Description
This paper pokes fun at the arch-seriousness of World Politics via a decolonial critique of the (Western) intellectual subject. Drawing especially on the work of Ramón Grosfoguel (2007) and Sylvia Wynter (2003), I trace the pervasive and disciplinary seriousness of social science to the “disembodied and unlocated neutrality” (Grosfoguel 2007: 214) of Western knowledge. Colonial epistemology un-locates the speaking subject – a privilege that is largely withheld from racialised and gendered speakers – in the service of consolidating power through the epistemic representation of specifically Western knowledge as unbiased, neutral, objective, and impartial. This project must eliminate or compartmentalise1 modes of enunciation that dangerously disclose the speaker’s embodiment and locatedness, such as humour, cultural references, poetics, and so on. To subvert this colonial epistemic seriousness, this paper presents a parody of the absurd performance of unlocatedness that the Western claim to knowledge is founded upon, through which to view the spectral theatricality of ‘objective’ social science for what it is.
Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The Epistemic Decolonial Turn, Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 211-223
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review, 3(3): 257-337.
