Epistemic Disobedience: Theorising Anti‐Blackness, an Editorial Overview

For most Afro-Black scholars, writing honestly, critically and authentically about Black and African experiences is a political act. Their resistance and what Tuck and Yang (2014) call a ‘refusal’ to be written for and about is an exercise in ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2009) or the expression of epistemic dignity. This disobedience is a form of reclaiming dignity that helps us to chart alternative paths that are de-linked from the colonial and white supremacist matrices of power that currently dominate Black anti-racism discussions and analyses. In this way, Afro-Black or Black-centred scholars are faced with the task of pushing the boundaries of knowledge in a direction that seeks to ‘re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators’ (S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017, 4).