UC Merced

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of

the Luso-Hispanic World

Title
An Epistemology for the Next Revolution

Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3492v2pt

Journal
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2)

ISSN
2154-1353

Author
Martín Alcoff, Linda

Publication Date
2011

Peer reviewed

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University of California
 An Epistemology for the Next Revolution
__________________________________________________________

LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF

HUNTER COLLEGE AND GRADUATE CENTER, C.U.N.Y.

It is my intention, by this optimistic title, to mark the need for a newly revised and
reformulated language of liberation. To explain this idea, let me begin with two distinct and
important claims made by Sylvia Wynter and by Enrique Dussel. Wynter has suggested that the
principal oversight of Marxist revolutionary discourses was to forsake the epistemological question
of social theory, that is, the question of who knows. To be sure, Marx developed the beginnings of
an epistemology of ideology in his account of how the fetish can appear as the real and in his idea of
bourgeois ideology’s camera obscura effect on perception. But neither he nor his followers paid
sufficient attention, in Wynter’s view, to the political circumstances in which knowledges of all sorts
are produced. These political circumstances include how authority and authoritativeness are
distributed, how certain sites and processes and methodologies are valorized while others are
repudiated, and how the production of theory mirrors the production of social inequity. Thus,
although Marx gave us a new and revolutionary analysis of how the general political economy is
reproduced, he did not provide tools for maintaining and improving on that analysis or for creating
revolutionary and democratic conditions for critical social theory. He did not provide a radical
critique of the legitimation processes of knowledge. Wynter is suggesting, I take it, that the
devolution of Marxism into positivism and patriarchal authoritarianism as well as bureaucratic
capitalism that we witnessed throughout the twentieth century might be directly linked to this
oversight. The extreme centralism of the Soviets as well as the general inability of Marxist
movements and governments to acknowledge their own mistakes and limitations are usually
attributed as a political problem, but perhaps their source is actually an epistemological problem
(Foucault’s own criticisms of Marxism echo this idea). The lesson from this is that the
epistemological question must be explicitly addressed in the next era of revolutionary thought and
practice.
I want to relate Wynter’s insight with Enrique Dussel’s argument that we need to develop an
analectical method. While Marxist dialectics stays within the realm of intelligibility, in a dialogical
opposition and sublation of the dominant worldview, analectics seeks to bring that which is beyond
the dialectic into visibility. Dialectics remains in an internal critique by contradicting what exists, but
it takes its terms of reference from the existing foundational concepts. New formulations are indeed
possible through dialectics, but they will be achieved through the conflictual process of
counterpoint. Dussel’s analysis of Marx’s treatment of “living labor” shows that Marx developed an
account through which it was possible to think beyond the terms of the current system, to imagine
that which has been made unintelligible by capitalism. Living labor is that essence of labor that
preexisted private property and commodification and even use value as traditionally understood.
Under capitalism living labor has been reduced and transformed into a commodity form, and it is
68 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

this form of labor on behalf of which the dialectic engages in class struggle. Yet to conceive the
ultimate goal as the liberation of commodified labor is to fall short of the goal. The difficulty in
reaching beyond commodified labor is again an epistemological one, since the very concept of living
labor is unintelligible by current lights. Thus, Dussel argues that, in order to conceive of living labor,
we need more than dialectics: we need what he calls analectics, a neologism for an attempt to think
beyond what is currently thinkable, to reach beyond beyond dialectics toward the unintelligible and
incommensurable or that which is beyond the existing totality. Living labor---uncommodified---
exists today only as an idea outside the totality of the ways in which value and labor are measured
and conceptualized. To reach such ideas, Dussel maintains, requires according epistemological
authority to the poor, to the perspectivism of los pobres, to those whose lives and experiences are
marginalized by the dialectic of intelligible possibilities.
I believe Wynter is right to argue that the epistemological problem must be central to the
next phase of revolutionary struggle. Scientism, positivism, masculine authority, elitism, and
Eurocentrism must be disentangled from the process by which liberatory knowledge is developed.
And I believe Dussel suggests the right way to begin this work: by putting at the center not simply
the objective conditions of global impoverishment and oppression, but the systematic
disauthorization of the interpretive perspective of the oppressed in the global south. This
disauthorization inhibits the critical dialogical encounters and epistemic coalitions through which
new solutions can be developed.
To develop this project further, this paper will address two stumbling blocks within the
current intellectual climate that obstruct the path of following this advice of Wynter and Dussel: (1)
the stumbling block of epistemology, and (2) the stumbling block of identity. I will address each of
these in turn.

1. The stumbling block of epistemology

Epistemology has been the protocol theory for discursive mastery in the West, sitting in
authoritative judgment well beyond the circles of philosophy. Epistemology presumes its right to
judge, for example, the knowledge claims of midwives, the ontologies of first-nations peoples, the
medical practices of the colonized, and even first-person experiential reports of every sort. Is it
realistic to believe that a single “master epistemology” can judge every kind of knowledge claim
from every cultural and social location? Universal knowledge claims about knowledge itself need, at
minimum, a deep reflexivity about their own cultural and social location.1
Toward developing a resistance strategy that can block unreflexive and uninterrogated claims
of mastery, and in order to avoid replicating Western epistemology’s imperialism, critical social
theorists have largely relegated their own epistemological work to the sphere of the descriptive and
the critical. In other words, critical social theorists will today describe what knowledge claims are
made, where, and by whom, and they will critique knowledge claims of all sorts, but they have
generally abandoned the doing of normative epistemology itself. We can all now critique existing
knowledges with great sophistication; we can analyze the strategic aims behind existing knowledges
69 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

and their hidden exclusions; and we can, with Foucault, describe with great precision the
interlocking matrices of power and knowledge and desire, their interconnections and
interdependencies. But ask critical social theorists today about how to reach truth or how to
comparatively evaluate theories of justification and most will look at you with incredulity. The
language of truth, realism, and justification has been discarded rather than redefined. Epistemology
proper, which has normative and not merely descriptive and critical components, has been
surrendered to the analytic philosophers.
This is a serious mistake. I admit to sharing the worries of Bruno Latour about the
excessiveness of our critical epistemologies and the paucity of our reconstructive ones. In a recent
and much discussed article, Latour argues that the right has recuperated the critical project of social
theory. He quotes from a New York Times editorial in which Republican strategist Frank Luntz says
the following: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views
about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, we need to continue to make the lack of
scientific certainty a primary issue.”2 The Republicans, as this makes clear, have taken up the cause
of critiquing positivism as a way to deflect the demands for the US to sign serious environmental
agreements. In order to advance their political interests, they have taken a position in the meta-
theoretical debates in the epistemology of the sciences, adopting the hyper-critical stance of the new
social theorists which amounts to a convenient skepticism.
What should we learn from this?3 Of course, it is true that no theoretical position is immune
from recuperation. But unless we can go beyond critique and deconstruction, and unless we are
willing to risk the normative project of improving on the process of knowing, there is no hope in
countering any sort of opposition. We have to be able to explain not just why opposition to the
thesis of global warming is politically motivated, but why the thesis of global warming is itself
epistemically defensible, at least in comparative terms with respect to other explanatory theories.
Besides the debates over global warming, there are ongoing debates over the effects of free trade on
the poor, over the capacity of women to do math and science, over the adequacy of DNA evidence
to overturn death row convictions, and over the real solution to the AIDS crisis, none of which can
be engaged merely at the level of meta-critique. The struggle over politics is ultimately fought on the
plane of truth.
The refusal of epistemology was motivated by epistemology’s lack of political reflexivity. It
was a rejection of the individualist orientation most epistemologies exhibit, which over-emphasize
individual agency and over-estimate individual self-understanding. It was a rejection of
epistemology’s attempt to colonize knowledge claims and maintain Western hegemony in the
domain of rationality, of the intellectual virtues, and of truth. Thus, the postmodern refusal of
normative epistemology was a corrective to individualist, de-contextualized, politically non-reflexive
approaches, but, as a corrective, it was still reactive, caught in the dialectic of response. Today we
can move beyond this.
Epistemology’s normative function concerns not just the question of how knowledges are
produced, who is authorized, how presumptive credibility is distributed, and how the objects of
inquiry are delimited. More than this, it concerns how knowledge should be produced, who should be
70 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

authorized, how presumptive credibility should be distributed, and how we might even gain some
politically reflexive purchase on the delimitations of ontology.
What I am calling the epistemological stumbling block is, then, the refusal to engage in
reconstructive work in epistemology, to go beyond critical skepticism and to reconstruct how to
make truth claims both responsible to political realities as well as reliable and adequate to the
complexity of reality. The very project of “shifting the geography of reason” requires such
reconstructive work, for it requires us to uncover and reassess disavowed knowledges and to clarify
the grounds of our own claims of adequacy or epistemic progress.
Some argue, however, that the conclusion of critique will show that epistemology is
unnecessary as well as delusional in its ambitions. Knowledge claims, it is argued, are forms of
strategic intervention that can shift perspective, expand imagined possibilities, and rearticulate the
good, but they should not be thought of as mirrors to reality or as capable of representational
correspondence. This is excessively skeptical about the possibility of knowledge. We can responsibly
claim to know that global warming is a defensible hypothesis, that Iraq did not have nuclear
capabilities in 2002, and that poverty is getting worse in the United States. Knowledge claims are not
simply strategies. Although they undoubtedly have strategic effects that should be charted and
considered, to equate knowledge claims with strategic interventions is to ignore their
representational content, dangerously rendering this beyond our assessment. Nor are knowledge
claims fully governed by aesthetic or political criteria, though such criteria may well be operative and
even decisive in regard to some underdetermined spheres of inquiry. Knowledge claims are always
also claims to truth, and thus we need evaluative accounts that can compare theories of justification
as well as the concepts of what it means to say that something is true. There has been some excellent
work toward this end by post-Quinean epistemologists like Putnam, Brandom, McDowell, Lynch,
and Cheryl Misak. There has also been excellent work by continental epistemologists like Hacking
and post-colonial epistemologists like Mignolo, Glissant, Castro-Gómez, Patricia Williams, and
Jennifer Vest, and, of course, a wealth of work by feminist epistemologists such as Nelson, Potter,
Lloyd, Campbell, Harding, Haraway, and others. This post-colonial and feminist work work does
not make the mistake of individualizing epistemic agency or decontextualizing truth, but shows how
political considerations can in some cases be legitimately salient to justification. This provides a good
starting point for the project of decolonizing and reconstructing epistemology, disinvesting it of a
mastery that would ignore the identity and situatedness of knowers while maintaining its normative
capacity.
To accomplish the project of decolonizing epistemology will require an account of the
relationship between political and normative considerations, and for this we need to develop what I
would call a political epistemology. A political epistemology would construct a new formulation,
both critical and reconstructive, of the project of epistemology, doing similar work for epistemology
as Marx’s political economy did for classical economics. The project of political economy was not
meant to eclipse entirely the work of economics, but rather to problematize and reveal the
construction of the central problems of classical economics. In other words, political economy was a
way of approaching economics at a meta-level, to explore how supply and demand are constituted,
71 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

what structures create the conditions for various economic roles and forms of economic agency, and
what conditions are necessary for the reification of value. In this way, political economy pushed
through to a broader problematic and a wider set of questions and options. The goal of political
economy was, and is, to lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the reality of economic
forces and to an expanded set of options for economic formations.
Similarly, a political epistemology could consider the conditions that structure epistemic
roles, it could reveal how authority and presumptive credibility are sometimes arbitrarily distributed,
and what conditions give rise to the illusion of a totally individualized epistemic agency. Political
epistemology might also clarify how some contextual conditions are rendered relevant to the
question of justification, while other contextual conditions are rendered completely irrelevant. And
in this way it might push through to a more comprehensive and truer understanding of what
knowledge and truth are, and to a broader set of epistemic options that can epistemically evaluate
interpretive frames and justificatory procedures. Clearly, political epistemology requires a strongly
normative and substantive notion of truth against which we can judge the inadequacy of existing
claims of correspondence.
We must be able once again to say with conviction that what is at stake in our struggle is no
less than the truth about the world. We must once again be able to show how fascism and
colonialism have no real respect or reverence for truth. And to get to this point, a liberatory
language must be able to epistemically account for itself, by justifying its processes of justification.
Epistemological nihilism cannot be accountable because it cannot be sufficiently reflexive about
what justificatory claims, and procedures are animating its own theoretical judgments and critiques.
We cannot collapse truth talk to strategy talk any longer, or avoid the work of thinking through the
ontological implications of our truth claims. And the alibi of avoiding positivism can no longer work
in the face of so much good and serious post-positivist epistemological work on the contextualism
and historical situatedness of truth and justification.
Dussel’s project of analectics is ultimately an epistemological project. The demand to reach
beyond the dialectic is based in the conviction that dialectical approaches are inadequate to the
reality of living labor and the conditions of the oppressed. The sense of inadequacy here is moral
and political because it is epistemological; in other words, the political urgency of analectics is based in
the idea that something about the perspective, experience, and knowledge of the oppressed is not
making its way into existing discourses. The political call for a change in how we develop and assess
theories of justice is thus grounded in a truth claim: that currently existing social theories do not
meaningfully engage with some of the most critical difficulties faced by the global poor. The idea of
analectics is driven, then, by an epistemic project: to get to a larger, more comprehensive, and more
adequate understanding of all that is true concerning the experience of those whose experiences are
most often ignored.
72 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

2. The stumbling block of identity

Dussel’s formulation of analectics also makes identity a legitimate element to consider in

developing a new philosophy of liberation. Traditional Marxist formulations of the abstract
categories of class cannot address the specificity of group identities such as the indigenous, the poor,
racialized peoples, women, religious minorities, and sexual minorities. As a result classical Marxism
lacks explanatory adequacy: the organization of the labor market in every society, not to mention
social ideologies, makes use of these identities. Feminists and post-colonial theorists have made this
point for decades. Yet some of the most vociferous criticism that Dussel has received concerns his
invocation of such identity groups, charging that he presents them too monolithically and
homogeneously, thus reifying their differences.
The project of decolonizing epistemology (and of shifting the geography of reason) requires
attentiveness to social identity not simply in order to show how colonialism has, in some cases,
created identities, but also to show how it has silenced and epistemically disauthorized some forms
of identity while shoring up the authority of others. Thus the project of decolonizing epistemology
assumes the epistemic salience of identity because it assumes that experiences in different locations
are distinct and that location matters to knowledge. This will open us up to charges once again that
we are falling into identity politics, that we are metaphysically unsophisticated and politically
retrograde, a critique that has too often been wielded from the metropole to the peripheries in the
global academy. The critiques of identity politics have held too many in thrall to the charge of crass
political essentialism and lack of theoretical sophistication. I believe that the anti-identity trend so
prevalent in social theory today is another stumbling block to the very project of decolonizing
knowledge, since it undermines our ability to articulate what is wrong with the theoretical hegemony
of the global north.
Moreover, many people involved in social justice movements have come to accept the idea
that identity politics is a diversion from class struggle. Identity-based political movements are by
definition class-inclusive, but more than that they are seen as divisive of a class-based agenda, as
fetishizing identities, and as presenting identities in an essentialist and de-historicized way that
obscures the fact that identities are the product of history and capable of dynamic change. Such
critics of identity come from the right, from liberals, and from the left, and unite in their claim that
identity politics fractures the body politic; that it emphasizes difference at the expense of
commonalities; and that its focus on identity offers only a reductivist politics, one that would reduce
or replace an assessment of a person’s political view with an assessment of their identity. Important
leftist European theorists like Žižek and Badiou have recently joined the ranks of those who believe
that, if we want to make genuine social revolution, identity-based political organizing must be
minimized.
The problem leftists have with identity politics, however, is not just about the process of
getting to the revolution, but also about what we think we are struggling for. That is, some imagine
that the new imaginary communities to come will have much less emphasis on racial and ethnic
differences, differences which they see as the product entirely or almost entirely of structures of
73 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

oppression such as slavery and colonialism. Colonialism creates and reifies identities as ways of
managing peoples and setting up hierarchies between groups. Therefore many believe we must aim
for a future in which the identities created by colonialism can wither away. For this reason, Nancy
Fraser articulates our long-term goals as “socialism in the economy plus deconstruction in the
culture. But, she warns, “for this scenario to be psychologically and politically feasible requires that
all people be weaned from their attachment to current cultural constructions of their interests and
identities.”4
I want to call both of these claims into question: that identity politics is in all cases divisive
and that social identities are generally undesirable for the future. Such a monolithic rejection of
identity politics follows from a particular understanding of what identities are. I will briefly address
both issues here.
To address the concerns about class, we need first to understand correctly the relationship
between social identities such as race, ethnicity and gender on the one hand and class on the other
hand. The idea of a “pure” class uncorrupted by race and gender may seem an old-fashioned
remnant of class reductionism prior to the theoretical reforms made by Marxist feminists and race
theorists, but class reductionism is enjoying a renewed resurgence. For example, in the work of
Fraser, one of the most widely influential social theorists today, the political fights around class are
analytically separable from the political fights around social and cultural identities. In her analyses of
identity-based struggles, Fraser divides what she calls demands for redistribution from demands for
recognition. Demands for redistribution are material struggles around resource allocation such as
made by labor and the poor, whereas demands for recognition are cultural struggles around identity.
On the face of it, her case looks persuasive. She argues that the movements for redistribution often
deserve our support, while movements for the recognition and even affirmation of identities can be
distracting of scarce political energy and can lead to a number of political problems (e.g.,
separatism). But if we go beyond the surface plausibility, we find that her account presumes the
possibility of an analytical separation between class and social identities, that is, it presumes that we
can define and explain class prior to or apart from racism and sexism. As an example of a “pure
distribution demand,” Fraser gives the case of a white male skilled worker who becomes
unemployed due to a factory closing resulting from a speculative corporate merger. In this case, she
tells us,

[T]he injustice of maldistribution [that is, the worker becoming unemployed] has
little to do with misrecognition. It is rather a consequence of imperatives intrinsic to
an order of specialized economic relations whose raison d’être is the accumulation of
profits. To handle such cases, a theory of justice must reach beyond cultural value
patterns to examine the structure of capitalism. It must ask whether economic
mechanisms that are relatively decoupled from structures of prestige and that operate
in a relatively autonomous way impede parity of participation in social life.5

But the reality here is that it is profitable to transfer production (or outsource it) from one labor
segment to another — i.e., from white male workers to a lower paid segment either within a country
74 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

or outside of it— because of the segmentation of the labor market by race, ethnicity, gender, cultural
identity, nationality, and geographical location. Thus, the prime directive of capitalism operates
through the segmenting of the labor market by identity. National minorities often form, willingly or
unwillingly, an “ascriptive class segment” which economist Mario Barrera defined over 20 years ago
as a “portion of a class which is set off from the rest of the class by some readily identifiable and
relatively stable characteristics of the persons assigned to that segment, such as race, ethnicity, or
sex, and whose status in relation to the means and process of production is affected by that
demarcation.”6
In actuality, there are no “pure” class demands: there are demands of skilled or unskilled
workers, of the trades or the service professions, of migrant workers, of women workers, of
immigrant workers, and so on. Sometimes these groups can make common cause, but the very
project of doing so will require a clear understanding of how identities mediate class relations to
produce specific workplace hierarchies and conflicts of interest. Class reductionists argue here that
conflicts will dissolve if we can only wean ourselves from our identity attachments. It is in just this
way that the left colludes with the right in portraying ethnic group politics today as special interest
agendas with opportunistic leaders who never take into account the common good.
However, we need to take another look at the assumption that politically mobilized identities
are inherently exclusive and thus tend toward separatism. When one goes beyond the anecdotal to
the empirical, there is simply not sufficient evidence for the absoluteness with which the critics of
identity have assumed that strongly felt identities always tend toward separatism. There are certainly
problems with essentialist constructions of identity and overly narrow formulations of political
alliances, but these problems result from certain kinds of construals of identity rather than the
automatic effect of a strong sense of group solidarity and group cohesiveness. There are many
examples, so I will just be able to mention a few here.
In the National Black Politics Survey conducted in 1993-1994, the first survey of mass
political opinion among African Americans conducted in the United States, one of the most striking
findings was a very high degree of belief in what political theorists call “linked fate”: the belief that
what generally happens to people in your identity group, in this case your racial group, will
significantly affect your life.7 Researchers found that the very high level of group identification that
exists among African Americans showed no evidence of having a correlation to a racially-separatist
political approach or a tendency to reject coalition efforts. Positive responses on the question of
“linked fate” registered over 80 percent; positive responses to political separatism came in under 30
percent.
In another study, political scientist José E. Cruz recently analyzed Hartford’s Puerto Rican
Political Action Committee as a case study of identity politics in action. The PRPAC took up ethnic
mobilization as “a way of achieving representation and a means to negotiate individual and group
benefits,”8 uniting in typical fashion the demands for recognition with the demands for
redistribution. And in fact, their identity-based organizing led not toward separation, but instead was
precisely the key to the enhanced political mobilization and involvement of Puerto Ricans in
Hartford politics (12). Identity politics did not “reify victimization,” but rather “encouraged
75 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

individuals to overcome passivity” precisely through a rearticulated “self-image” and the demand of
“equal access to positions of responsibility within the civil and political society” (12). Thus on
balance, Cruz argues that the identity based political organizing of the PRPAC resulted in
significantly increased voter turnout and in the political representation for Puerto Ricans not only in
the city but in the state. The very possibility of coalitions with the black and white communities of
Hartford required this political mobilization and involvement.
Other studies by Renato Rosaldo and the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group, which did
ethnographic work in five states, as well as by political scientists like Omar Encarnación working in
Latin America and Manuel Castells working all over the globe reveal similar findings. These
empirical findings of diverse political outcomes from identity based political organizing clearly
suggest that we need a better account of the nature of identity itself than the sorts of accounts one
finds among the critics. Strongly-felt identities in reality do not uniformly lead to the political
disasters the critics portend because identities in reality are not what the critics understand them to
be. Social identities can and sometimes do operate as interest groups, but that is not what identities
essentially are. Given this, what we need is not a global or general repudiation of identity and identity
politics, but an analysis of when identity based movements become dysfunctionally narrow and
conformist, under what conditions and in what contexts, rather than assuming an inevitable logic of
identity.
We might define identities more insightfully as positioned or located lived experiences in
which both individuals and groups work to construct meaning in relation to historical experience
and historical narratives. For example, Satya Mohanty has argued that identity constructions provide
narratives that explain the links between group historical memory and individual contemporary
experience, that they create unifying frames for rendering experience intelligible, and thus help to
map the social world.9 Identity designations are like small theories whose adequacy to experience can
be judged, tested, and evaluated.
Thus, identities are not lived as a discrete and stable set of interests with determinate political
implications, but as a site in which one has ties to historical communities and events and from which
one engages in the process of meaning-making and thus from which one is open to the world. To
the extent that identities involve meaning-making, there will always be alternative interpretations of
the meanings associated with identity. And yet, the self operates in a situated plane that can be
culturally located with great specificity even as it is open onto an indeterminate future and a
reinterpretable past, not of its own creation. The self carries with it always this horizon of experience
and history as a specific location, with substantive content—as, for example, a specifiable relation to
the holocaust, to slavery, to the 1492 encuentro, and so on—but whose content only exists in
interpretation and in constant motion.
There is also an important epistemic implication of identity. In stratified societies,
differently-identified individuals do not always have the same access to points of view or perceptual
planes of observation from which certain aspects or layers of reality are readily visible. Two
individuals may participate in the same event, but have access to different aspects of that event.
Social identity is relevant to epistemic judgment, then, not because identity determines judgment but
76 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

because identity can in some instances yield access to perceptual facts that themselves may be
relevant to the formulation of various knowledge claims. Social identity operates then as a rough and
fallible but useful indicator of differences in perceptual access.
This kind of hermeneutic descriptive account of social identities is more true to lived
experience and more helpful in illuminating their real epistemic and political implications than the
theory that identities are scripts that circumscribe our freedom, or the notion that identities are
simply top-down enforcements of power. And with this approach we can now see that, as a located
opening out onto the world, different identities have no a priori conflict. Aspects of horizons are
naturally shared across different positions, and no aspect comes with a stable ready-made set of
political views. What is shared within a horizon is having to address in some way, even if it is by
flight, the historical situatedness and accompanying historical experiences of a given identity group
to which one has some concrete attachment. Because of this, and because identities mark social
position, the epistemic differences between identities are not best understood as correlated to
differences of knowledge, since knowledge is always the product in part of background assumptions
and values that are not generally grouped by identity categories. Rather, the epistemic difference is
in, so to speak, what one can see, from one’s vantage point. What one can see underdetermines
knowledge or the articulation of interests, but the correlation between possibilities of perception and
identity mandates the necessity of taking identity into account in formulating decision making bodies
or knowledge producing institutions.

3. Conclusion

Enrique Dussel and Sylvia Wynter rightly invoke the need for a new epistemology of
liberation. I have argued that this new epistemology must be able to address truth and the normative
project of improving the production of knowledges. Moreover, the normative project itself requires
a rearticulation of the relationship between identity and knowledge, such as I have suggested. If we
are to establish that social position makes an epistemically relevant difference, we must be able to
articulate why and how this can be so. I want to conclude by returning again to the need for a new
liberatory lexicon.
The most important legacy of the so-called new social movements for the academy was the
wave of demands for diversity. No longer could liberation be formulated in the name of a single,
homogeneous class. Within the academy, these movements took the form of demands for a
liberatory scholarship that would be produced through the creation and institutionalization of
programs of inquiry in women’s and gender studies, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies,
racial and ethnic studies, post-colonial studies, and, more recently, disability studies. The omission
and distortion of scholarship on these large areas of human experience required a reform that would
take disciplinary and institutional forms, including the creation of new methodologies of inquiry.
What we have witnessed in the past two decades, however, has been a slow erosion of the
discourse that grounded the demands for these new areas of study. That is, the intellectual basis for
77 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

the demand to decolonize the academy has been eroded by skeptical, postmodern philosophies that
have called into question the founding terms such as humanism, identity, progress, truth, and
liberation. Postmodernism is a movement that I would credit with opening up new ways to diagnose
the causes of oppression and to critique domination, but it has also resulted, particularly in the
humanities, in a demoralization and confusion about what unites our diverse constituencies, what
language we can use to make demands, and what vision we are working toward, just as it has called
into question the ability to invoke any “we” here at all.
I believe we need today to re-invoke that “we” that would include all groups targeted by
identity based forms of oppression. And we need to consider on what intellectual and political
grounds we can responsibly base our alliance and plausibly formulate a united agenda for academic
work once again. This cannot be based on a return to the theoretical naïveté of the 60s. Rather, we
need new articulations of identities and knowledges, articulations with greater historicist and
contextual reflexivity, but articulations which can explain why decolonization has not yet been
achieved in the academy, why it is even of legitimate scholarly and epistemic concern, and how,
concretely, we can revise and reform our epistemologies in time for the next uprising.

Notes
1 Some such discussions have occurred in the philosophy of the social sciences, on the debates over rationality across
cultures, for example. These discussions have noted the difficulty in coming up with universal standards, but have
generally not attempted a genealogy or diagnostics of western epistemic assumptions.
2 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30

(Winter 2004): 226.

3 Latour’s own reconstructive proposals are, in my view, vague and underdeveloped, but he is right to point out that we

need to be able to make serious, and not merely strategic, truth claims.
4 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997): 31.

5 Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003): 35.

6 Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,

1979): 212.
7 Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1994, and Daniel Holliman, and Robert A. Brown, “‘A Nation within a Nation’: Racial Identity, Self-Help, and African
American Economic Attitudes at the End of the Twentieth Century”, Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the
American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1997.
8 José E. Cruz, Identity and Power: Puerto Rican Politics and the Challenge of Ethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1998): 6.
9 Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).
78 | L. Alcoff. Transmodernity (Fall 2011)

Works Cited

Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1979.
Cruz, José E. Identity and Power: Puerto Rican Politics and the Challenge of Ethnicity. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998.
Dawson, Michael C. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition New York: Routledge,
1997.
Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political Philosophical Exchange.
London: Verso, 2003.
Holliman, Daniel, and Robert A. Brown. "'A Nation within a Nation': Racial Identity, Self-Help, and
African American Economic Attitudes at the End of the Twentieth Century." Annual Meeting
of the American Political Science Association. 1997.
Latour, Bruno. "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern." Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-48.
Mohanty, Satya. Literary Theory and the Claims of History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.