Tuesday Telegram — Durham, NC
On Epistemicide, Becoming, and Small Refusals
Tuesday Telegram — Durham, NC
On Epistemicide, Becoming, and Small Refusals
Today’s Tuesday Telegram is arriving from Durham, North Carolina, where I am spending the week teaching—walking with students through the long and unfinished terrain of decolonial thought. This work is not abstract for me. It is not merely academic. It is ancestral, embodied, and necessary.
The book anchoring our time together is The Epistemology of the South by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In it, Santos names a violence that many of us have felt in our bodies long before we had language for it: epistemicide—the systematic destruction of knowledge produced by those on the margins of the margins.
Epistemicide is not just about silencing voices.
It is about erasing ways of knowing.
It is about training us to distrust our own wisdom.
Western modernity, Santos reminds us, has been extraordinarily efficient at this work. It elevates a narrow form of rationality while disciplining, dismissing, or annihilating other epistemologies—Indigenous, Black, queer, disabled, poor, mystical, fugitive. What does not conform to the grammar of certainty is rendered suspect. What cannot be measured is made invisible.
And yet.
Here we are.
Still thinking.
Still dreaming.
Still remembering otherwise.
The question that keeps returning to me this week is a simple one, though not an easy one: How do we make small moves against destructiveness in a world that praises certainty?
Because certainty is seductive. It promises safety. Control. Mastery.
But certainty also calcifies. It closes. It hardens.
What if, instead, we practiced an epistemology of becoming?
An orientation toward knowledge that is provisional. Relational. Emergent.
A way of knowing that understands wisdom as something that grows between us, not something owned or conquered.
The world has changed so much—and also, not nearly enough.
The machinery of domination still hums.
But so do the quieter frequencies of refusal.
Practicing Buen Vivir—living well, together, in right relation—will not come from grand proclamations alone. It will come from small, faithful gestures:
choosing curiosity over certainty
honoring local and ancestral knowledges
making room for stories that do not resolve neatly
trusting what emerges in relationship rather than what is imposed from above
These are not minor acts. They are insurgent.
They are ways of staying alive—epistemically, spiritually, collectively.
So today, from Durham, I offer this as a gentle provocation and an invitation:
What knowledge has been kept from you—or taken from you—that is asking to be remembered?
Where might you loosen your grip on certainty and practice becoming instead?
What small move could you make this week toward a life—and a world—more capable of Buen Vivir?
As always, we are learning our way forward.
Together.
Paz, -RCE+