Epistemicide in the Academy Reflections from the Colonial Wound on the Systematic Silencing of Palestine and other Epistemologies of the Global South

Abstract (English)

In this paper I propose a critical reflection on the teaching of epistemicide as a constitutive phenomenon of modernity/coloniality in a context where these acts of epistemic violence continue to manifest themselves with brutal actuality, as evidenced by the Palestinian case. Epistemicide does not merely represent the suppression of knowledge, but the ontological negation of the Other, placing it in what Frantz Fanon called the "zone of non-being".

Palestinian corporeality, relegated to this space of invisibilization and dehumanization, constitutes a paradigmatic case of contemporary epistemicide that Western academia systematically silences through an epistemic complicity with the colonial-modern project. This silencing is not accidental but structural, reproducing geo-political and corpo-political hierarchies of knowledge that privilege Eurocentric epistemology while delegitimizing other epistemologies.

From a decolonial perspective, I argue that teaching about epistemicide necessarily requires an ethical-political positioning from the colonial difference. The supposed "academic neutrality" represents a form of epistemic violence that perpetuates the coloniality of knowledge. The invisibilization of Palestinian epistemicide in academic spaces reveals the persistence of what I call "Western provincial universalism" which, under pretensions of objectivity, perpetuates a complicity with the systematic destruction of other knowledge. Teaching epistemicide from border thinking implies, therefore, an act of epistemic justice that recognizes the continuity between historical colonialism and contemporary coloniality.