Epistemologies of Domination: Colonial Encounters, Heterology, and Postcolonial Pedagogy

Abstract

Abstract This article theorizes and establishes some of the outlines of an epistemology of domination. An epistemology of domination interpellates the question of “how/what does the oppressor know about the oppressed?” Drawing on several studies of cultural encounters such as Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Arab Rediscovery of Europe, Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy, and Zeynep Çelik's Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient, the discussion explores epistemic tropes around colonial encounters: the power and politics of representation; the burden of belatedness/the denial of coevalness; the over-emphasizing of Western agency. Wlad Godzich states that “Western Thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.” My discussion here accepts this premise but only partially, and asks the question: does domination always entail the projection of alterity as a threat, or is there a wider spectrum of epistemic projections? How does the other encounter and experience the Western self, and does such encounter modify hegemonic epistemological paradigms? Following Michel de Certeau's assertion that “what is near masks a foreignness,” I seek to complicate the relation between selfhood and otherness in the colonial encounter, and its entanglements with colonial violence. What pedagogical moments emerge from such encounters? And how do such pedagogical moments structure postcolonial epistemologies?