Colonial Unknowing

The concept of ‘colonial unknowing’ was developed by Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein to explain the deliberate continuation of colonial processes with the aim to limit critical initiatives, in particular in relation by those that have been historically oppressed. For them colonial unknowing is ‘a process that restricts our collective critical capacities, we proceed from a commitment to both Indigenous-centered decolonization and Black liberation’ (Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein 2017). Furthermore, ‘colonial unknowing’ is fabricated to establish an epoch where the colonial relationships are seen as a matter of the past: ‘[…] colonial unknowing endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and colonization, occluding the mutable historicity of colonial structures and attributing finality to events of conquest and dispossession’ (Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein 2016).

Moreover, ‘colonial unknowing’ is seen as a way to cement the coloniser’s voice and render the ‘other’s voice’ indistinct. ‘[…] we contend that colonial unknowing is always a response, a reaction intended to make indecipherable and unimaginable knowing otherwise—an otherwise which is of course not otherwise at all, but simply a knowing—so as to secure and center the colonizer’s perspective and power. Colonization is always for colonial knowledge regimes an encounter with peoples, socialities, knowledges, cosmologies, and relations to place with no innate relation to colonial suppositions of power, likely initially indifferent to the colonial self-appointment as the center of the world, as civilizational paragon. Colonial unknowing is a response to this vertiginous existential challenge to the universality of colonial onto-epistemology that continues to be reproduced, reworked, and variously re-asserted—rendered particular to specific places, times, and relations despite the colonizer’s adamant solipsistic demands’ (Vimalassery, Pegues, and Goldstein 2017).

Then, ‘colonial unknowing’ is not a phenomenon that died with the end of Empires but continues to be regenerated in modern society through actions and systems. For Bradley, ‘[…], it also occurs through the everyday, potentially unintended reproduction of cultures and ways of working that efface how colonialism and related, racialized inequalities continue to shape perceptions, power dynamics and policy choices’ (Bradley 2023).