Antiracist literacy: epistemologies of the south and counter-hegemonic becoming

Abstract

The article attempts to answer the question of how to introduce the prospect of antiracist education in the time of social fascism that we now face in Europe. Based on the work of Portuguese oppositional postcolonialist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the article decolonialises the Eurocentric monoculture of knowledge with the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences; it responds to the epistemicide in Western sciences with the epistemologies of the South; in the possibility of global social justice, it addresses global cognitive justice, recognition and validation of excluded knowledge; and finally, presents the ecology of knowledge and intercultural translation as an alternative. The article reveals how through (and in) education, existing social realities have been twisted into ideological anticipation, which makes it impossible to think about contemporary social problems (specifically, migration and social fascism), let alone solutions or social transformation. In the case of the sociology of emergences, the article calls attention to antiracist literacy, which is emerging at the intersection between excluded sciences and people without rights, the subjects of our human rights discourse.