Praxis is no Metaphor: Diasporic Knowledges and Maroon Epistemes to Repair the World

Thinking about a project like the effective decolonization of eighteenth-century studies demands a total remapping of the world. That can be difficult for any institution—and particularly so for institutions based on the consolidation of knowledge and the enforcement of disciplinary boundaries. And so, to decolonize eighteenth-century studies must entail more than just an intentional effort to reimagine the field by pursuing novel avenues of research, or studying new texts, geographies, or protagonists. Rather, this essay provides a call for action. By centering praxis, I articulate the insufficiency of gestures like making the field look nominally more diverse or the tokenistic inclusion of subjects of inquiry racialized as non-white. Without an actual, substantive commitment to return land, repair the world, and produce new material realities, decolonization will remain in the realm of the metaphorical. Thus, to enact change and to seek a reconfiguration of modes of sociality and the ethos of scholarship requires the enactment of self-reflexive criticism and a deep commitment to practicing liberation.

"I refuse the prison of 'I' and choose the open spaces of 'we.'"

— Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

"The West does not exist. I know. I've been there."

— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Start with yourself. That must always be the first iteration—always. Collective change cannot happen without broad coalitions premised on the discomfort prompted by the willingness to listen, by the difficult decentering of oneself, and by the acknowledgement that power operates through us too, try as we may to resist it. Learn, unlearn, relearn. Be open to that difficult confrontation. Be prepared, also, to eschew familiar categories—they too reify power, silently, insidiously, and with the seeming innocence conferred only by the tacit conflation of the "normal" with the "natural." Accept this questioning—if not the outright abandonment—of inherited categorical certainties. Be prepared for radical change, for abolition, for the transformation of resistance into a realm of plural and protean reexistences. Recreate and reimagine the world, reconstitute and resignify a commons not structured by the scaffold of scarcity. Think with abundance. Economies of prestige confer legibility, but their attachment to rank and hierarchical clarity also hinder solidarity. They thwart our capacity to think from and with, instead teaching us to simply research about. Unborder the world and jettison strict dichotomies between subject and object, the West and the Global South, the "civilized" and the "savage." Accept and embrace these open-ended processes starting with and from you.

This preamble serves both as a ritual and a reminder. As a scholar of Portuguese colonialism, and as someone raised and educated in Portugal, colonialism and coloniality have come to represent far more than mere objects of disciplinary interest. In fact, the grip exercised by coloniality over the uninterrogated structures of my quotidian life forms the essence of my own project of unlearning imperialism—a project incorporated, both through praxis and hexis, into my intellectual and lived experience. Here, I echo Ariela Aïsha Azoulay's desire to repair the world by forging solutions devised outside of the existing terms—be they epistemic or political—afforded by imperialist structures.¹ That is the positioning I write from and with. Moreover, it is also the reason why I regard imperialism as a genre of storytelling that thrives on the promise of futurity and has no qualms about using all the violence it needs in order to will that "ideal" into being. Empire was a lie compelled onto me, too—a deceit of neat order, fixity, universal yearnings, clear-cut demarcations, and linear futurity. Until we are ready to face its silent workings within ourselves, decolonization will be nothing more than an empty gesture.

Both as individual scholars and members of the idiosyncratic field of eighteenth-century studies, we are often moored to the grandiose birthing myths of modernity. Here, the eighteenth century seemingly has it all: a spirit of secularism and equality, a bonhomie about progress, science, universal human rights, the ascendency of reason, and the collapse of the divine right of kings. Yet even as our field today confronts the many silences produced by these stories through its critiques of heteropatriarchy and imperial whiteness, it also tacitly reifies a canon whose core texts and working languages continue to largely overlap with the modern imaginary of the "developed" West. This privileging of the United Kingdom, France, and the United States—with perhaps a bit of Italy or Germany here and there—forces us to confront the weight of imperial hegemony within our own field. Or, to put matters somewhat differently, it may force us to consider what would an Afrocentric eighteenth century look like? Would the field be recognizable to its current active participants if we were to be asked to engage an eighteenth century shaped by Asian perspectives, Latin American experiences, and Indigenous worldviews? Speaking as a scholar of Portuguese eighteenth-century colonialism, I remain skeptical, but hopeful.

Both skepticism and hope serve as a reminder that we must start from our own positionality while aiming to privilege intentional praxis. As a junior scholar whose work weaves together a lesser-known part of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas, the habitus of asking if X place has any legitimate claim to an "Enlightenment"—or any other recognizable grand eighteenth-century narrative—still remains, in my experience, deeply ingrained. In this regard, there are small gestures scholars could adopt, if not to decolonize, then at least to open the field to new possibilities. For example, to abandon the habit of asking colleagues who study non-canonical sites, problems, or authors to justify why they belong—especially when "why" amounts to a demand for self-justification, rather than a proposition for mutual engagement. More than representing an unfair burden placed onto scholars already dedicated to the study of marginalized problems and communities, this question also expresses a hierarchy of scholarly priorities: who is seen as a "natural fit" versus who, conversely, will be asked to explain why their work matters or belongs. Gestures like this work in a way that is akin to the canon pushing back. In their most benign iteration, they may simply aim for commensurability: i.e., they're trying to make the unfamiliar legible in terms they already understand. But when borne out of a spirit of scarcity and moored to liberal fantasies of individual genius, they may serve to exclude by enforcing a narrow vision of the discipline.

This is where an intentionally decolonial scholarly praxis must intervene through the upending of perspectives, the dismantling of disciplinary hierarchies, the rejection of economies of prestige, and a refusal to engage in the extractivism of either knowledge or labor. Any effort to decolonize must commit to decentering whiteness as well as the structures through which it is reproduced as power, property, or epistemic force. Thus, decolonization does not—or cannot—be accomplished by the mere addition of marginalized identities to the eighteenth-century pot. For if those identities—Black, queer, Indigenous, among others—continue to figure as deviant epiphenomena set against the established norm, then the field will continue to manifest a fundamental commitment to its epistemic whiteness. To decolonize, therefore, requires not just seeing or imagining the world differently. In a more fundamental way, it demands the development of a new politics of collective life and mutual rapport—or what Kathleen Tamayo Alves calls, in her essay in this cluster, a move toward a "relational ecology."

Drawing on this invitation to think together rather than as discrete beings, I want to draw from the epigraph from Toni Morrison with which I began, her call to "refuse the prison of 'I' and choose the open spaces of 'we.'" The sentiment contained in this gesture reminds me of subjects who, although chronologically part of the eighteenth century, have not traditionally been made part of the field. I am thinking about the quilombos, Afrodiasporic maroon communities that have existed in Brazil since the colonial period. Quilombos, as the Brazilian Black feminist scholar Beatriz Nascimento recounts, were spaces of reconstitution for Black life and being.² They were not merely spaces of flight, although they were that as well. Rather, quilombos were spaces in which new potentialities were forged through the recreation of Black life as it existed both before and outside of colonial domination. Although, as Nascimento carefully notes, quilombos cannot be reduced to a single model or system, they nonetheless offer a heuristic for how sociality can interrupt colonial structures. Spatially instantiating sovereignty through both individual flight and the collective reconfiguration of relations outside of imperial structures and the ways of thinking that they impose, quilombos manifest the power of refusal. This is not to romanticize quilombos. African societies also know hierarchies and unfreedom. Yet, as Nascimento insists, the longevity and changes experienced by Afro-Brazilian maroon societies demonstrate how liberation comes to fruition when metaphor and matter meet. That is, when decolonization aims to repair, restitute, and reconfigure reality.

Any effort to decolonize and therefore liberate and abolish existing matrices of power must seek to rebuild the world from the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. Sometimes this exercise will entail reading documents against the grain. At other times, it will force one to accept that African or Amerindian intellectuals were, far before Western academics, committed to creating deeply incisive analyses of colonialism's intersecting oppressions. Adopting citation practices that decenter Western knowledges and recalibrate epistemes towards Indigenous thought, lifeworlds, and ways of living is therefore an imperative. This gesture demands the abolition of existing hierarchies of intellectual production. Withholding recognition from Indigenous thinkers/makers is paternalist and extractive and so would both reproduce a hierarchical mode of thought and reiterate a key method of dispossession.

Colonialism operates by transforming life—anthropocentric or not—into property. If eighteenth-century studies is to have a future, the colonial moorings of devices as central to Western epistemology and state formation as scientific reason, economic progress, state sovereignty, and natural law jurisprudence must continue to be excavated. Slavery and dispossession were not just routine in the eighteenth century, they were state sanctioned and, thus, part and parcel of a legal scaffold of legitimate subjugation. For this reason, a decolonial vision of knowledge production within Western academia must start by decentering itself. To abolish the taxonomical language of imposed normativities confining existence to the enclosure of biocentric fixity, biopolitical control, and classificatory certainty entails engaging with Indigenous pluriverses. If we are to unlearn imperialism and decenter epistemic whiteness, Indigenous, African, or "Ameroafrican" lifeways and intellectual production must become the kernel for our future growth.³ This gesture is not simply one of negation; rather, it stems from an ethos of nurture and cultivation. Stewardship and caretaking must replace the claiming of ownership over fields of knowledge and the correct methods of delivering such knowledge. Gatekeeping, and the disciplining of approaches and topics into the performance of scholarly convention, must therefore be intentionally averted. Amid all this, we can never lose sight of the long history of colonial epistemicide, nor how Western "reason" and legal regimes were complicit in the legitimation of slavery, dispossession, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

The enduring coloniality of the available conceptual worlds forces a confrontation. It requires facing the epistemic attachment to methods whose idioms of rigor have upheld established hierarchies by recapitulating and reproducing power. It demands urgent and intentional action from us. We need to openly acknowledge who was centered by the canon and, conversely, who has historically been absented from the narrative—and why. The colonial matrix of power, to evoke Aníbal Quijano, organizes, disciplines, and endlessly replays a truncated vision of the human.⁴ However, this "prototypical whiteness" also continues to endure through the tacit recapitulation of an uninterrogated universal template.⁵ Katherine McKittrick terms this presumption of natural belonging and universal, unambiguous interpretation as "transparent space."⁶ Inviting us to consider why some varieties of humankind—and their respective geographies of belonging and exclusion—seem to exist as something that "just is" and questioning the discipline's attraction to stasis as a necessary epistemic condition, McKittrick reveals the many hierarchies of being that sustain the Western knowledge-making matrix of power. McKittrick also cautions her readers that "description is not liberation."⁷ Thus, she reminds readers to be on guard against the epistemic desire to incorporate identity into disciplines that seek to read people as enunciating observable truths. Rather than adding symbolic Blackness to frameworks that recapitulate—and therefore simply "describe" the world—liberation demands theoretical interventions that support material reconfigurations.

Tackling the ongoing grip of coloniality by abolishing its power to separate, commodify, and extract the resources of people and places, the problem of "reason"—so central to the eighteenth century—appears at the crux of our efforts to decolonize eighteenth-century studies. This challenge must be faced from new vantage points. Refiguring what "the" Enlightenment means for the field, what sort of labor that concept performs, from where it is imagined to who is included and excluded from its dominant field of vision—all these demand our immediate attention. This labor, which must start with ourselves, stems from our willingness to unlearn what we think we already know as certain. Yet, while starting with the "I," decolonization can only be practiced and imagined together. The work of the future is here—may we know to embrace it together.