Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long Sixteenth Century

This chapter has been inspired by Enrique Dussel’s critique to Cartesian philosophy and his World-Historical work on the conquest of the Americas in the long sixteenth century.1 It aims at adding another dimension to his many contributions by looking at the Conquest of the Americas in relation to three other world-historical processes, namely the Conquest of Al-Andalus, the enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the killing of millions of women burned alive in Europe accused of being witches, in relation to knowledge structures.2 As Dussel focused on the genocidal logic of the Conquest of the Americas, this chapter draws on the implications of the four genocides of the sixteenth century to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) calls ‘epistemicide’, that is, the destruction of knowledges that was tied to the destruction of peoples. The focus is fundamentally on the emergence of modern/ colonial structures of knowledge as the foundational Epistemology of Westernized universities and its implications for the decolonization of knowledge.