Epistemologies at a Crossroads: Decolonising Knowledges on Politics of Development, Economics, and Feminism

Abstract

Postcolonial theory offers profound critiques of cultural hegemony and domination. Yet, postcolonial approaches have been criticized for marginalizing economic dimensions in their analysis, as witnessed from their relative lack of engagement with issues such as poverty, wealth creation and land. In turn, postcoloniality or engagement with the ideas and challenges posed by postcolonial critiques is virtually absent in existing economic literature. Possible alternatives to the gap between postcolonial theory and economics are, in epistemological terms, the missing links, the incomplete records, voids and ruptures in economic thinking and practice. This dissertation, composed of an extensive introduction followed by five peer-reviewed Articles and an afterword, takes as its point of departure the idea that these opportunities have not been sufficiently explored and it aims to contribute to the nascent approach of postcolonial feminist economics in doing so. Drawing on a transdisciplinary approach, I situate this dissertation within the ongoing decolonising project as a political, anti-colonial, and affirmative practice, aligned with projects and theoretical approaches that challenge and contest hegemonic modernist ways of knowing, being, and seeing the world. This research, thereby, responds to the call made by postcolonial feminist economists to foreground the relevance of non-modernist understandings of the economy, feminism and non-Western moral orders from non-Western knowledges. The exploration of such possibilities takes two paths in this dissertation. Firstly, I submit the notion of development, which I read as a companion to colonialism, to an exacting critique, which allows me to highlight the cultural rootedness of development and its contemporary colonial forms as well as draw attention to existing alternatives to capitalism and counter-discourses from the Global South. I show how the dominant development epistemology has resulted in the loss of a vast set of social and economic knowledges. Building upon this argument, I explore non-Western economic, ethical and social dimensions of the epistemological claims and possibilities for thinking differently from capitalism in a non-ethnocentric, non-relativist way. Secondly, I investigate how the decolonising project and feminism inform, enhance, contradict and mutually influence one another in light of twenty-first-century entanglements of the increasing influence of global capital, transnational corporations, looming environmental crises and xenophobia. Decolonising feminism has been, and continues to be, a central challenge in feminist theory and politics. To complement ongoing feminist debates about decolonising solidarity in the age of global neoliberalism, I argue that solidarity may be directed towards decolonization as a strategy. This means constructing the conditions for a different kind of encounter that both opposes ongoing colonisation, and seeks to heal the social, cultural, and spiritual ravages of colonial history. I propose, thereby, it is from the sustainability of life that solidarities in relationship with decolonization may be organised.