminist unsubmissive epistemology needs to be a border epistemology, an epistemology of crossroads and solidarity that increasingly trains researchers who are sensitive and committed to combating inequalities in their different areas and intersections. These new perspectives require us to formulate new concepts, and theoretical and methodological tools. For example, Renata SOUZA (2020) proposed the notion of “political feminicide” to shed light on how Marielle Franco’s gender, sexual, and racial identity operated as the motivational framework for her assassination. Marielle Franco, a Black woman, sociologist, and lesbian, was a representative elected to the Rio de Janeiro City Council, President of the Women’s Commission of the City Council, and a strong advocate for human rights and against the actions of the military police in Rio de Janeiro. She was 38 years old when she was brutally shot 13 times on March 14, 2018, in an attack on the car she was in with driver Anderson Pedro Gomes who was also killed. At the time of her murder, the World Social Forum was taking place in Salvador, Bahia and participants quickly reacted with massive demonstrations. Marielle Franco became a national and international symbol of Black women, lesbian, and queer struggle.

Experience is an important concept for feminism and for Black feminism. “The personal is political,” one of the important early transnational contributions of feminism, highlights the link between individual and collective experience. Personal and shared experience is, for us, very important evidence. It is the basis of our reflection and theorization. In this sense, the methodologies proposed by Black feminisms underscore more horizontal dialogue, empathy, and often autoethnography as a research method, since our reality challenges any perspective of conservative and neutral science. How can we think about the existence of knowledge that is not focused on understanding social dynamics that perpetuate inequalities and exploitation, and that perpetuates Brazil’s white minority’s privileges? How can we accept and, in a certain way, reproduce concepts and theories that do nothing to help us in terms of building a science committed to social transformation? So, it was exactly from these problematics, and from our challenges to this reality and the stagnation of concepts and theories, that the current generation of Black feminists in Brazil has reacted, creating a constant dialogue inside and outside the academy. Speaking with has replaced speaking about.

The categories of understanding that western modernity proposes, such as time and space, have been the target of critique by various authors. From a Black radical critical perspective, the continuity of racism and Black exploitation in modernity very directly connects past and present time. Jota MOMBAÇA (2020) critiques these categories when reflecting on an everyday scenario in which she is called queer, Black, and fat and named as a monster, an abject body. This scene, experienced many times in her daily life, takes her back to the past, to the period of enslavement and its vocabulary. This is how for Black people time is not linear. Present and past are experienced simultaneously. Based on this critique, experience is also how we confront the limits of the categories of understanding that order our world, as well as our way of being and feeling the world.

In this sense, decolonial Black feminist unsubmissive epistemology stands in revolt against previously established norms. It breaks boundaries and places subjects who have been on the margins, Black women, at the center of knowledge production. For decolonial Black feminist unsubmissive epistemology the subject and “object” which, according to Western reason are apart and as Denise FERREIRA DA SILVA (2017) points out lead to a valueless ethics, instead for us are inseparable. 

*Translated from Portuguese by Paola Bacchetta