The erasure of Southern knowledge is not abstract – but material. By systematic annihilation colonisers have long suppressed our stories, our languages, our cultures. They have dismissed – and even criminalised – the traditions of Global South people. This erasure and epistemicide, as Latin American decolonial thinkers like Catherine Walsh have noted, is foundational to how colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism maintain power.
When history is contested terrain, what we remember – and how we remember – is a radical act. It is not enough to just find inclusion in dominant knowledge systems – we need to forge new epistemic landscapes, liberate and decolonise our subjectivities as Suely Rolnik and Sylvia Tamale stated.
The murder of knowledge (epistemicide) are conditions imposed by genocidal and imperialist tactics of conquest. This implies the death of the knowledge system and the subordinated culture that possesses it, and therefore the death of the social groups that comprise it. By delegitimising and marginalising the knowledge of oppressed peoples, what Spivak named as epistemic violence, imperialism not only imposes material domination, but also annuls the possibility of imagining and building alternative worlds, thereby deepening epistemic subjugation as part of the global colonial order.
As part of the broader process of epistemicide, the academic and knowledge production system is rooted in hegemonic, colonised frameworks of the Global North. As theorists of Dependency Theory and Feminist Epistemology (Haraway, Harding, Lugones, Espinosa, among others) have argued, the modern system of knowledge is not neutral or objective; rather, it is universalist, sexist, racist, androcentric, and colonial in its foundations. “Northern knowledge has no soul, Ciriza, ”
This system not only perpetuates the asymmetrical relationship of dependency between the Global North and South, but also systematically marginalises, erases, and renders invisible the knowledge of Indigenous peoples, feminists, grassroots communities, and all oppressed groups.
Such is the degree of internalisation of colonialism and oppression that even inside Southern knowledge production spheres, there are hierarchies – marginalised ways of knowing, thinking and creating are more delegitimised.
Thus, the production of knowledge, culture and information becomes a site of political relevance. There is an urgent need to collectively develop a new base of theoretical and practical knowledge, informed by anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-cisheteropatriarchal feminist principles and solidarities, through dialogue, exchange and transformative creativity. A new knowledge base capable of decolonising our mind, responding to current challenges, supporting our Southern feminist activism and contributing to building a Southern feminist genealogy. The South Feminist Knowledge Hub is an archive of counter narratives, rooted in the recognition that colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems of knowledge have erased and co-opted our living truths. It is a record of insurgent storytelling grounded in collective, ancestral, ecological wisdom – what Claudia Korol describes as “cosmocimientos”.
In Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988), Donna Haraway offers a feminist critique of the disembodied, universal perspective, and argues for situated knowledge rooted in positionalities and contexts. Afro-Dominican decolonial feminists like Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso also critique this framework emphasising the urgent need to account for how coloniality, race, and geopolitics shape what counts as knowledge. We need not only situated knowledge, but epistemic rupture and disobedience that challenge colonial power as something that shapes dominant feminist theory too.
“The epistemological shift in the midst of transition that we feminists from critical and counter-hegemonic backgrounds and positions in Abya Yala are experiencing presents us with the challenge of contributing to the development of an analysis of coloniality and racism—no longer as a phenomenon but as an episteme intrinsic to modernity and its liberating projects—and its relationship to gender coloniality.”, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014.
The Knowledge Hub builds on this framing, rejecting ‘neutrality’ of Western epistemology, and embracing positionality as the root of knowledge. The Hub centers embodied knowledge – stemming from our bodies, our streets, our movements, from the margins, from our interdependence and our communities. This living, growing archive holds multivocal feminist works in Spanish, Arabic, French, English, and Portuguese – across locations sharing histories of colonisation. As much as it is an archive, it is a pedagogical tool inviting Southern feminists – our movements, circles, communities, and classrooms – to challenge hegemonic narratives and build new ones.
Feminist scholars like Vandana Shiva have talked about the colonial hierarchies that are at the core of dominant knowledge systems. Vandana Shiva writes: “The knowledge of our ancestors, of our peasants about seeds is being claimed as an invention of US corporations and US scientists, and patented by them. The only reason that can work is because underlying it is a racist framework that says the knowledge of the Third World and the knowledge of people of colour is not knowledge. When that knowledge is taken by white men who have capital, suddenly creativity begins.”
To counter this, the Knowledge Hub carries stories of Sudanese women resisting militarisation, pedagogies of insurgent knowledge dissent from the South, recipes for radical care from Africa, narratives for weaving queerness into the struggle for decolonisation in the settler colonial context of Palestine, and more.
As Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, feminist knowledge should begin “from the experiential and analytic anchor in the lives of marginalised communities of women” to reveal the workings of colonial-capitalist power systems. In the face of power systems that write violence on their bodies, Southern women and gender diverse communities are not just subjects to be studied – they are teachers, visionaries and theorists whose knowledge(s) lay out a blueprint for liberation. The works of Southern feminists that the Hub holds, militates against the colonial logic that brands Southern knowledge(s) as “irrational” or “unscientific”.
As Southern feminists, we want to reclaim and redistribute knowledge that has been stolen from us, devalued, dismissed, or suppressed. The Knowledge Hub holds works like The A Project (Lebanon) that is filling historical gaps in access to health through body-affirming, political knowledge. Find more radical sexual and reproductive health guides like the Easy Peasy Guide to Abortion Pills by Agents of Ishq (India), the initiative How to use abortion pills or the platform AbortionData created by a transnational collective.
The Knowledge Hub affirms that our knowledge is not a product of large institutions but stems from communities in struggle. It is a reminder that our movements echo each other and that we need to find collective grounding in the face of oppressions that try to individualise and isolate us. And as Claudia Korol emphasised in the public launch of the Knowledge Hub, Southern feminist archiving is a means to defend community and territory and is essential for creating empowering spaces, materials and tools of power.
…and so we invite you to:
We want to expand this Hub with you – to advance a bold vision: building a space that Southern feminists in all their diversity can turn to, to find our histories and imagine our futures.
As Amina Mama said, “Imagine a world in which feminist movements develop stronger transnational connections across the south, in which we are able to access and learn from the uniquely specialised archive that the South feminist Knowledge Hub promises to become. It will be a world that becomes easier to change and transform, because we will be equipped with the knowledge – and deep rich knowledge – from multiple traditions that can propel us forward and continue to inspire us.”
We want to build that world with you…
Korol,C (2018).El diálogo de saberes en la pedagogía feminista y en la educación popular
