Présentation d’Amandine Catala intitulée “Decolonizing Social Memory: Epistemic Injustice and Political Equality”, dans le cadre du colloque Decolonizing Epistemic Injustice and Implicit Bias.

Le 25 janvier 2023. Pour s’inscrire, c’est ici.

Résumé

Most western democracies have been, or continue to be, involved in colonialism. Yet colonial memory is often either severely distorted or lacking entirely – a situation I characterize as “colonial erasure.” I argue that, by obscuring the continuity between historical and contemporary injustice, colonial erasure produces and maintains inequalities in both epistemic and political power for Afrodescendants and Indigenous peoples. Specifically, I argue that colonial erasure creates epistemic injustice; that this situation of epistemic injustice undermines political equality in contemporary societies; and that securing epistemic justice and political equality therefore requires, among other things, a collective duty of colonial memory. I proceed in three steps. I first point to the mechanisms that underlie colonial erasure by looking at the functions that social memory serves for social groups, and I show how defective social memory regarding colonialism produces and maintains epistemic injustice for Afrodescendants and Indigenous peoples. I then argue that this situation of epistemic injustice seriously undermines these minorities’ ability to engage in the democratic process of political participation on an equal basis. In this way, colonialism very much continues into the present. Ending colonial domination and achieving political equality thus require, among other things, bringing about epistemic justice through colonial memory. Finally, I specify what the collective duty of colonial memory involves and the processes whereby it might be fulfilled. Here I show how an understanding of the different functions that social memory serves can help to identify effective strategies to fulfill the collective duty of colonial memory, and hence to move toward greater epistemic justice and political equality.