Mariam Elashmawy

It would not be convenient for a Maori, Aymara or Ghanian philosopher or an Indian from Calcutta who are modern/colonial subjects and would rather have ‘our modernity’ than to listen to vanguard post-modern critics or Western experts on developing underdeveloped countries. Thus, geo-politics of knowledge comes to the fore. There are many kinds of... See more

But there is still another dimension in de-colonial politics of knowl-edge relevant for my argument: the claim that knowledge-making for well being rather than for controlling and managing populations for imperial interest shall come from local experiences and needs, rather than from local imperial experiences and needs projected to the globe,... See more

Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to transformations. For this simple reason, the task of de-colonial thinking and the enactment of the de-colonial option in the 21st century starts from epistemic... See more

Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation.

While recogniz-ing the ‘improvements’ in material conditions in some countries, such as laboratories, libraries, buildings, etc., he strongly argues that Third World countries are, economically, providing natural resources to industrial countries and, scientifically, providing data to be processed in the labora-tories (literal laboratories in the... See more

we did not know how to use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not practice the ‘arts’ of civilization. By lacking such values we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself. In other words, we were not ‘fully human’; some of us were not even considered partially human. Ideas about what counted as... See more

. As we know: the first world has knowl-edge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo Americans have science. The need for political and epistemic de-linking here comes to the fore, as well as decolonializing and de-colonial knowledges, necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial... See more

The de-colonial option is the singular connector of a diversity of de-colonials. The de-colonial path has one thing in common: the colonial wound, the fact that regions and people around the world have been classified as underdeveloped economically and mentally.