This e-book is provided without charge via free download by E-International
Relations (www.E-IR.info). It is not permitted to be sold in electronic format
under any circumstances.
If you enjoy our free e-books, please consider leaving a small donation to
allow us to continue investing in open access publications:
http://www.e-ir.info/about/donate/
i
Critical
Epistemologies of
Global Politics
E D ITE D BY
MA R C W OON S & SE BA S TIA N W E IER
79
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
5
A Post/Decolonial Geography
beyond ‘the Language of the
Mouth’
A MB ER M U RR E Y
In this chapter I re¿ect upon what was a transformative conversation during
research in Nanga-Eboko, a town in central Cameroon that is located along
the pathway of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. This brief conversation, I
argue, was ¾gurative of the on-going debates about political epistemologies
and knowledge making within border-ridden fossil fuel capitalism, including
the ways in which, despite a rich literature that criticises extraction,
researchers and scientists continue to play signi¾cant roles in providing
information and validating the socio-economic agendas of oil and gas
corporations. More than this, the conversation is an avenue through which we
might demystify the World Bank and oil pipeline sponsorship of primary
school construction along the Chad-Cameroon pipeline.
Recent criticism of the ‘epistemic murk’ obscuring the social worlds of oil and
gas (Appel et al. 2015) emphasizes the continued need to focus on the
infrastructures, structures, networks, and border making constitutive of
resource extraction. More than this, the ‘epistemic murk’ of the global oil and
gas industry is deeply political and is situated within a global coloniality of
knowledge: such ‘murk’ is often intentionally generated and it is an important
component of the dismissal of people’s everyday confrontations with
violences of extraction as unsubstantiated, unmeasured (often unmeasurable)
and unveri¾ed by ‘experts.’ Oil corporations and the International Financial
Institutions that often ¾nance oil development projects actively contribute to
the corporate manufacturing of uncertainties regarding the social, ecological,
and political costs associated with extraction. At the same time, cleverly
crafted knowledge management and marketing ventures cast oil companies
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
80
as eco-friendly corporations that operate on behalf of women, Indigenous,
and ‘local’ people.
Working from a decolonial orientation, I explore the ways in which the ChadCameroon oil consortium (comprised of ExxonMobil, Petronas and, until
recently, Chevron) and a major ¾nancer, engineer, and proponent of the
pipeline, the World Bank, embarked upon highly publicized and celebrated
projects to support ‘local’ education though the building of schools as a
mechanism of community compensation. These endeavours cast the oil
pipeline as a development project. Through a decolonial orientation, I situate
my intellectual and existential consciousness against the geopolitics of
knowledge embedded within the World Bank’s policies, projects, and
amnesias — what I call ‘the language of the mouth’ (as you will see below).
Despite claims that the oil pipeline would empower ‘local’ people through
various consortium-sponsored educational initiatives, the narratives of people
in the villages near Nanga-Eboko and Kribi in Cameroon reveal key
insuf¾ciencies in such claims. I focus particularly on the claim that the oil
pipeline contributed in a meaningful way to educational development along
the pipeline. Without subscribing to the trope of grassroots politics or ‘giving
voice’ to subaltern perspectives (Spivak 1988), I argue for a decolonial
research consciousness that is foremost attentive to the productions, circuits,
policing(s), and geopolitics of knowledge within socially, culturally, and
psychologically destructive forms of imperial development and extraction.
These approaches refrain from claims to authority (see Icaza, this volume)
and challenge the positivist notions of objective knowledge that are central to
the operating mechanisms of neoliberal projects (see interview with Mignolo,
this volume), including the multiple powerful actors of the Chad-Cameroon Oil
Pipeline. This is an ethos that is questioning, humble, and grounded in the
respectful turn and return to the voices and stories of people. Much like
Rosalba Icaza’s chapter in this volume, I am interested in seeking, thinking,
and experiencing a place of conscious dwelling that unsettles the privileges
that are ascribed by modernist thought to myself-as-author. Here I approach
knowledge as co-created through conversation and endeavour to incorporate
forms of de-privileged knowledge expression, including poetry, joke-telling,
and narrative.
Nanga-Eboko, Cameroon, August 2012
Seated on a wooden bench under the raf¾a-thatched roof of Monsieur Tené’s
courtyard stall, I listened as he recounted the story of the Chad-Cameroon Oil
Pipeline’s construction in 2000. The construction of the pipeline dispossessed
his family of their ancestral mixed cacao, banana, and avocado plantation. As
81
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
he spoke, a tall woman walked along the roadside nearby. He called her over
to join us.
‘She is my neighbour and can tell you about the pipe,’ he said by way of
explanation.
The woman was on her way to sell food to a group of migrant labourers
employed by a Chinese road construction company nearby. An iron pot was
balanced neatly atop her vivid red hat. The woman, who I would later learn
was called Nadine, walked up to where we were seated and placed the pot
on the bench next to Monsieur Tené. She eyed me with a mixture of curiosity
and suspicion. She did not sit down.
Monsieur Tené told her that I was there ‘to ask questions about the pipe.’
She replied, ‘Aiikiéééééé, encore vous?’
Her words, ‘you again,’ were said in reference to her previous interactions
with researchers working along the pipeline: the academics, journalists, nonpro¾t employees, oil consortium representatives, and World Bank
researchers who visited Nanga to conduct studies, surveys, and interviews
on-and-off for the preceding decade.
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
82
Figure 1: ‘La Langue De La Bouche’
Clapping her hands together for emphasis and then rolling them outward with
a graceful ¿ick of her ¾ngers, Nadine said, ‘Nothing ever comes of the visits
from researchers to Nanga village.’ She succinctly concluded, ‘tout ça c’est la
langue de la bouche. Moi, je m’en vais vendre ma viande.’ All of that is the
language of the mouth. I am going to sell my meat. She resettled the pot atop
her hat and walked back down the road (see Figure 1: La Langue de La
Bouche). As she strode briskly away, she continued talking about the
‘n’importe quoi’ and futility of the pipeline, her hands gesticulating on words
as she looked intermittently back up at us.
Nadine’s expression, ‘la langue de la bouche,’ distinguishes between an
inactive language of the mouth and an active language of movement and of
the body. Her provocative monologue was a challenge against the language
of inaction: the ‘empty words’ of politicians, professionals and, too often,
academics, from whose mouths come words — or from whose ¾ngers come
83
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
pages of words — that are ‘merely speculative, merely theoretical’ (Hall 1974:
151) and without material effect. Within the presence of substantial
contestations of global knowledge — as diverse actors negotiate to establish
evidence, fact, proof, and truth — the languages and experiences offered by
Nadine and those living along the pipeline are often de-legitimized and
dismissed by more powerful actors (government of¾cials and corporate
entitles) as non-factual or as unsubstantiated.
In his analysis of Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological technique,
Lewis R. Gordon (1995: 45, emphasis in original) argues, ‘An existential
standpoint rests upon the following thesis: that the lived body is the subject of
agency ... [and that] however universal the hostile structures against black
presence may be, we must ... remember that all those structures are
situationally lived by the people of ¿esh and blood.’ In my work along the oil
pipeline in Cameroon I return again and again to the ‘situationally lived’
sufferings of the compound disasters of colonial violence: social, ecological,
epistemic. My time of eight months living in two communities in Cameroon
along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, brought me
face-to-face with tangible, lived politics of knowledge among vulnerable and
resisting people who have experienced long-term systemic and colonial
violence(s), including land dispossession, displacement in-place (through
socio-ecological destructions, see Murrey 2015a) and consequent cognitive
violence(s) (see Figure 2).
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
84
Figure 2: ‘L’e Cri Vain’
My commitment to post-/decolonial praxis is centred upon the concurrent
need to (i) critique the colonial geopolitics of knowledge that sustains the
‘coloniality of power’ as well as to (ii) ‘“learn … from” those who are living in
and thinking from colonial and postcolonial legacies’ (Mignolo 2000: 5).
Herein, I offer re¿ections on complexities characteristic of the pursuit of
decolonial ethics while seeking knowledge on the ground, during exchanges
with people.1 A range of intellectual efforts have sought to ‘decolonise
knowledge’ and yet many times such efforts are made with little speci¾cation
of the exact processes crucial for the decolonisation of the knowledge
regimes at the centre of the (post)colonial global order (Shilliam 2014).
Addressing Nadine’s critique, I draw from heterogeneous post-/decolonial
thought to outline a holistic decolonial ethos (or, an orientation) that critiques
and moves toward the creation of epistemes against la langue de la bouche. I
understand my efforts as part of a larger collective energy to decolonise
knowledge and think at the borders (Anzaldúa 1999), or what Walter Mignolo
(2000: 5) describes as ‘creating a locus of enunciation where different ways
of knowing and individual and collective expressions mingle.’
I am inspired by the ‘decolonial turn’ as well as the burgeoning body of work
For a related decolonial analysis on the resistance potentials and limitations of
epistemologies of witchcraft along the pipeline, see Murrey (2015b; 2016).
1
85
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
on Indigenous methodologies to elucidate an orientation that is grounded in
storytelling, narrative, and sustained efforts to de-centre and de-privilege the
scholar/author/self (without erasing my presence from the project). This is
possible, I posit by echoing decolonial thinkers, through an attention to the
scholar’s place of conscious dwelling. This dwelling place, following Walter
Mignolo (2000; also this volume), is metaphysical, geographical, and
temporal; that is to say, it is sustained and committed through time. Rather
than an exclusive focus on my positionality, the emphasis is placed on
building and maintaining sustained (long-term) relationships with people
where we work and a grounded ethical and political orientation that is
attentive foremost to the voices and experiences of the people.
An Orientation That Pursues Life: Vivons Seulement
Decolonising ethics focuses on healing, dignifying, and advancing a
community rather than a discipline. In order to break from the trajectory of
colonialism and the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000), these orientations
¾rmly centre life (human, animal, plant) in the knowledge project. This
distinguishes decolonial thought from conventional scholarship, where the
transformation of the discipline and the making of a ‘contribution to theory’ is
the central focus. ‘On est déjà die ici au pays!’2 Valery Ndongo, the
Cameroonian comedian, joked in one of his political skits: We are already
dead in this country! Again, in his satirical song, Touche Pas Mon Manioc
Avec le M¾an Owondo, he establishes the tongue-in-cheek tone of the song
in the beginning with a nonchalant, ‘On va tous die ici au pays-ééé.’ We will
all die in this country. Against a seeming permanent presence of death is a
celebration of life, conveyed through the popular Cameroonian expression,
‘vivons seulement’ (just live) — often said in dire or grim circumstances (see
Figure 3).
2
Camfranglais vocabulary is a mix of French, English, and Indigenous Cameroonian
patwas.
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
86
Figure 3: ‘On a falli die sans vivre!’
Nurturing a scholarly consciousness attuned to people is an approach useful
for navigating the entangled histories of colonialism and the imbalances of
power in (post)colonial places. This approach refrains from claims to absolute
authority and challenges the positivist notions of objective knowledge that are
central to the operating mechanisms of neoliberal projects, such as the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline. This is an orientation that is questioning, humble, and
grounded in the respectful turn and return to the voices and stories of people
(Chi’XapKaid 2005; Chilisa 2012; Tuhiwai Smith 2012).
The decolonising orientations articulated here are not a neatly synthesisable
or formulaic set of rules intended to determine or authorise certain
knowledges.3 Instead, they arise within a contextualisation of the geopolitics
of knowledge in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi. Geopolitics of knowledge refers to
the ways in which knowledge and knowing are embedded in and reproduce
global structures of political economy, in this case an intellectual project
juxtaposed with (neo)colonial epistemic dispossession.4 The epistemic
possibilities of established social sciences are limited by their foundation
within the rigid rules and regulations of ‘the methodology.’5 In¿exible and pre3
4
5
See Sholock (2012) on the signi¾cance of ‘epistemic uncertainty.’
See Murrey (2015a; 2015b; 2015c).
For a critique of ‘disciplinary decadence’ in which ‘becoming “right” is simply a
87
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
set methodologies preserve boundary-making and border-making within
academia, wherein the delineations between academic and non-academic
knowing are mapped, regulated, and policed. Particular ‘methodologies’ are
endorsed as ‘effective’ means of ‘producing’ valid, scienti¾c knowledge.
Historically the ‘methodology’ has been rooted in an obscuring of the ‘knower’
or the researcher’s subjectivities and personal engagements. Santiago
Castro-Gómez (2005) calls this ‘la hybris del pinto cero’: the hubris of the
zero-point. This hubris has been essential to academic border-making, in
which an ‘unbiased,’ non-corporeal, scholar is presumed to be capable of
universal, fact-based abstractions for scienti¾c ‘truth.’ More than this, la hybris
del pinto cero is a mechanism for the de-legitimisation of other ways of
knowing; it functions by relegating Other knowledges (embodied, subjected,
and emotional) to the margins (as lacking measurability, calculability). Along
the pipeline, it is precisely this hierarchisation of knowledge that created the
contexts within which complaints about the pipeline’s social, economic,
ecological, and other consequences were dismissed as ‘lacking substance.’
Rather than a methodology, I outline an ethical and political ethos that is
established on the ground, in meeting with people. This ethos is constantly
and uniquely negotiated through the organic maturing of relationships within
the course of knowledge-creation (not ‘knowledge production’) over time.
Post-/decolonial Orientations
A post-/decolonial orientation arises in response to a discomfort with the
limitations of re¿exive social science. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a
re¿exive turn in research methodologies, as the researcher’s position vis-àvis the people involved in the research became a central focus of criticism.
This moment produced an important body of literature identifying and
critiquing notable weaknesses and biases in the scienti¾c production of
knowledge, including the racisms, sexisms, and inadequacies of such
observations (hooks 1984; Minh-ha 1989; Collins 1990; Haraway 1991, 1992;
Behar 1996; Rose 1997; Mountz 2010).
The re¿exive turn failed, however, to bring about a wholesale transformation
of how knowledge is co/created, made, gathered, and assessed. In some
cases, the move gave rise to what Richa Nagar and Susan Geiger (2007)
characterize as a ‘paralyzing’ re¿exivity as the centrality of the author prompts
self-centred re¿ections that lead to political inertia (see also Maxey 1999;
Horner 2002; Moser 2008). This re-centring of the author reinforces the power
hierarchy between ‘the scholar’ and ‘the subject.’ Furthermore, the focus on
positionality is limited, I note, in the tendency to compartmentalise the
matter of applying the method correctly,’ see Gordon (2011).
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
88
researcher’s self-re¿exivity within the methodological section of the write-up,
after which there is a sort-of return to business-as-usual, as Eurocentric and/
or Western ontologies, epistemologies, and theories remain dominant
frameworks and reference points (this is particularly re¿ected in postgraduate
student training and requirements). Mignolo (2000; 2011) argues instead that
scholars make explicit the conscious place from which knowledge emerges
as a means to decolonise the ¾ctitious hybris del pinto cero without (re)
centring the author. This consciousness within the geopolitics of knowledge is
existentially, geographically, politically, and ethically committed to
decolonisation. This conscious place where we think is a geopolitical and
metaphysical space.
Against La Langue de la Bouche along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline
For me, this consciousness within the geopolitics of knowledge requires ¾rst
and foremost an engagement with la langue de la bouche in Cameroon,
including the epistemological dispossessions effected ¾rst through missionary
education and subsequently through the International Financial Instituteendorsed neo-liberalisation (taken to mean the withdrawal and minimization
of the state) of education since the 1980s. La langue de la bouche — not only
inactive but also repressive knowledge — in Cameroon has been enacted at
multiple levels: the service of colonial knowledge to socio-political and
economic control, which was intimately tied with missionary activity and the
development of the sciences, including agronomy, anthropology, geography,
medical, and pharmaceutical science (Leslie 2013).
In the 1700s, British Baptist missionaries settled permanently in Limbe (at the
time the town was named ‘Victoria’) on the coast of Cameroon. By the early
1870s, American Presbyterian missionaries had established settlements at
Grand Batanga, where today the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline extends eleven
kilometres beneath the Atlantic Ocean (in a marine pipeline) to the ¿oating
storage of¿oading vessel (see Figure 4).
89
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
Figure 4: ‘Map of Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline’
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
90
Early missionaries and charter company employees prepared the landscape
(sometimes directly, other times indirectly) for colonialism. They set up
permanent trading posts with guns and cannons that would facilitate the
violent appropriation of resources. They also established the missionary
schools that educated people in European languages and socialised pupils as
human capital for brutal and often forced colonial labour (Kanu 2006). This
implementation of Eurocentric, Christian-oriented, ¾xed-classroom instruction
was unlike previous oral-based and practice-based educational styles, which
focused on holistic wellness — physical, moral, emotional, spiritual — of the
community and self (Diang 2013).6 Pre-colonial educational practices centred
upon family- and community-engaged learning, with mothers responsible for a
child’s education until age eight, after which the mother and female relatives
continued teaching girl children and the father and male relatives would teach
boy children. Through storytelling, legends, proverbs, riddles, and arithmetic,
education consisted of fostering an awareness of the community through
social engagement, respect for elders through interaction, observance of
custom through practice, and respect for nature through living on the land —
so that the centre of knowledge encompasses the ethical, intellectual, and
physical simultaneously (Che 2008). The implementation of Christian values
in missionary education — including ‘forgiveness, submissiveness… patience
[and the belief] that life on earth was temporary and should be a preparation
for eternal life’ (Diang 2013: 10) — alongside a condemnation of Indigenous
world views, supplanted previous conceptualisations of community and self,
effecting epistemic dispossessions on a grand scale (see Figure 5).
Here the focus is on the role of Christian missionaries as they were more common
in the central, southern, and western regions of Cameroon and not Islamic schooling,
which was more common in the northern regions. For an analysis of Islamic schooling
in Cameroon, see Diang (2013).
6
91
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
Figure 5: ‘Close your eyes to really believe’
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
92
Nearly one hundred years later, the engineers of the Chad-Cameroon Oil
Pipeline drew upon the framework of missionary ideology in positing the
pipeline project as another venture in ‘African development.’ The
multinational-corporation-as-development-instrument echoes the ways in
which early European charter companies and missionaries were rhetorically
presented as a continuation of ‘la mission civilisatrice’ (Césaire 1955). There
are uncanny similarities between these charter companies, cast as quasihumanitarian bodies in an Enlightenment epistemology of human evolution
that naturalises the domination of one people over another (Mudimbe 1985)
and the ethos of social corporate responsibility in today’s multinationals.7
Elizabeth Ocampo and Dean Neu (2008: 9), in Doing Missionary Work: The
World Bank and the Diffusion of Financial Practices, argue that ‘The powerful
church of the colonial era has been replaced by a cadre of institutions that are
equally, if not more, powerful than the church ever was.’ In this newer
missionary paradigm, ‘the ¾eld of dissemination is not religious but
economical. And the main objective is corporate globalization. These central
institutions, uniquely positioned within the web of the world’s major economic
players, be they countries or corporations, are the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)’ (ibid.).
La langue de la bouche along the pipeline can be conceived of as the technoscienti¾c vocabulary embedded within and supporting the ideological
paradigm of economic growth based on the primordiality of the market — a
language that facilitates material violence and has enormously destructive
consequences for the peoples, ecologies, and epistemologies subsumed
within their schematic worlds. Indeed, la langue de la bouche was
fundamental to the World Bank’s framing of the pipeline project. In this case,
the ‘civilising’ agenda was a ‘civil-society agenda.’ Central components of the
consortium’s developmental approach to oil exploitation in the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline were its educational initiatives and apparent efforts to
support educational infrastructure, almost exclusively through the
construction of schoolrooms. In Chad, the World Bank’s Petroleum Revenue
Management Law (PRML) earmarked eighty per cent of oil revenue for public
health and poverty alleviation measures, including education. In Cameroon,
the consortium constructed schoolrooms as a mode of community
compensation (at the individual, communal, and regional levels) and held
educational campaigns on oil and pipeline safety.
In Etog-Nang village near Nanga, two brothers explained to me that the local
schoolroom built by the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company (COTCO) as
See Ottaway (2001) for a compelling examination of such ‘reluctant missionaries’ in
the oil industry.
7
93
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
a part of community reimbursement for the passage of the pipeline was never
¾lled with benches or a chalkboard. The brothers, Elie and Joseph, explained
that one of the exterior walls of the schoolroom partially collapsed during a
rainstorm while the children were inside attending class. ‘Fortunately,’ Joseph
said, ‘the wall fell out instead of in.’ COTCO declined to pay for building
repairs and the parents collected money over a period of several months to
replace the wall. During this time, children continued to attend school, as
Joseph said sarcastically, ‘en plein air’: in the open air (see Figure 6).
Figure 6: ‘In Kamer, they say primary school is “free”…’
In another case, in Mpango village near Kribi, the parents, who were already
working together to collect funds, initiated construction for a school building
and ‘then COTCO,’ Sewa, the son of the chief of Mpango village outside Kribi,
explained, ‘came in and completed the funds.’ Sewa and I had many such
conversations during my time in Kribi. He earned his Bachelor’s degree at the
Université de Douala and returned to Kribi after graduation. With a young son
to care for, he was the only young man in a group of sixteen (during a later
discussion) from Mpango who was employed. In 2013, he was working as a
negotiator and real estate agent.
The schoolrooms built by COTCO as community compensation were not
staffed with teachers nor ¾lled with desks, benches, chairs, chalkboards, nor
books. With ‘école’ painted on the doors and the signs outside, these are little
more than rectangular rooms: four walls and a roof. Sultan Oshimin, an artist
who popularised ‘le reggae Kamer,’ powerfully critiques the tendency of a
minimalist educational infrastructure in Cameroon, from primary school
through to university. In his song, Quelle École (What School?), Oshimin
sings,
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
94
Ils disent l’école primaire au Kamer c’est ‘gratuit’
Les frais de l’APE sont toujours exigés
Des parents n’ont pas d’argent pour acheter des livres
…Les jeunes ont compris, ils sont tous au centre ville
Ils vendent des bonbons, ils vendent des arachides
…Babylone rigole, rigole, rigole
…Amphi 500 pour trois mille étudiants
‘Université’—il y’a pas des toilettes
…Viens faire un tour du coté de SOA
Ya pas d’eau potable, pas de campus étudiants
Le premier ministère a construit ça…
Mais on dit ‘école’, ‘école’
Mais on dit, on dit ‘université’
(translated) In Kamer, they say primary school is ‘free’
[Yet] PTA [Parent Teacher Association] fees are still required
Parents do not have money to buy books
…The youth understand: they’re all in the city centre
They’re selling candy, they’re selling peanuts
…Babylon [i.e., the West] laughs, laughs, laughs
…Amphitheatre [#]500 seats 3,000 students
‘University’ [they say, but] there are no toilets
…Come take a tour of [the University of Yaoundé] SOA
There is no drinking water, there is no student campus
The prime minister ‘built’ that…
But we say ‘school’, ‘school’
But we say, we say ‘university’
The song provides a critique of the hollow language or naming of ‘school’ and
‘university,’ demanding that we look beyond empty buildings at the human
infrastructure of education.
More than the lack of infrastructure — books, instructors, benches,
chalkboards, notebooks, writing utensils, drinking water, toilets — people’s
conversations revealed that there is a lack of ‘real teaching’ or ‘relevant
knowledge.’ For example, in Mpango along the pipeline, Jean said, ‘nearly
every village between Kribi and Douala has a primary school, so why do they
keep building more schoolrooms? We need technical training! We need
jobs… We do not need more training in le bon français [speaking proper
French].’ Jean echoes Oshimin’s assertion that a material classroom does not
translate into education. Likewise, education does not translate into wisdom
or knowledge. Nor does education translate to employment, for that matter.
I have recounted this exchange as a means of demonstrating a disconnect
95
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
between a neoliberal promise of education and concrete pervasive
joblessness and epistemic violence in (post)colonial Cameroon. The
schoolrooms constructed by the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline were quite
literally empty. As I explore more elsewhere, the impetus for schoolroom
construction along the oil pipeline is particularly hollowed when situated within
the longer and on-going paradigm of ‘knowledge management’ by the World
Bank in Cameroon, beginning with its shifting educational paradigms in the
1970s (Murrey 2015c). This is, in résumé, la langue de la bouche that Nadine
linked my research and writing with. In this paradigm, border thinking — or
creating a ‘condition of possibility for constructing new loci of enunciation’
(Mignolo 2000: 5) that is attentive to ‘knowledge from a subaltern perspective
[that is] conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world
system’ (ibid.: 11) — is empowering as a set of tools to advance those
‘undisciplined forms of knowledge [that have been] reduced to subaltern
knowledge’ (ibid.: 10). But how do we ensure that this knowledge moves
beyond yet another form of language of the mouth?
By Way of Conclusion
In Cameroon we tell each other that, ‘on est ensemble.’ ‘We are together,’ I
say, even as we close our convivial exchange. Relationships are a basic
edi¾ce to our senses of being in the world. A relational, sustainable
conception of the world is one in which, ‘I am because you are.’ In a
decolonial orientation, relationships are central to life, research, cosmology,
and ontology. Wilson (2008: 39, 80) argues that an, ‘axiology of relational
accountability’ is central — so central that, ‘we are the relationships that we
hold.’ A researcher’s relationship(s) with the community informs the
knowledge that emerges from the project. How we speak to others and are
spoken to as well as how we are embraced or pushed away shape the
politics, the practices, and the form(s) of our knowledge.
In the current moment of neoliberal capitalist global expansion and its
concurrent manifestations of the commercialisation of land, landlessness,
land grabs, displacement, displacement in-place, and place-based struggles,
an ethos that returns to the ground and is grounded by human dialogue and
human voice is immanently urgent (Escobar 2008). At the same time, the
historic centres of global knowledge production are being continuously
ruptured and displaced: ‘Knowledge, like capitalism, no longer comes from
one centre; it is geographically distributed’ (Mignolo 2013: para. 1). The
ground that we walk on, the buildings that we inhabit, the air that we breathe,
the food that we eat, the people that we engage with, and the language that
we speak are all ingredients that shape knowledge in particular ways. Who
we are with on the ground and how we consciously politically and ethically
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
96
orient our intellectual projects are all decisive in shaping social worlds,
politics, and imagination.
Nurturing a political and ethical consciousness attuned to people and
relationships is an approach useful for navigating the entangled histories of
colonialism and the imbalances of power within the creation of knowledge.
The place where we think is a geopolitical and metaphysical space; it is a
place ‘that has been con¾gured by the colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo
2011: xvi). Where we consciously locate ourselves is a deliberate and mindful
place-making process. Our place of dwelling is our political and ethical ethos
or consciousness. It is an approach that is forever mindful of the language of
the mouth.
References
Ake, C. (1979) Social science as imperialism: the theory of political
development. Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (1999) Borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books.
Behar, R. (1996) The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your
heart. Boston: Beacon Press.
Castro-Gómez, S. (2005) La hybris del punto cero: Ciencia, raza e ilustración
en la Nueva Granda (1750-1816). Bogatá: Universidad Ponti¾cia Javeriana.
Che, Megan. (2008). Domestic and international power relations in a
Cameroonian mission school system. International Journal of Educational
Development 28(6): 640-655.
Chi’XapKaid or Pavel, M. (2005). Decolonizing through storytelling. In:
Waziyatawin, A.W. and Yellow Bird, M. eds. For indigenous eyes only: a
decolonization handbook. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. pp.
109-126
Chilisa, B. (2011). Indigenous research methodologies. London: Sage
Publications, Inc.
Césaire, A. (1955). Discourse on colonialism. New York: Monthly Review.
97
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
Diang, M. C. (2013). Colonialism, neoliberalism, education and culture in
Cameroon. College of Education, DePaul University. Paper 52. Available at:
http://via.library.depaul.edu/soe_etd/52
Escobar, A. (2008). Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gordon, L. R. (1995). Fanon and the crisis of European man: an essay on
philosophy and the human sciences. London: Routledge.
Gordon, L. R. (2011). “Shifting the geography of reason in an age of
disciplinary decadence.” Transmodernity 1(2): 95-103.
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women. London: Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (1992). Primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world
of modern science. London: Verso.
Hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: from margin to center. Cambridge, MA:
South End Press.
Horner, B. (2002). Critical ethnography, ethics, and work: rearticulating labor.
Journal of Advanced Composition 22(3): 561-584.
Jackson, J. L. Jr. (2004). An ethnographic ¿im¿am: giving gifts, doing
research, and videotaping the native subject/object. American Anthropologist
106(1): 32-42.
Juris, J. S. and Alex Khasnabish, eds. (2013). Insurgent encounters:
transnational activism, ethnography, and the political. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Lassiter, L. E. and Campbell, E. (2010). What will we have ethnography do?
Qualitative Inquiry 16(9): 757-767.
Low, S. M. and Merry, S. E.. (2010). Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and
Dilemmas. Current Anthropology 51(2): 203-226.
Madison, S. (2012). Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance.
2nd Edition. London: Sage Publications, Inc.
A Post/Decolonial Geography beyond ‘the Language of the Mouth’
98
Magnat, V. (2011). Conducting embodied research at the intersection of
performance studies, experimental ethnography and Indigenous
methodologies. Anthropologica 53(2): 213-227.
Maxey, I. (1999). Beyond boundaries? Activism, academia, re¿exivity and
research. Area 31(3): 199-208.
Moser, S. (2008). “Personality: a new positionality?” Area 40(3): 383-392.
Mountz, A. (2010). Feminist politics, immigration, and academic identities.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9(2): 187-194.
Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern
knowledges and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: global futures,
decolonial options. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Minh-ha, T. T. (1989). Woman native other. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Murrey, Amber. (2015a). Narratives of life and violence along the ChadCameroon Oil Pipeline. Human Geography—A New Radical Journal, 8(1):
15-39.
Murrey, A. (2015b). Invisible power, visible dispossession: the witchcraft of a
subterranean pipeline. Political Geography 47: 64-76.
Murrey, Amber. (2015c). Lifescapes of a pipedream: a decolonial mixtape of
structural violence and resistance in two towns along the Chad-Cameroon Oil
Pipeline. PhD dissertation in Geography and the Environment, University of
Oxford.
Murrey, A. (2016). Slow Dissent and the Emotional Geographies of
Resistance. The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 37(2): 224-248.
Mudimbe, V.-Y. (1988). The invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the
order of knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Nagar, R. and Geiger, G. (2007). Re¿exivity, positionality and identity in
feminist ¾eldwork revisited. In: Tickell,A., Sheppard, E., Peck, J. & Barnes, T.
eds. Politics and practice in economic geography. London: Sage. pp. 267-278
99
Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics
Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: positionality, re¿exivities and other
tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21: 305–320.
Robben, A. C. G. and Nordstrom, C. (1995). The anthropology and
ethnography of violence and socio-political con¿ict. In: Robben, A. C. G. and
Nordstrom, C. eds. Fieldwork under ¾re: contemporary studies of violence
and survival. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp.1-24.
Sholock, A. (2012). Methodology of the privileged: white anti-racist feminist,
systematic ignorance, and epistemic uncertainty. Hypatia 27(4): 701-714.
Thomas, J. (1993). Doing critical ethnography. Newbury Park, London and
New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: research and
Indigenous peoples. 2nd Edition. London: Zed Books, Ltd.
Wilson, S. (2009). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods.
Manitoba, Canada: Fernwood Publishing Co., Ltd.
Zilberg, E. (2004). Fools banished from the kingdom: remapping geographies
of gang violence between America and El Salvador. American Quarterly
56(3): 759-779.